In 1993, the future director of The Substance, Coralie Fargeat, made a Star Wars fan film. Over 30 years later, it’s now available to watch online…
Over 30 years before she both startled and beguiled audiences with her horror satire The Substance, writer-director Coralie Fargeat made a Star Wars film. It was 1993, the French filmmaker was just 17, and she had little more than a camcorder and a VHS player to work with.
All the same, her 14-minute homage to George Lucas’s space fantasy is a thing of ramshackle beauty – and decades after Fargeat made it, the whole thing is available to watch online. Below, in fact.
The short emerged thanks to Letterboxd (via TheWrap), which published some comments from Fargeat about her first piece of work as a director.
“Using my family’s camcorder,” she wrote, “I animated my toys frame by frame in stop motion, disguised my friends as Ewoks and stormtroopers and edited it on a VHS video recorder (which was the top device at the time!)”
Her film mixes animation and live-action footage to create a condensed version of Return Of The Jedi, complete with those aforementioned Ewoks (kids in fluffy dressing gowns) and an unexpected cameo from the Indiana Jones theme tune. It’s delightfully lo-fi, but as Fargeat herself points out, “everything I loved about making films was already there.”
Fargeat therefore joins a collective of successful filmmakers who made amateur films in their youth. As immortalised in The Fabelmans, a young Steven Spielberg was so inspired by Cecil B DeMille’s The Greatest Show On Earth that he recreated its train crash sequence with his own railway set at home.
Son Of Rambow (2007) and Super 8 (2011) are both partly about groups of kids making movies based on the cinema that triggered their imaginations. It’s a continuum of artists inspiring other artists, and in an industry plagued by uncertainty, there’s surely something comforting in that.
“It was the place where I felt free,” Fargeat wrote of her fan-made debut, “passionate and alive, and able to fully express myself. It’s after I made this little film that I knew that I wanted to be a director. Today, I am nominated for Best Director, and I can’t help but remember this little film… Follow your dreams!”
