Releasing a music video with Orville Peck, Beck, and Sharon Stone one month, and a glossy and glamorous film with Elizabeth Banks and Lewis Pullman another month, filmmaker Austin Peters is doing it all, and with style. We spoke with him recently about his new movie Skincare, which is now playing in theaters and stars that wildly talented aforementioned cast.
The satirical thriller’s storyline involves a beauty salon owner’s rivalry with another nearby business, which escalates to the point of violent threats. If the plot sounds over-the-top, just remember, so if life — some of the events actually happened in Hollywood circa 2014. Well, kind of. “It’s really just loosely inspired by some of those events,” Peters told MovieWeb. “Early on, we sort of wanted to just make it its own thing and its own movie. And so once there was that sort of point of departure, you know, we basically never returned to it again.”
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From there, the end result is a delicious neo-noir film of sorts, and what some — including the director — have dubbed a “sunshine noir” more specifically. “When a friend of mine said ‘sunshine noir’ to describe it, when he said that, that really sort of unlocked a lot of things for people,” says Peters. “Because even if you don’t know what that is, and people have different ideas of it, when you say that, I think it sort of puts an image in your head that is true to what this movie is, or at least to me.” Peters shared his definition of the subgenre, which could also be applied to Chinatown and The Long Goodbye.
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A sunshine noir is a noir where all the sort of darkness and seedy underbelly comes out into the light of day and gets sunburned
, and it’s sort of a little bit of like a noir on tilt, you know? It has a reality that you’re not sure if you can really buy into, you’re not sure if you’re being told the truth. And I think it can be a little funnier, and it can be a little weirder than the classic, traditional noir. And so that gave us the latitude and the freedom to make this movie the way that we kind of always knew that we wanted to.”
Watch Our Full Interview with Austin Peters Below:
Skincare’s Stylish Noir Nods, From Chandler to the Coens
Given the noir vibes throughout Skincare, Peters shared with us some classics from the genre — both film and literature — that helped fuel his vision from the get-go. “A bunch of the ones that we were thinking about on this one [were] Body Heat and The Long Goodbye, and obviously all the Coens’ movies,” said Peters. “Double Indemnity… and all the Raymond Chandler novels, Philip Marlowe novels… a ton of Patricia Highsmith, because that has that sort of like sociopathic bent to it that I think is present in this movie.”
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And if the visual treats and camerawork tickle your fancy in Skincare, you might recall similar effects in Peters’ last feature-length project: Give Me Future, the documentary about the musical trio Major Lazer’s famed free concert in Cuba. Peters noted that he brought some of the same crew members from that project onto Skincare, and the result surely paid off. “There is some DNA that sort of connects them,” he added, in thinking about certain story parallels between both movies.
A lot of my interests remain the same in things that attract me to films — in breaking off with certain characters that are maybe not the main character, and going into their lives for a second. That sort of stuff, I think, is present in both films.
From IFC Films, Skincare is now playing exclusively in theaters.