While set predominantly in Mexico City, Emilia Pérez was shot on soundstages in Paris—the birthplace of the film’s decorated director, Jacques Audiard. He made that decision after several location scouts in Mexico, where he and cinematographer Paul Guilhaume realized they shouldn’t try to make their audacious musical look realistic. Instead, they were more interested in making a film in traditions of opera and telenovela.
Netflix’s Oscar contender (now streaming) takes its cues from a range of styles. The music itself, composed by Camille and Clément Ducol, bounces from ballad to karaoke, overlapping genres and integrating with dialogue and action in a way that keeps the lines of reality and fantasy blurred. The narrative—unfurling the years-long dynamics between a sharp attorney named Rita (Zoe Saldaña), a cartel leader seeking help in facilitating her gender transition (Karla Sofía Gascón), and said cartel leader’s volatile wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez)—explores themes of transformation and redemption on scales both intimate and vast, if always with a touch of “kitsch,” as Audiard affectionately puts it.
For a filmmaker who’s dominated the global scene for years, between his Cannes-winning A Prophet and Dheepan and the searing Marion Cotillard vehicle Rust and Bone, Emilia Pérez reminds us that Audiard is never one to be pinned down. The film extravagantly showcases the director at both his most controlled and his wildest, slotting a trio of bold, career-redefining performances into a rollercoaster that’s always teetering on the edge.
Audiard and Guilhaume joined Vanity Fair for a deep dive into their mad, mad methods, via a closer look at six pivotal scenes from Emilia Pérez.
FROM LIGHT TO DARK
Gomez’s big dance number arrives as Jessi wonders what’s next after the disappearance of her partner (who, unbeknownst to her, now goes by Emilia). We’re given a hint of Jessi’s darker inner life—which plays a pivotal role in the film’s climax.
Jacques Audiard: First, she’s waking up: “Where am I? What’s going on?” And then, when she goes into the second room—the second part—it’s her entire project of rage and fury that’s taking shape. It’s also the beginning of an act, which begins with Selena, and that tells us that [Jessi] may become a problem.
Paul Guilhaume: For us on the technical side, it was, “How do we connect this world of dark thoughts with the real world of the film?” We built the room in a studio with a missing wall that was replaced by a very strong laser wall. On the other side of this missing wall, there’s a black set that Selena could suddenly jump into without even breaking the shot. The camera could follow, and the actors and the dancers are waiting on the other side of the room. The sound changes as the camera passes this invisible wall.
We actually needed a very big set to shoot everything here, and in the lighting point of view, all had to be able to change as Selena was crossing the wall. There was a console, really like a theater. We had an operator who was waiting for her to just cross the laser wall, and as soon as she crossed, the sun of the room shuts down, the sky shuts down—there’s a single white top light that lights her.
REUNITED
The movie opens with Rita organizing Emilia’s transition in exchange for a healthy payout. Following Emilia’s transition, the action jumps forward several years. This dramatically-lit shot highlights the moment Emilia and Rita meet again for the first time.
Audiard: What can Rita expect from Emilia? This person whom she knew as a narco? She can perhaps think that there’s a contract on her head, that she’s going to be killed—that the last witness to Emilia’s transition adventure is going to be eliminated. The entire scene plays on that. Initially, the two women are, so to speak, unrecognizable. We go from an objective scene to a completely subjective scene. The first part is dialogue and song; we see everyone, and then the lights shift significantly, and we have this dramatic song where we’re only on the two women. As Paul mentioned for the previous scene with Jessi, it was important that the light change visibly, as it would at the opera or at the theater.
Guilhaume: We really had to be struck by the beauty of these two women. We put our energy in the lit moment for them to really glow. We used a technique of much softer light, a bit less realistic than the rest of the film, to materialize fear. As soon as Rita realizes what’s going on, all the practicals had to shut down—not just the cinema light. That means that all of the lamps we can see in this restaurant had to be able to softly dim off on a particular line. And it’s also a scene when we actually needed to be in a studio—to be able to switch off the world that is London by night, which we can see through the windows.
LADY IN RED
One of the film’s centerpiece numbers, “El Mal,” takes place at a fundraiser, with Rita calling out government corruption and cartel violence while circling tables of complicit donors. It’s a complex bit of filmmaking—anchored by a tour-de-force performance—that required a great deal of planning to work out.
Audiard: The image doesn’t really capture the full scale of the set. The idea here was Rita is at a fundraiser, as she has now developed a political conscience, or political awareness, and she has begun denouncing things. [Costume designer] Virginie Montel had the idea that Rita would wear a diabolical red suit—the idea was a little bit sympathy for the devil. It’s really a magnificent suit because wherever Rita is in the frame, you only see Rita. It is the red of anger, the red of revenge. What Damien Jalet did here is a very aggressive choreography, and what I wanted was for the people sitting at the tables, and so on, to be like insects—animals, far-off, wiggling convulsively. It was very hard to do, but I love it.
Guilhaume: Even when we were aiming for a more realistic movie shot in Mexico, Jacques already wanted us to block out a big space and do this scene this way, with black walls and the light from the tables and the big light from the ceiling. Just to talk about this suit, we knew it was the main thing that we had to achieve in this sequence; we did a lot of tests to see how the suit reacted in front of the old red curtain that we had put behind the stage. The light here is directed by Rita. It’s as if she’s taking power over the film itself. We used an entirely operatic technique. We had a team that works on concert sets, decorations, lights, come in to do this. We have red lights hidden in the ceiling and these motorized projectors that allow her to be free and stop whenever she wants. Despite the fact that the dance was very planned out, we were able to improvise until we had actually found the shot.
