‘Skincare’ Director Austin Peters On Joan Didion And Sunshine Noir
The beauty world is cutthroat, especially in the age of the internet where influencers build massive platforms and form countless collabs that saturate an already over-saturated market. So to stand out in that world is sisphyean task it seems,and to make it big seems nigh impossible, something that could drive someone mad. Director Austin Peters looks at such a possibility in his new film Skincare, a twist on the noir featuring a frantic Elizabeth Banks, a loveable Lewis Pullman, and the unrelenting, sweltering Los Angeles sun.
In the film,
Famed aesthetician Hope Goldman (Elizabeth Banks) is about to take her career to the next level by launching her very ownย skincareย line, but her personal and work lives are challenged when rival facialist Angel Vergara (Luis Gerardo Mรฉndez) opens a newย skincareย boutique directly across from her store. She starts to suspect that someone is trying to sabotage her reputation and business, and together with her friend Jordan (Lewis Pullman) she embarks on a mission to unravel the mystery of who is trying to destroy her life.
We spoke with Peters about the idea of sunshine noir, crafting looks for Elizabeth Banks, and how Joan Didion influenced the film.
Dread Central: So at the beginning of Skincare, a title card says the film is inspired by a true story.
Austin Peters: The movie is definitely a work of fiction, and it’s inspired by headlines and stuff that had transpired in Los Angeles maybe a decade ago, mixed with all the various movies that we were watching and books that we were reading when we were in this. So it’s sort of like a mutant fictional story inspired by true events.
DC: Okay, cool. What were some of the works of fiction that inspired you while you were writing and making Skincare?
AP: Well, there was for sure a lot of noir stuff like the James M. Caine books Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice because they’re these classic LA noirs that are this weird sort of expressionist, Marxist, existentialist, tough guy realism thing, all put in a blender. In all those James M. Caine stories, it’s always someone who’s really hard up, something financially really bad is happening to them and they’re being crushed by the economy. So they make a bad decision to try and get ahead of it, and then it comes back to destroy them basically. And then Raymond Chandler, all the Philip Marlowe novels, and Patricia Highsmith and the first Ripley book. Ripley was such an amazing three-dimensional sociopathic character who totally didn’t think that he was doing anything wrong and never does know.
But then we were also reading Joan Didion and her nonfiction. The first story in Slouching Towards Bethlehem is called “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”. It’s about a woman who may or may not have killed her husband, and they go to jail and she goes to jail. The way it captures this eerie atmosphere of California felt really important. Obviously that was so much of her language and memorable pieces of writing were about Los Angeles being the weather of the apocalypse and this sort of scary atmosphere where someone’s in a bikini at the grocery store and at any minute there could be an earthquake that makes the city fall into the ocean.
Then there was other nonfiction stuff like City of Quartz by Mike Davis, which is about Los Angeles, and for us was about understanding how to put this movie, or not even to put it in conversation, but to take inspiration from what is the unofficial history of Los Angeles, while also having this sort of Didion-esque character play it as it lays. All of the central female protagonists in [Didion’s] novels are totally fried. They’re just drifting through life and acting, not thinking through things they do because they’re acting impulsively, but also you would be way foolish to underestimate them. That felt like Hope Goldman
DC: Yeah. Oh, that definitely does. She’s so glamorous and thinks that if she has it all together until it very quickly falls apart. You see a lot of men in roles like that, so to see a woman who works in a distinctly feminine field, it’s cool to have that kind of subversion of what you expect in a narrative like this.
AP: So I like this inversion of all those sorts of things. In my favorite stories, there are no good guys really or bad. There are some bad guys, but everyone is sort of the architect of their own destruction in some way or another. And so I liked that about Skincare. I didn’t want to make anything about someone who was heroic or something. I’m more interested in characters that are complicated and problematic and hard to deal with.
DC: I really love how Elizabeth Banks is presented. I’m so used to seeing her in roles where she feels more confident so seeing her in a role where she is very vulnerable is great. Plus she’s wearing some pretty outlandish early-00s clothes. What was it like working with your costume department and setting the distinct look for Elizabeth Banks’ Hope?
AP: Well, I worked with Angelina Vito, who is amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing costume designer. She was a costume designer on two episodes of Euphoria.
So we talked a lot about what Skincare should feel like because it’s super regional Hollywood and it’s super period in a weird way, even though it’s recent past. It’s long enough ago that everything seems jarringly out of style, but it’s also not long enough ago to be nostalgic quite yet, though hopefully by the time this movie hits DVD or whatever, it will be. So we made this decision that we don’t want people to see photos of this movie and think Elizabeth is just working with a shitty stylist who’s not thinking in a contemporary way. We want them to understand that it’s a period movie. And more than that, I think we made a decision which really affected everything: Every one of her outfits had to be a look.
She had to always be doing looks because this is someone who cares so much about how the world perceives her. She wants to be in so much control of what she puts out to people around her that even if she’s going broke and she can’t pay her rent, and even if she’s absolutely coming unraveled on the inside and going completely nuts, she still 100% is going to dress in the pink leopard shirt and the diamond necklace. And that was another thing Angelina said early that I loved, she was like, “I just want her to be dripping in every scene. Always so much jewelry.”
DC: Also, she always has an iced coffee. I also always have an iced coffee, so I just felt very seen by that. [Laughs] I love that attention to detail with her character. It was neat.
AP: Oh, cool. I drink a lot of iced coffee too, so I identify with that. [Laughs]
DC: Lewis Pullman in this movie is incredible. The more movies he’s in, the better he’s getting. And here he’s especially chaotic. So I just wanted to hear more about that character and what it was like working with Pullman to really make this character both seem trustworthy and diabolical.
AP: Lewis is amazing. He’s such an incredible actor, and he goes so deep and he works so hard and pulls from so many interesting things. He was on Outer Range, and when he would be in town, we would get together at my place and go through the script and talk about the character and what he wanted and kind of go through it scene by scene. And then other times when he was shooting, we would get on Zoom at night after he was done, or he would make videos of himself doing vlogs and sending them to me.
He would also send me voice recordings when he was sort of trying to find Jordan’s voice. And he was looking at early interviews with Justin Timberlake when he was really early in his career where he seems like he’s putting on this thing where it’s sort of street smart, but also soft and commanding, but also really gentle.
So we were trying to find the right space for his voice. Lewis had a lot of really interesting ideas like that. We looked at this photo book called Hustlers by Philip Lorca de cor, and that was really a reference for the photography, but then it ended up informing the costumes and informing Louis took inspiration from for the performance there because he’s so omnivorous in what he’s consuming to put to create the character.
Then when we were playing it, some of the first scenes in the beginning of the movie, we did a couple takes and we were like, “Oh, you know what? I feel like he needs to be dumber. He needs to be more of a himbo.” That’s part of what makes him appealing to her. He’s so stupid but it’s also charming because he’s like a puppy and he’s innocent.
DC: I really love the way that you shoot skin and how you shot closeups of hands and faces. How did you work with your cinematographer to capture these gross yet intimate moments.
AP: Yeah, yeah. I’m so glad that that works for you.
DC: I wanted more of it, too!
AP: Well, in some of the test screenings, certain people would be like, “Boo, no more skin. Take it out, it ruins it, stop doing it.” You’re the first person to bring that up, so I’m glad it worked for you.
Yeah, we did a lot of stuff. We got macro lenses and shot super close on people’s skin. Chris Ripley, who’s the DP, is a mad scientist genius. He’s been really prolific in music videos and commercials. This is maybe his third or fourth feature.
We prepped for such a long time, and he specially bought this microscope lens. You would put it on your hand and it would show this incredibly disturbing desert landscape. But then we learned that that’s not what the way your skin looks under a microscope on your forehead or on your face. Your hand really, looks like Death Valley. It’s like totally no water and cracks and really disgusting.
DC: It sounds like you learned a lot about LA, too. I’m assuming you live in LA?
AP: Yeah, I live in Los Angeles. I grew up here, but I was in New York for 15 years. I moved back three years ago, but I grew up here until I was about 18. And so I think that a lot of that growing up here, you’re able to see a lot of the broken dreams more immediately. I remember at a young age, I was able to clock certain delusions and things that were happening around me.
I felt like LA always ends up being this place that really feels like a parody or the reverse where it’s super aspirational selling some sort of fake idea that isn’t real. And especially this idea of Hollywood, which is a neighborhood that I spent a ton of time in growing up. If you say “Hollywood” anywhere in the world, it conjures this image of the movie business, of wealth, of glamor, of the sweet life. The reality is Hollywood is a sort of a gritty place. It’s kind of a gritty neighborhood and the area where we shot this movie is sort of gritty and it’s the area in which I live. So I wanted it to feel like a real city the way that New York City feels in an American movie from the 1970s.
DC: Oh, that’s awesome. Falling in love with the location and wanting to present it a certain way I think is really cool.
AP: Yeah. Well, everybody told us you can’t make an art movie in Hollywood. And they were right. [Laughs]
But we tried anyway and we had to shoot less days to make it work. We could only shoot for 18 days, but we were looking at locations that were way outside in Simi Valley and stuff. And Simi Valley was totally cool, but I really felt compelled that I wanted to shoot in Hollywood for real and not cheat it, not go to New Mexico or not go to Serbia or whatever and shoot interiors and then shoot exteriors here. I had this crazy idea that the energy and the chaos of Los Angeles would end up on screen in a real way. Whether or not that turns out to be the case remains unclear, but we certainly felt it while we were making it.
DC: I feel like you get the weird brightness of LA, but at the same time it’s like a neon sign that’s about to burn out? Everything feels like a shade of neon that’s about to sputter out. And I think that’s a great way to think about LA.
AP: Yeah. I love that assessment of the movie. I mean, the other thing that we talked about a lot is this idea of sunshine noir.
To me, sunshine noir is about the sort of seedy, unsavory underbelly of noir happening in the bright daylight where it’s even more jarring and you sort of have sunstroke or heat stroke. So it’s a little weirder and can oscillate tonally between being scary and being funny, maybe it has an unreliable narrator and it feels very LA. That was sort of what we were thinking about: a noir where the sun is at 12 o’clock and it’s beating down and she’s got the sunglasses and you can see through the sides.
DC: Yeah, I mean, it’s like Texas Chain Saw Massacre and sunshine horror. It’s so cool when light is used in a way you don’t expect in genre.
AP: Yeah, it’s funny, there was a long time when people would read the script and they would be like, “What is it? Is it funny? Or is it a thriller or what is it?” And I would always try to explain, Skincare is a thriller, but it’ll be funny. There might be something about it that’s a little surreal, but it’s really realism. Certain people immediately got it. Elizabeth read it and she was like, “I understand what this is.” We got on Zoom and instantly we realized within 15 minutes that we saw the film the exact same way, which was amazing.
DC: Oh, that’s so nice.
AP: But there were other people who read it and they couldn’t understand what the genre was or what it was supposed to be. And then a friend of mine who’s a writer and a filmmaker called it a sunshine noir. Then I started saying that to people. And even though they may not be scholars of noir or scholars of the genre, even just the way those two words together, they’d go, “Oh, a noir, I get it.”
Skincare is available now on digital.
Categorized:Interviews
