Hope Goldman (Elizabeth Banks) isn’t exactly putting on her best face when “Skincare” begins, despite all the attention the aesthetician can be seen exfoliating her pores at the start. After attaining a strong reputation amongst a steady stream of B-list celebs, she looks to take her business to a new level with the launch of a new product line, but for all her gifts at keeping others’ skin radiant, she is woefully ill-equipped at preventing others from getting underneath hers, terribly irked by the arrival of Angel (Luis Gerardo Méndez), a new aesthetician across the way that threatens to pull customers away from her cozy cottage in Hollywood’s Crossroads of the World mall on Sunset Boulevard, as well as her landlord (John Billingsley), who constantly has his hand out waiting on the latest rent payment, which only promises to come when Hope can defray her startup costs with actual sales.
Fittingly, there is plenty going on beneath the surface in “Skincare,” Austin Peters’ auspicious narrative feature debut. After the longtime music video maestro previously directed the 2017 doc “Give Me Future,” following the lead-up to a Major Lazer concert in Cuba, no one would mistake his latest for nonfiction, even with an “inspired by true events” disclaimer, yet for anyone that’s ever lived in the “showbiz capital of the world,” his treatment of Hollywood feels incredibly real as it presents those who come to Los Angeles to make it and find themselves going to desperate measures simply to tread water. As all her other problems pile up, Hope’s fears that someone is out to get her start to also feel more real and with people looking to her to make themselves more attractive in a place that offers no guarantees that it’ll be a way to get ahead, the skincare specialist can’t help but be swayed a bit by the affirming platitudes of Jordan (Lewis Pullman), the only person to give her a kind word these days besides her own assistant (Michaela Jae Rodriguez) after a longtime client (Wendie Malick) introduces them, even though his part-time profession of being a life coach with aspirations of competitive bodybuilding should probably concern her.
Chaos commences in the thriller where appearances are deceiving and all the bright lights of the big city seem to make its dark corners a bit more bleak, but Peters’ makes something a bit more buoyant than any of the characters on screen when both he and Banks, giving the plucky protagonist her all, are both in on the joke of an image-conscious community that can’t see their bad decisions for themselves and on the eve of the film’s release, the director spoke about giving the film a professional polish without sanding off its edge, the excitement of building characters alongside actors for the first time and portraying his hometown exactly in the way he sees it.
How did this come about?
This came to me when I was working on my documentary, “Give Me Future” and the DP of that movie told me that he was working on a script with another friend of ours. They thought that I would be a really good director for it, so I looked at it and I just immediately fell in love with this atmosphere and world and chaos that they had created. I grew up in Los Angeles, so I have a very specific relationship to it, and I really wanted to make a movie that felt like real L.A. It didn’t feel like a movie set or aspirational or a parody version, so we really worked to really try and capture the feeling and the chaos of being in Hollywood for real, and I said, “Yeah, let’s start working on this together.”
I’ve sat across from Crossroads of the World plenty of times, wondering what’s inside, because one of my favorite Thai restaurant is across the street…
Did you immediately gravitate towards that as a location?
We were talking about where we wanted to do it and I just said, “Hey, can we go check out Crossroads of the World?” Because we need a place where we can have these two shops [across from one another] and we want to do it practically and we want to do it in L.A. We don’t want to have to fake it somewhere else. So we went to Crossroads and they were really amazing to us. They were willing to make a deal with us and use it as our home base. And I just love that it’s the perfect intersection of old Hollywood and new Hollywood and has this amazing look that has been there forever. I’ve grown up looking at it too, so it just felt perfect. It was our first choice and we made it work.
What was it like to bring Elizabeth Banks aboard? I imagine she changes everything.
That is definitely exactly how I would describe things. It was, if not immediately in the business or the schedule of the movie, just in my own perception of the movie, as now suddenly it was a real movie. This whole time we’ve been writing this script for an Elizabeth Banks type, and then you meet with Elizabeth Banks and she says, “Oh, I want to do this. This is a great character.” And we talked about it and we saw that we thought about the movie and the character the same way, so it was just beyond thrilling. Then getting to see her bring this to life was one of the greatest pleasures of the process.
It was so fun getting to work with all these actors who I love so much. Elizabeth is one of my favorite actors, but they all are — Lewis Pullman, Nathan Fillion, Michaela Jae Rodriguez, who I love, and Luis Gerardo Mendez…from top to bottom, Eric Palladino, John Billingsley, Medallion Rahimi, Ella Balinska. It was really, really amazing to [work with them] and get to play these scenes and find new things. Once I realized that that’s what making a movie entailed, which I knew, but hadn’t actually done [before in my previous experience as a music video director], I think that if I wasn’t hooked before, then I definitely was after that.
Something like the costumes must’ve been really interesting then — what was it like figuring out those faux fur outfits that Elizabeth Banks wears with her?
That was such a huge part, and working with Angelina Vitto, the costume designer, was so fun. Elizabeth and I had gone through the script a couple times and we talked a lot about it, but then the second she went and started doing these fittings, trying on these crazy outfits and doing these looks that were so important to this character who is constantly thinking about how she is perceived and what people are seeing when they look at her, it was such an important part [of developing the character]. Getting the photos [from those fittings] from Angelina of Elizabeth in the different outfits, it was so exciting because there I get to see Hope for the first time and even in those photos, you see on her expression and the way that it’s changed. She’s not Elizabeth Banks anymore, but she’s already doing Hope Goldman and that was an incredible moment. We love the costumes. They’re such a great manifestation of her character.
Color in general is a really great reflection of what you’re trying to do here because you’ve got these really fun poppy colors against these deep, deep blacks. Was the palette in mind from the start?
We looked at a lot of references, movies and photos that we were sort of inspired by and we knew that we wanted it to feel gritty, but all about this dichotomy between beauty and grit. The whole movie is about that, so it felt like the imagery had to tell that same story, feeling like it really looks like L.A. with this interesting and chaotic light pollution that you have everywhere, where it’s all these different colors that are not speaking to each other, lighting up the dark space, but then also these really beautiful spaces and beautiful people [up] against the things that make them very, very gritty, which is like [having] “Crossroads of the World” and the neighborhood that surrounds it.
The score has that feeling about it as well, moving from classical to more twitchy electronica. What was it like to work on?
I was definitely always thinking about music, and when I gravitate to an idea, the first thing that have to understand is what does it sound like? This went through a couple different iterations of what it was going to sound like and I always knew where we’d land at was this idea that there’d be all these different kinds of genres like it is when you’re in a city and you go into the coffee shop or the restaurant or the car drives by, and then you’re in someone else’s apartment and everyone’s listening to different music. It all bites each other. So we knew that we wanted the score to unify it and put us in Hope’s head to give us this internal musical monologue. And that’s where Fatima came in, who did the score. I was such a huge fan of her music and the score that she had done for “Atlantics.” That was one of the last stages of this process was her coming aboard to make the music and sending it to me and me giving feedback and us just working on that together. [The broad spectrum of music] was something we always envisioned, but when she did it, it suddenly elevated the movie so dramatically.
You have 18 days to shoot this. Was there anything you were particularly excited to pull off?
Yeah, there was one particularly crazy day every week [of this shoot] that we just got absolutely murdered and we just knew it just wasn’t possible, but we threw our hands up and said, “Let’s do it anyway” — and we ended up getting all those things. There was nothing that we lost in it. the second day of the shoot, Elizabeth Banks was on Sunset Boulevard screaming at John Billingsley as cars were whizzing by, so that was an interesting way to break in on the second day of shooting the movie and the last day of the first week, we shot everything in Jordan’s apartment, so that was a really crazy way to end the first week.
But what was so crazy was that all the actors were so great about making this movie work, but they also [as they] were all shooting different stuff [away from this production], so we could only get them at certain times. It was this jigsaw puzzle of fitting the schedules together so we could shoot Michaela and Lewis’ scenes together because Michaela was shooting “Loot” and Lewis was shooting “Outer Range,” so making all these things work made for really interesting scheduling. But diving in and going for it allowed us to see, this is the movie that we’re making and [we thought] “Use this chaos and freneticism and try and bring it to the film,” so I think it may have worked for us in the end.
“Skincare” opens wide in theaters on August 16th.