The reason that Jacques says this was hard is that the work with the camera was very challenging. We were working with the Steadicam [operator] Sacha Naceri, who has done few feature films, but who’s a star in the music video field. Jacques and I looked at each other and we just decided, “Let’s let Zoe and Sacha work together,” and that’s what they did. We chose a very short lens, a 20mm, and we divided the music into eight pieces. With those eight pieces, we had eight master shots in which the camera was moving very quickly, coming to sudden stops very close to her face.
LOVE STORY
One of Emilia’s most affecting numbers, “Enamorada,” finds our titular heroine singing about the meaning of her new romance with Epifanía (Adriana Paz).
Audiard: Emilia is singing while Epifanía goes about making everyday gestures, cleaning and so on. It’s actually a device that we took from Francis Ford Coppola’s film One from the Heart, in which we have two women who are together, one is singing and the other does not hear her. If one were to divide the film Emilia Pérez into different aesthetic zones, this one would be the most kitsch, the most telenovela. The reason we did that is because I think that best corresponds with what Emilia’s state of mind is at that moment. What’s amusing about this sequence is that, of course, we shot it in a studio in Paris, but it reproduces quite accurately a location that we had found in a favela in Mexico City.
Guilhaume: As Jacques said, it’s a set based on what we saw in Mexico City. We had taken many photos of it. In fact, we were supposed to shoot there. We had been on a location scout there before the summer of 2023, I believe—and then at the end of the summer, Jacques wrote to us, and he said, “What we’re doing is too stuck to reality. We’re never going to be able to lift off in this film.” We used what the studio could bring us. But what’s funny here is that the set decorator really had everything from that location—the colors, the curtains, the paintings on the wall—and we actually went and took photos for what we would see outside the windows that was blue-screened in, because the neighborhood that this actual location in was a very interesting one. It’s in the heights of Mexico City. You have the cable car going by, so it has very working-class connotations.
What the studio brought is, we opened the sequence with Emilia walking in with the sun rising at an accelerated pace, which throws the shadows moving across the wall. That’s an effect that we achieved by using a projector on a crane, which allowed us to do something much more lyrical than we would’ve been allowed if we had been shooting on location.
THE SHOOTOUT
In the film’s final act, Jessi kidnaps Emilia and demands ransom from Rita—leading to a tense shootout sequence that sets the stage for the film’s climactic tragedy.
Audiard: I like this scene a lot, but I also have a regret here. This is a scene where Damien Jalet was going to [work out] choreography from the loading of weapons and [composer] Clément Ducol was going to write percussion music on which Damien was going to set the movements of these gun barrels. It corresponds to something that we see a little more in the film, which are gestures that are indistinguishable between everyday movements and dance movements. It’s reminiscent of something in opera, which is “Sprechgesang”—spoken singing, where it becomes indistinguishable between what is spoken, what is sung, what is beginning to be a melody. I would’ve liked to do more of these intermediary gestures where you’re somewhere between ordinary movements and dance movements, but that would’ve demanded more time. Each film is made of its regrets.
Guilhaume: This sequence comes in the last act of the film. It’s a single shot. The camera is outside the room. We’re seeing through a window, we can’t hear what’s being said, and it comes at a point where the tragedy is underway. It can no longer be stopped. Rita has raised an army. She’s become practically a general in the army, and what happens will happen. Jacques spoke of the choreography; the camera here is simply moving forward, a slow zoom at the same speed throughout that ends on Rita’s face so that we are just seeing Zoe’s performance.
KARAOKE, EMILIA PÉREZ-STYLE
The film’s most meta moment comes in “Mi Camino,” a karaoke-inspired number that finds Gomez breaking the fourth wall, as Jessi relishes in her plan to remarry and move away with her children—to Emilia’s great chagrin.
Audiard: Again, we have a change of form, a change of rhythm—we adopt basically a music video aesthetic. Camille and Clément Ducol, our composers, wrote this song very fast. I believe we were already shooting when they wrote it. We particularly wanted something where the character of Jessi would tell us something about the woman Selena Gomez, and that’s exactly what the lyrics here do. We have this very kitsch, very artificial aesthetic in which Selena Gomez talks to us, and I really like that. It’s a sincere song. What I liked is that in the most artificial form possible, someone told us the truth.
Guilhaume: The question here was, “What would this artifice be?” We asked ourselves, How do you film karaoke? How are you at the border of two genres? Jacques had the intuition very early that there should be a wall made of a screen behind them. While I was researching screen technology, people would talk to me of a latency of so many milliseconds per screen. I said, “So what does that mean? The latency?” If you have a large latency, you’re going to get video feedback, so the mirror effect that you have here—things will get out of phase. That’s what we see here with Selena smaller and smaller behind her. When I talked to Jacques about this, we realized that what everybody was telling us to avoid, video feedback, was actually really great. What we have here formally is Selena Gomez and Edgar Ramírez singing, facing the camera, and the video feedback is making time and space go out of phase.
Audiard: You might even say that’s a metaphor.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Listen to Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast now.
Presenting the 31st Annual Hollywood Issue
The 2025 Hollywood Issue: Zendaya, Nicole Kidman, and 10 More Modern Icons
Glen Powell’s Secret: “I Try to Think Audience First, Rather Than Me First”
Zendaya on Acting With Tom Holland: “It’s Actually Strangely Comfortable”
Nicole Kidman Talks Babygirl, Losing Her Mother, and a “Terrifying” New Role
Dev Patel’s Long-Ranging Career, From “the Little Rash That Won’t Go Away” to Monkey Man
Sydney Sweeney on Producing and Misconceptions: “I Don’t Get to Control My Image”
Zoe Saldaña Won’t Quit Sci-Fi, but She “Would Like to Just Be a Human in Space”
A Cover-by-Cover History of Hollywood Issue
The post How ‘Emilia Pérez’ Pulls Off Its Audacious Musical Numbers appeared first on Vanity Fair.
