Behind the Scenes: Emilia Pérez

A musical melodrama about a cartel boss undergoing gender reassignment surgery has no right to work on paper. Imagine Pedro Almodóvar directing Sicario as Time Out put it. Yet the audacious staging of Emilia Pérez by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard succeeds. The film has already won plaudits at Cannes where, unusually, all four female leads were awarded the Best Actress prize while Audiard picked up the Jury prize.

Despite being set in Mexico with a script that is 95% Spanish language, this French production is the country’s nomination for International Feature at the Oscars.

The director, who previously made Rust and Bone and The Prophet, originally wrote the screenplay as an opera libretto in four acts. By the time French cinematographer Paul Guilhaume joined the project, things had changed. “It was still going to be an opera but Jacques also had a desire to make a film that was super realistic, shot in Mexico, and without any music,” he says. “Over time I saw the two projects converge into one.”

Less than a year before the start of principal photography the film was set to be an opera but shot on location in Mexico “with a look very anchored to reality,” says Guilhaume. “During the location scouting in Mexico, we realised that this would not work because the story would actually be too connected to reality. Jacques sent us an email saying the whole film is going to be exactly as we planned, only it will now all be shot in a studio.”

The team built sets on soundstages outside Paris for scenes set in Mexico, London, Bangkok and Switzerland, and shot across 49 days, with five days of exterior work in Mexico.

Emilia Pérez (played by Mexican actress Karla Sofía Gascón) is the rebirthed character of Mexican drug lord Manitas, introduced as a deeply unsavoury figure who makes frustrated but ambitious criminal lawyer Rita (Zoe Saldaña) an offer she can’t refuse.

“To me the film is almost like a chimera,” says Guilhaume, “a mix of musical and drama elements.”

It is the fusion of song and dance with a story about identity, loneliness, misogyny and the 60,000 people who have been ‘disappeared’ in Mexico’s drug wars, which renders the film almost unclassifiable.

“Visually, it’s very stylised on the one hand, but with much grittier moments on the other,” says Guilhaume. “There was a constant ‘to and fro’ between the two concepts. We had no reference to work with, since no film had attempted something like this before. So we made lots of tests, really trying to understand what we are doing.”

Read more Behind the Scenes: Anora

The visual language borrows from classic noir films, to more modern films like Uncut Gems but also from pop culture references and music videos. Guilhaume was also inspired by the way the film’s choreographer Damien Jalet had used bright white lights thrown into a dark space to create the imagery in his own shows.

“The important thing for Jacques was that the music should not come after the drama as an illustration of what just happened but that the drama would happen inside the music,” Guilhaume says. “He was very clear that he wanted the audience to still have something to learn as the song is going on.”

“My starting point was the emotional message of each song. Is it an intimate scene or one of anger? What’s the energy we are conveying? Perhaps it’s a confession, or a plea for understanding, or about being a prisoner. Each song had to be treated differently based on how it progressed the story.”

The first scene featuring Rita in a Mexico City street market soon erupts into full song and dance (of the song ‘Alegato’). It was the first scene they shot and it became a test for how they would shoot the rest of the film’s musical numbers.

“We spent three weeks on these first three minutes so that it was both chaotic and extremely accurate. It also helped introduce a specific language for the film where the dance numbers blend in with the characters’ body language, just as the songs blend in with the dialogue.”

After initially imagining the market street to be empty and operatic with a black background heightening the focus on Rita, tests showed that the approach wasn’t focused enough on the story.

“We reworked it to include many more elements such as market stores and crowds of extras and within that to have Zoe writing her plea for the defence. The first scene creates this dynamic between the film’s different art forms and gave it a sense of urgency and intensity.”

This scene and much of the rest of the film were shot against bluescreen with backgrounds replaced by 3D-generated sets in post.

A specific example is the shot near the beginning of the film showing Rita waiting in front of a newspaper shop when she gets abducted. The backdrop here, including the courthouse, was a 3D replacement. The street market scene was augmented with trees, telephone cables, and more shops.

The film’s climactic gunfight in the desert was shot at night in a quarry with the foreground dressed and backgrounds replaced in post.

