In ‘Skincare,’ the beauty world has never looked more killer—and almost quite literally.
The new film from director Austin Peters sees skin guru Hope Goldman (Elizabeth Banks) taking on a stalker of sorts who is trying to take down her career, and her character. Through this “sunshine noir” set in LA, audiences will see the world of a few different colorful characters and how they help shade the chaos happening in Hope’s life.
To delve a little deeper into this fun, thrilling and unique story, Peters sat down to discuss ‘Skincare.’
What interested you about this film?
It was a project that the writers (Sam Freilich and Deering Regan) brought to me initially that they had been working on—they thought I would be a good director for [it.] It was sort of loosely inspired by some true events that we had seen in the headlines, but then it very much took a life of its own. We made a decision that we really wanted to write this sort of fictional story and write it as a movie with new characters, but that still felt within the framework of this very sort of LA noir story.
I know Elizabeth Banks was at the forefront of your mind to play Hope. What about her worked for that character?
I think Elizabeth is such an amazing actor and obviously, she is an amazing director and producer and writer, and many other things. But for me, I’ve just been such a huge fan of her for so long and I’ve always been blown away by the range of what she can do between drama and comedy. And then since this movie is something that lived a little bit in the in-between, [I knew] she would be perfect for it.
She’s also just completely fearless as a performer and has shown us many times, whether it’s in ‘White Hot American Summer’ or ’40-Year-Old Virgin’ or in ‘the Hunger Games’, she can completely transform. She is unafraid to go there and to do something that maybe someone else might be afraid to do. She just felt like such a high bar for who this could be, that when she agreed to do it, it was sort of like we couldn’t believe that she was willing to get on a Zoom with me.
Since you mentioned this film living in that blend of comedy and drama, how do you achieve that from a director’s standpoint?
I think it is something that you really feel, I mean, it’s something that we talk through when we’re doing rehearsals or just at least talking through the script with the cast…Saying, this is an up moment or this is a down moment, or this is a moment where she’s coming apart. It’s sort of deciding what the tone of each moment will be.
But then also, Elizabeth is just so funny, she can sort of make it really funny even when it’s really dark. We would always do some [takes] that were very serious and then we would do some where she was just ripping. In the edit, it was always about making sure that this journey was tracking and that you were feeling the emotions of the character and you were feeling what the movie was supposed to be giving you.
It doesn’t become too funny that you don’t take it seriously, but you feel the danger. We just decided that we wanted to make it a thriller first—that was the goal, to make it this anxiety thriller before anything else. And then the comedy just got hung on it a bit like a Christmas tree or something.
The city of LA also has a big role in ‘Skincare’, and I saw you mentioned that you wanted to represent it truly and not just in a glossy way that we normally see. What did you try to do behind the camera to achieve that?
I think a big part of that was shooting on location, and we shot for way less days because we had to make it work in Los Angeles and in Hollywood. But I think that it comes through in the end, you get to feel what the city actually feels like and you get to be in Hollywood for real.
Just understanding what that’s like as a city that’s filled with lots of different kinds of people spread out over a giant space…And not only seeing the aspirational side or the silly side, but really understanding it as a sprawling urban environment was something that I felt like would be really important to the feeling of the movie.
What went into the music for ‘Skincare’? I loved the soundtrack and really felt like it set the tone.
The score is by Fatima Al Qadiri, she had done a film called ‘Atlantics’ that I had seen that made me really excited. I was so into the movie as a whole, but also into the score. When you are going around LA you hear all this music in people’s cars that are driving by and in stores and on people’s radios. It’s almost like you’re stepping into all these different little worlds.
I really wanted to mirror that experience in the film. So all these different spaces had their own sonic language, and then of course, just juxtaposing the feelings of those songs against what is actually happening and what the reality is… which happens naturally in real life. Making sure that that kind of stuff came across in the film was super important to me from the beginning. It’s also meant to be 2013 [in the film], with one song exception from Orville Peck that he wrote for the movie. It plays in the bar scene with Jordan (Lewis Pullman) and Hope.
I enjoyed the characters and seeing them all unravel in their own way. Whose journey was fun for you to explore?
Hope Goldman was super fun, but also getting to break off and be with Luis (Gerardo Méndez) as he was developing Angel and Michaela (Jaé Rodriguez) for Maureen and Lewis for Jordan was so fun. Building those characters and building the kind of layers of what they end up doing and seeing the way that they bring them to life and seeing the kind of choices that they make…that’s the thing that keeps you going when you’re doing these long days for 18 days.
Elizabeth or Lewis will do something that is mind-blowing and I didn’t know this could go there or this character could feel this way and suddenly, it takes on a new life. Then that informs the stuff that comes later and the different scenes. We got to have this environment where everybody really felt really safe going forward and trying different weird things and pushing these characters into bizarre spaces.
‘Skincare‘ will release in theaters Aug. 16.
