“Skincare,” the sly thriller starring Elizabeth Banks now in theaters, begins with an eerily stressful makeup routine performed by Banks’ celebrity aesthetician character, Hope. From there, the movie acquires what cinematographer Christopher Ripley called an “unhinged momentum.” That translated to the actual filming, as well, which took all of 18 days in Hollywood.
Not bad for a film that’s set in 2013, which required a surprising amount of retro equipment to pull off. “[Director Austin Peters] and I both were very interested in that time period, a period in flux with a lot of changed energy,” Ripley told IndieWire. “Hollywood was, as Austin described it, ‘fully torqued.
’ Uncanny and very disturbing, intense energy going on.” That energy was the perfect backdrop for the increasingly unraveling Hope, whose shot at financial security and fame with her own product line is upended when a rival aesthetician moves in across from her salon, and a wave of harassment begins. What Ripley described as the “insidious undertones” of the cinematography only enhanced the shooting location: Crossroads of the World in Hollywood, an open-air mall that once served as home to filmmakers’ offices (including Alfred Hitchcock) but one that also has an insidious past of its own.
Specifically, Ella Crawford had the mall built in 1936 on the site of her husband’s fatal shooting, a man who also served as inspiration for some of Raymond Chandler’s criminals (proving his.