The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Skincare.

Can you talk about the decision to set the film in 2013, and why that specific year was the right choice for this story?
Austin Peters: If you think about where we, as a country, were at in 2013… It was such a different time. The sort of depths of the darkness that exist online we were aware of, but not in the way that we are now. And it didn’t feel as dangerous, these social media platforms and the things that we know about them now, what they do and what sort of scams are run on them. That was really outside of our line of vision at the time in many ways. And especially for someone like Hope, who’s so… offline, and has built her whole career on face to face relationships, and being in person and all that sort of thing.

When she starts thinking about putting herself online, building a brand, that entire idea is like a foreign language to her. And so you know, it felt crucial to set this story in the modern era, but not quite in the time we’re in now. It felt that if this story happened in the present day, it just would not play the same way because we know so much more about the internet and we have so many more tools, and falling into this dark underbelly of the Internet and the city like she does would require almost different pathway, I think, for that to happen now because we know so much more.

we sent her the script almost as a gag

How did Elizabeth Banks get involved in the film?
AP: Well you know Elizabeth was the person who signed on to this movie, she was our first choice to play Hope Goldman and we thought there was never a chance in hell that she was going to do this movie, which is so small and dark. After all, she’s a very successful producer and director and also a movie star! And all of those things led us to believe that she would never be interested in this. And we sent her the script, almost as a gag. And she responded to it, and we talked about it. And then once that happened… This movie became a real thing that people could see in the script, because you could understand what kind of part this was for Elizabeth.

And for me, just as a fan of hers, this is the movie that I wanted to see her in, you know? And she blew me away every single day: she would be jumping between scenes in the beginning and scenes at the end of the movie within the space of a few minutes. We shot for 18 days, so some of the days we would have to do, you know, six scenes that were from all over the timeline of the story, and she would just go between where this character was … it was kind of breathtaking to watch, honestly.

And our producers Jonathan Schwartz and Logan Lerman had worked with Lewis Pullman on a previous film, and they really loved him. I’m so grateful that we went with Lewis because I think that he brings so much to that character. You know, and, and obviously Michaela Jaé Rodriguez is so amazing. And so we just went for all these people that we thought were not going to do it, and they agreed to do it!

The work done behind the camera was exceptional as well. Can you discuss building the team? The music, makeup, camera work… all of it was just phenomenal.
AP: Oh, I’m so glad that it worked for you. The Director of Photography is Christopher Ripley and he’s amazing. And he’s sort of a mad scientist that I had shot some music videos with, and he is constantly working. He’s done videos for some of biggest artists, their most exciting videos. Megan Thee Stallion, Bad Bunny, Harry Styles… And he got wind that I was making this movie and he called me and he said, “can we talk about it?” And he read the script and he immediately stopped doing everything else while we were in prep, turning down all the jobs, just coming to my house every day: talking about the movie, looking at photos, looking at movies, doing page-turns for the script…And so he really was an amazing collaborator.

The score is by Fatima [Al Qadiri], who I am a massive, massive fan of. She did the score for a film called Atlantics in 2019 that won the Grand Prix at Cannes, and when I watched that film I was so smitten by the whole movie, and I thought the music was such amazing an part of it. I had sort of known about her then, and I wrote down her name because I thought maybe she would be interested in doing an American movie—and this is her first American film. So we got connected and I loved the score that she did here.

And Laura Zempel, the editor, is an enormous talent. This is her second or third movie, but she does a lot of TV. She did Euphoria, and Beef, and Lessons in Chemistry… and the costumes by Angelina Vitto were really important to us, obviously, to set us in 2013. And because this character is someone who is constantly thinking about how she appears and what she looks like, even when her life is crumbling, and even when her sanity is crumbling, she is constantly trying to present herself in a certain way. So we just knew that every outfit had to be a very specific look. She always had to be giving a look. And Angelina was an enormous talent. Liz Toonkel did the production design: she had a huge stack of architectural digests from 2008 to 2012, to get a sense of what places looked like, and she bought a book by Kate Somerville, who was one of the first celebrity facialists circa 2013. So there’s all these photos of her studio and what it looked like because it’s sort of… now we’re almost getting there, but 2013 is sort of long enough ago that it feels really jarring and out of date, but it also doesn’t feel like a period necessarily. You don’t immediately register that this is a time period thing, you know?

What was it like to direct a narrative feature for the first time, after directing TV, music videos, and documentaries in the past? Were those skills transferable to this project?
AP: What was transferable was working on set and collaborating with people. Doing music videos, I think what you learn is that you have to get it done, you know, you have one day with the artist and if it doesn’t come out right, it’s your fault. There are no reshoots, and that’s what it is. And there’s never enough money on music videos. And so, you have to sort of train yourself to get the strongest image you possibly can, and know when you have to compromise, and know when you can push.

And so those sorts of learning experiences were helpful, in terms of going on set and bringing that to it. That said, I had never worked with actors. That’s different from working with musicians on a video, you know, because musicians create something in a studio and then the video is the supplementary part of it… whereas with actors, the moment of creation is on set.

And so getting to be a part of that and, and doing that with them was really thrilling. The thing that was the most confusing for me, even having done documentary, was the absolute scale of it in prep and really in post. I just could not… it sounds so stupid to say now, so I should stop saying it, but I could not believe how big it was when we got into the edit. I could not believe that we would spend all day working on one scene. And the next morning look at it and be like, “is it better?” And it was so uncertain, and that was something that I didn’t know was coming, and I was lucky to work with Laura, who is a genius, and I could lean on her because she only lives in narrative. She’s never done a commercial, she’s never done a music video, even though I would love to see her do both of those things! But she is only in storytelling and so, she was someone that I could lean on in that in that process.