Other scenes featured backgrounds of photographic plates shot on location in Mexico. While there are practical reasons for extensive bluescreen (such as giving the filmmakers more control) the result also evokes a dreamlike quality in keeping with the film’s hybrid fantasy and reality.

“The first act of the movie happens entirely at night so we knew we would explore darkness, but it had to stay shiny and bright in some elements of the frame. That could be elements in the set design, like the giant TV screens behind Zoe at the karaoke bar.”

Another constant inspiration for Guilhaume was the Italian photographer Alex Majoli, whose images of realistic scenes are lit with magical contrast and shiny flashes.

“We wanted the film to be a mix of a light musical feeling and dark realism. In a way we wanted to keep the timeless imagery of an opera stage, with the characters standing in dark environments, but including in it modern elements of light, using LED, projections, lasers, and very contemporary light fixtures,” he adds.

The film’s electric colour palette had its cues in the costume and production design and also acts to contrast with scenes set in the dark and strong daylight.

“The first act happens at night and I had full reign from Jacques to explore darkness so as long as we saw the actor’s faces. In those dark environments we focused on deep reds, some deep greens and tried during the whole film to avoid pastel colours. In the second act, there is more daylight. Everything had to be a bit more joyful as the story unfolds. By the end, the colour palette has blended and become greyer.”

Music video elements

Audiard had met Guilhaume on the set of French detective series The Bureau and invited him to shoot the 2021 feature Paris, 13th District. However, it was Guilhaume’s music promo work for artists including Rosalia, Beabadoobee and Kanye West that also inspired the look of two showstopping numbers in Emilia Perez, one at a fundraising gala and another in the courthouse.

“Jacques wanted the film to be infused by something of the music video world but we had to be careful not to make a big music video.”

To help make the camerawork integral to the choreography, Audiard wanted to bring on board Steadicam operator Sacha Naceri, who was highly experienced in shooting music videos.

“I’d describe Jacques’ aesthetic as an aesthetic of movement,” explains Guilhaume. “He applies that to every craft in a film. In the cinematography it’s obvious. If the camera is too static, he won’t be happy, something in the image has to have motion. If not the camera then maybe it’s the light. If it’s not the light, maybe it’s the performance of the dancers.

“You could extend this to music or editing to the general rhythm of the film and even to the script - you always have something going in motion.”

Typically, movie musicals play prerecorded tracks as the musical sequences are filmed, with the actors lip-syncing to their own vocals. Audiard ultimately became more interested in having the actors perform live on the set. What we hear in the film is a combination of original recordings with on-set performances.

For all that the scenes were extensively planned, (Guilhaume has a notebook containing a hundred pages of detailed ideas) they retained flexibility to improvise in the moment.

“We always tried to have something that we called an ‘eye image,” he says. “It didn’t have to be for the whole mise-en-scène, the whole blocking of the scene. It was just an image that we kept with us in our memory after the sequence. It could be a particular lighting design or could be a car in flames. Sometimes we had a very clear idea of the blocking. Very often we’d throw everything out when the actors arrived on set and gave us something new but we always knew what we were looking for.”

Camera choice

When the film was still envisioned as an opera shot against a black background, Guilhaume planned to shoot anamorphic to accentuate lighting. After tests he chose Blackwing7 lenses from Tribe which are marketed as able to produce images of “musical fidelity…” that can be tuned “identical to how EQ adjustment is used in music production… across the audio frequency spectrum.”

“Jacques loved the simplicity that they convey, but also that it’s not too digital and not too sharp,” the DP says “It was a good balance between style and an image that is not overly visible.”

Sony Venice was selected for its light sensitivity, notably the day exteriors of a snowstorm in Lausanne filmed in the studio which had a huge ceiling. “Daylighting a studio is extremely expensive because you have to reproduce the whole sky. We knew we needed a camera that would be sensitive.”

Mostly they shot single camera, occasionally with another, which was also a Venice. Colourist Arthur Paux took time to add in textures which Guilhaume felt was missing from rushes shot in a studio on digital video.

Netflix will stream the film following its October theatrical release.

Read more Behind the Scenes: SFX and dynamic lighting merge worlds in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice