Story by Brad Balfour
Sometimes, an indie film captivates but you really don’t know why. Maybe it’s because it’s helmed by a star like Elizabeth Banks or it has a wacked out story and characters. In this case, Austin Peters’ debut “Skincare” has both. Sort of based on a true story, the film is loosely framed by the case of Dawn DaLuise, who was arrested and later acquitted for a murder-for-hire plot against a rival beauty guru.
In telling a warped version of this narrative, the film unveils a world most don’t know about but many people experience. Facialist gurus abound and the inside world has twists to it that only an insider gets to know.
Banks is best known for playing chaperone Effie Trinket in “The Hunger Games” film series (2012–2015) and as an ICCA commentator in the “Pitch Perfect” film series (2012–2017). She made her directorial film debut with “Pitch Perfect 2,” whose $69 million opening-weekend gross set a record for a first-time director. She has since directed the 2019 action comedy “Charlie’s Angels” and the horror comedy film “Cocaine Bear” (2023).
The 50-year-old Banks brings a firm and complex performance to this comedic thriller. Whether it gets the audience it deserves is another question. Such questions were considered by the director, Peters, when this Q&A was conducted with a moderator at a screening the week the film opened mid-August.
Q: While making a film like this, how important is it to see it with audiences? It’s already finished, obviously, but because of the number of tonal shifts in the film, how essential is this experience for you as a director?
Austin Peters: It was super essential. We did a bunch of screenings throughout the process, where we would get a bunch of people to see it. We did at least four, I think, where we’re at different stages. We would get a bunch of different people –– filmmakers, artists and people who weren’t involved in any sort of creative medium but were fans of movies. There was a wide reach between me, editor Laura Zempel, producer Jonathan Schwartz and Logan Lerman, the other producer. We filled the theater and then got feedback on cards and did a talk back at the end to understand what was coming across, what we were hitting too hard, and all that kind of stuff that was really, really, really critical.
For the second screening, we did an experimental structure, which is different from the one you see here. We were so sure that this was going to be our last screening. It was so perfect but in the first 15 minutes of the movie, we all looked at each other and were like, “Oh my God, it doesn’t work at all.” It was totally humiliating. I invited all of my favorite people that I wanted to impress, and then was mortified afterwards.
Q: Was what you were attempting is consistent with noir storytelling, but it didn’t work for the audience?
Austin Peters: Well, the movie has a really specific perspective shift, where we’re in her head, basically, for the first two thirds of the movie. And then, there’s this musical interlude where the movie is in Brett’s head (played by Nathan Fillion). Angel [Luis Gerardo Méndez] sings a song, and it kind of shifts into “The Eye of God” perspective of a more classical noir. That was always in the script, and that’s always been in this moment where you become the head of her, rather than in her head. Everyone kept saying, “Well, why don’t you do it the traditional way? Why don’t you wait until the end to reveal Jordan [Lewis Pullman] and just keep it in her perspective the whole time?” And we tried that once, but it just did not work at all, so we wrote it back to this.
Q: What was the writing process like? What genres were you inspired by — obviously there’s noir and Raymond Chandler, but also “The Real Housewives” were in there as well. You had three screenwriters, you and two collaborators. What was that process of figuring out how to nail it down so that the audience doesn’t race ahead of the plot?
Austin Peters: The script was brought to me by two writers, and they had been working on it for a while before. They brought it to me as something that I might want to direct — they were people that I had known. Actually, one of them was a DoP on a documentary that I made in Havana, Cuba, about a concert. We were down there shooting, and he told me about this script about a facialist in LA. I read it and immediately connected with this atmosphere that it had, which was very weird and Southern California Gothic. The way that it went so chaotically off the rails at the end was really exciting to me. I think that from the jump, we had a really clear idea of what we thought it was.
It became about conveying that to other people. When we gave the draft to a lot of people, they didn’t necessarily see that on the page. After we worked on the script for quite a long time, I got the producers involved, and they had notes; we rewrote, rewrote, and rewrote. It’s so many drafts and a colleague of mine described it when he read it, as a “sunshine blog.” I had never heard that before, but I liked the way it sounded, and upon looking into it, there’s a lot of disagreeing opinions about what that is. But I felt like that was correct for this. Then, weirdly, when we would share the script with certain people, they would say, “Well, what is it? What kind of movie is it? What is the genre?” I would say, it is a thriller, but it’s sort of funny/ When we started saying, “sunshine blog,” even people who aren’t scholars of the genre would be like, “Oh yeah, I understand.”
Q: Perhaps “The Grifters” is an example of a movie that’s very hard to classify because of that same thing. And they set it in LA as well.
Austin Peters: Absolutely.
Q: Your have a background in music and music videos. Did you read the draft, and immediately see an entry point for yourself in terms of your background? Or did you almost want to see this as a departure from your previous work? There’s tons of music in it, and it’s great music. It really plays into the plot. Did you go and make a film that had music in it?
Austin Peters: Initially, when I started reading it, I wanted it to be very sparse –– all natural sound and no music at all like so many great movies that I love. But I also love movies that are wall-to-wall music, so it became clear throughout the process that that wasn’t where this was naturally going. Being in any city, LA especially, you’re crossing in and out of all these different spaces, and in every restaurant, store, car, there’s different radios playing different music. Sometimes that attaches to the way you’re feeling and enhances it. Sometimes it plays against it in really uncomfortable ways. I wanted to capture that with the needle drops to make it feel like all these different sounds of all these different lifestyles in this one place.
Q: Talk about Elizabeth Banks and your collaboration with her. She can do tonal shifts; she can do that thing that she does here where she can smile and be seething right behind the smile. We all trust her as an actress. Was she drawn to the material on the script level? Or was there some convincing that needed to take place to get her involved?
Austin Peters: When we were writing this, we were always talking about her as someone who would be amazing for this. I’ve grown up watching her movies; to think that “Wet Hot American Summer” is her first movie. From that scene where she has barbecue sauce all over herself to “W,” where she plays Barbara Bush, all these movies where she’s so transformative and fearless. We always thought, “Oh, she would be amazing for this, but she’ll never do a little movie like this, an independent movie that’s so dark and all the things that it is.” We sent it to her, almost like it was a gag, “We’ll send it to her and we’ll get a pass and then we’ll move on.”
She really responded to it and wanted to have a Zoom with me. She had watched the documentary that I had made. We got on the Zoom and talked for like 15 minutes. Immediately, I realized that she saw the movie exactly the same way that I think all of us did. She understood what the tone was and she wanted to do it because she’s producing, directing and acting, doing all these things that she does amazingly well. She was attracted to doing a part like this where she could really become unhinged and put it all into the performance.
Q: She’s an accomplished director who did the “Pitch Perfect” films and “Cocaine Bear.”
Austin Peters: We pushed [back] this movie because she had to do her press tour for “Cocaine Bear.” We were supposed to start on January 4th, which is an insane day to start a movie. Everyone’s done on vacation and you’re supposed to be prepping. Then, she pushed it back again because she wanted to have more time so she could learn how to do facials. She worked with facialist Camille Fields in Studio City, and learned how to give facials. She would practice on her kids and her husband [audience chuckles.]
Q: In terms of visual strategy, your cinematographer Christopher Ripley did a job well done with amazing close-ups in this. And Banks has had experience multiple times as a feature film director, did she have input in terms of visual strategy? Or in terms of tonally where things would land between the two of you while she was working?
Austin Peters: That’s very much what she did to her credit. She was always there if I had a question for her, especially in the edit. We showed her the first cut, and she had notes — they were all very, very good. But she definitely made a point of letting me, and letting us, do the thing; she intrinsically trusted us and is also a producer on this movie. I think that manifests in a lot of ways. One of the ways that it manifests is that she always really wanted it to be Austin’s vision — “If this is what he wants to do, this is what we’re doing.” She certainly says when she doesn’t agree with something, if she thinks something is out and out wrong. She doesn’t mince words about it, which is amazing and also very scary at times. I think she put it through in her way, sort of behind me in a way. that was super, super, super meaningful, and probably something that I will owe her for the rest of my life.
Q: She probably drew in other actors just because of her name.
Austin Peters: When you have a script like this and there’s no one attached, you read it and you’re like, “I don’t know if I’ll ever see this get made.” But then when you read it and Elizabeth Banks is the star, you suddenly can start understanding what it’s going to look like and that it’s going to have a super high-caliber actor at the center of it. And so, she didn’t cast anyone directly, but she has had a long-standing relationship with Nathan Fillion. They were in a movie called “Slither” together, and they may even be roommates at some point. They’re like really old, old friends. Luis Gerardo Mendez had been in “Charlie’s Angels.
Also, Ella Balinska, who plays Jessica, is one of her three Charlie’s Angels. Ella showed up for two days, and the first day that we shot with her was the “Do You Need Your Asshole Bleached?” scene. She comes in and screams at her when David Gray is playing on the stereo. For that to be the first scene that you walk in to do in a movie as an actor… As you walk in, Elizabeth Banks is screaming that sort of stuff in your face –– I think that can be very intense. But because they had all done “Charlie’s Angels” together and had spent so much time together, they were having a ton of fun and were willing to really go there and make it really crazy. They were super unafraid of making it uncomfortable in a really exciting way.
Q: How much time did you have to film this? It wasn’t that long.
Austin Peters: It was 18 days with the actors.
Q: You got lucky because you finished filming almost the day before the strike started.
Austin Peters: Yes, the day before the writer’s strike happened. Then, fortunately, the actor’s strike was over by the time we did ADR. We just basically finished and everybody went on strike. Then me and Laura, the editor, sort of locked ourselves in a garage and edited for 16 weeks or something.
Q: When the plot shifts to be about Lewis Pullman’s character, his motivation takes more of the center stage. You referred to the toxic positivity of a character like that. That could be a description of several of the characters.
Austin Peters: That was something that we thought a lot about. That character is so magnetic that we kept getting pulled to him and wanting to see more of him. And with Lewis, he was shooting out a range. Basically, what he would do is send me videos and voice notes and stuff where we would be practicing some kind of life coaching and doing inspirational sort of talks. We were looking at a bunch of Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s photos of “The Hustlers,” his famous project, and taking inspiration from that. Also, we liked early photos of Channing Tatum and interview clips with Justin Timberlake when he first started acting, the sort of way where he could be really gentle with someone but also sort of forceful.
That was how Lewis was finding that character; everyone’s process is so different. Elizabeth looked at the script the first time and she was like, “I got it I know who this woman is.” We went through it a bunch of times but 95% of the time she was right on about what it was. Lewis also has amazing instincts but there was much more of a process of us talking about different things and pulling from different sources. He’s such a sponge for information, looking at movies like “Star 80” which was another good one that we looked at with him. Looking at the Eric Roberts character, thinking about what this guy is, this Hollywood hustler type and how to make him feel non-threatening but also very dangerous at the same time.
Q: That’s the challenge. He’s sort of a ludicrous person but he’s also a danger.
Austin Peters: How do you not make it so immediately. She’s thinking, “Get this guy away from me.” And it just felt like, in some of those early scenes, I would make him dumber. He has to be dumber so she can laugh at him and not feel threatened by it. He’s sort of like a him-o and that is how he feels so non-threatening. And then even at the end when you realize how sociopathic he is. Or when you get to see his deranged mental state. It doesn’t take away from the fact that he’s not very smart. He can be both of those things.
Q: Yeah, yeah. Also assisting his portrayal of it is the musical score. Apart from the music you use, the score you used.
Austin Peters: Fatima Al Qadiri did the score. She’s an artist in her own right who did a score for a movie called “Atlantique” in 2019 which was Mati Diop’s movie. It won the Grand prize at Cannes. I saw that film and was so spent with the whole film, but also the music and the way that it sounded. I thought it was like so intoxicating. And we were working on this project then and I thought, “Oh, wouldn’t it be interesting to hear what she did for this?”
That was really the last stage of this process after we picture-locked and Fatima came on for eight weeks. She lived in my head and air pods. We would just be talking and she would be sending me demos for each piece because there’s a ton of original music on it. she had this idea that the heart would be very feminine and delicate like her mind, her voice. then we knew that it had to invert in the moment we talked about when she drives and we shift into the God perspective. At that moment, the music shifts into it. Before that, she’s becoming unhinged. the music shifts into this almost demented club music where it’s the language of synthpads.
Q: After the editing process, this film runs about 90 minutes — 95 or so with the credits. It’s really tightly constructed which is very important. We’re pulled through this story. We have no idea even at the 45-minute mark where it’s going to go next. How was it shaping the film down to what it is now from what you had? So I’m assuming you shot more than you?
Austin Peters: We shot more, but not that much more. It was 18 days so it was like not that much more stuff, but we definitely cut scenes and made them shorter. When Laura Zempel and I were working on it, it needed to be faster. It has to be over before people understand what’s happening. What we really wanted was for it to feel like a ride. In the beginning you take a little bit of time with her world as we were setting up the character and her aspirations. Also, it’s okay to laugh at the movie. It felt like something that we had to set up early on so that people could understand that even though it has a gothic feeling. it’s okay if you laugh at the characters — it doesn’t make them any less real.
Q: Finally, you’re in New York and it’s great to have the film shown here. What’s been the difference, if you can even detect one, between screening in LA versus New York?
Austin Peters: That’s what I was thinking about as I was sitting in the back listening to everyone. One of the writers still lives in New York. We all lived in New York when we started working on this movie. Making an independent film takes forever, so we’ve moved across the country since the beginning. I was really eager early on for IFC and our partners to show the movie here. They were going to test it and I was like, “Great, test it in New York, please. I want to know what it feels like to an audience that doesn’t live in Los Angeles. I didn’t want to make something ever that felt like inside baseball. I feel like when you make something that’s super-specific, hopefully it can become universal. I hate things that are like LA-inside-jokes. We really tried to avoid that at every possibility.
Q: You made a point about building up its pace and then it all whirled around. Were there times where you wanted this a little bit earlier? How did you decide when you finally came to the conclusion of what would come where, when and how? It all felt like it was happening simultaneously, but it wasn’t. You could have done it in slightly different order. It was fascinating how you saw it when it was in a different order. Did you pretty much do it as you wanted it to be?
Austin Peters: Like I said, we worked on the script for a really long time. A colleague of mine gave me some amazing advice which is in the scripting, that’s when you get to make the movie for free. Make sure you make it as good as you can, because you won’t get to do it again. So we played with the structure of time. There was so many different versions of this. There were versions where it was in the God’s eye perspective the whole time, where you’re tracking both Jordan and Hope simultaneously. In another, one of her clients was doing the voice-over the whole time, telling the story line.
We tried so many different versions of this before we arrived at this [one]. I think what you see on the screen is pretty close to what’s on the page. Some things are rearranged. Some things are taken out of the beginning. Then there’s some things that are arranged around the musical inversion point. Some scenes come before that instead of after. It felt like we needed to have her reach the fever pitch, and then. the movie sort of inverts. Before we had that split vibe by the inversion point, it didn’t work as well.
Q: Was the Katy Perry song in your head from the script stage?
Austin Peters: It was definitely in my head for a long time. A bunch of these songs certainly were. The Queens of the Stone Age song in the beginning title sequence, and the Katy Perry one, were ones that had been in my head for a while. But I was nervous to say it. Everyone said that it would never happen and then we were doing the edit and I asked Laura the editor to try it. She sort of laughed and was like, “Okay fine,” and tried it. Then she texted me because I was in Rome finishing the shoot and said it actually works really. really well. So we stayed with it. We knew that everyone was going to get mad at us because it was unclearable. When we showed it to the producers, they loved it but they also were mad at us because it was unclearable. We got rejected for that song three or four times trying to clear it, sending in submissions and asking. And it was a non-starter.
I was trying to reach Katy through friends of friends of friends of friends. They were saying, “No, we can’t do this. He’s doing coke, he’s in a speedo, he’s working out, he’s insane. You can’t do this to a Katy Perry song.” There’s so many writers on it but eventually basically we uncovered the emails of all the writers. We had mixed and delivered the film with another song, But I was really frustrated that we didn’t have the Katy Perry song. Everybody was looking at me saying, “It’s so good.” This other song was great but I was still really upset about it. So we emailed all the writers one by one. and they all signed off on it. We went back to Katy’s manager who we had been in contact with before and said “Hey we got all the partners to sign off on it.” He said “Okay, well now I have to watch it.”
He said, “Okay fine, send me the link. I’ll watch it tomorrow.” We sent it during the Super Bowl. A day goes by and nobody responds. Another day goes by, and we still haven’t heard from anybody. The producer is calling me and he’s going, “It’s never going to happen for this scene.” Finally, we got an email from him, and he was like, “Hey, guys! I just want to let you know that Katy and I watched the movie and we really love it. And we’re happy to grant you usage of the song. Thank you for your enthusiasm for the music.”
Q: How was it for you to make it authentically and portray that for the audience?
Austin Peters: We talked with a lot of estheticians. And it was super important that –– if we were going to make a movie set in this field and this world –– that it was real. Otherwise, it just seemed pointless. We talked with a lot of estheticians and skincare writers. and tried to really understand the timeline of where that culture was in 2013. She was one of the first celebrity facialists in Hollywood who had a store on Melrose Place. Kate Somerville published a book around this time and we had that. We looked at it for the sets, and I talked to someone who worked for Kate. I just basically reached out to every person I had ever known and said, “Do you know any estheticians? Can you introduce me to them?” One of them, Lana Folletti, became the skincare consultant on the movie. She would come in and be there when we were shooting a lot of those scenes.
Elizabeth worked a lot with Camille Fields to learn from her. For some of the close-up stuff, we would have hand doubles. Or we shot some of that all over. But also, as you can see in the wide shots, Elizabeth can really do it, so thank you.I just really love the story and the characters, and found them so challenging and upsetting in certain ways. I wanted to spend more time with them and do the story. I hadn’t felt like I had seen a movie that was in this world, and I liked how physical and visual it was.