The French filmmaker Jacques Audiard is known for hard-hitting crime dramas with incisive social commentary. He doesn’t often enjoy musicals and doesn’t speak Spanish. Yet his latest work, the offbeat “Emilia Pérez,” which began streaming Wednesday on Netflix, is a Spanish-language musical set amid Mexico’s drug wars.
He lifted his protagonist from the pages of Boris Razon’s 2018 novel, “Écoute,” about our hyperconnected, perpetually online world. One chapter features a ruthless Mexican cartel boss seeking a gender transition who hires a lawyer to help with the logistics.
For the titular role, Audiard, 72, cast the Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón (a trans woman herself), and changed the attorney in the book from a man to a woman played by Zoe Saldaña. To write the movie’s many tracks, the director enlisted the singer Camille Dalmais and the composer Clément Ducol.
Shot almost entirely on soundstages in Paris, the film debuted in May at the Cannes Film Festival to mostly positive reactions that praised the film for its way of “testing the limits of character sympathy as well as shifting tones and moods,” as The Times’s chief critic, Manohla Dargis put it, though some reviewers expressed reservations about the portrayal of Emilia Pérez, herself. In the end, the film’s four stars — Gascón, Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz — shared the best actress award, while the film itself won the jury prize (essentially third place).
Speaking through an interpreter during a recent video interview while in the United States, Audiard explained how he came to try his hand at musicals with this timely subject.
These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
What was it about the character in the novel that sparked your interest?
One chapter set in Mexico featured a very violent cartel boss who wanted to transition. What struck me was this person, representative of pure violence, of machismo, of the most absolute patriarchy, having a desire for femininity. It was that paradox that drew me. What interested me also is the endemic violence that Mexico deals with and the tremendous amount of people who have disappeared.
Why did you decide to make it a musical as opposed to a drama?
If we had had this conversation three or four months ago, I would’ve said that it just landed on me. But actually, that’s wrong. I think the musical has been chasing me for a long time. Already with my second feature, “A Self-Made Hero,” the composer Alexandre Desplat and I had thought of making a small opera but lacked the courage to do it.
After my film “A Prophet,” [co-writer] Thomas Bidegain and I thought about doing a musical set in the world of narcos, a love story amid the drug trade. But it didn’t happen. When it came to the character that eventually led to “Emilia Pérez,” I knew that I could do it and immediately wrote a short opera in the form of a libretto.
Have you always been a fan of opera?
I’ve long loved opera. Now, I’m not an assiduous spectator. Sometimes I’m quite bored. But I have a deep curiosity for this total spectacle. Maybe my desire to do an opera came from my own feeling as a spectator that what’s missing is contemporary opera.
Were you hesitant about approaching the visual language of musicals?
I didn’t have any hesitation. I wasn’t hampered by an excessive love for the musical genre. I don’t actually like that many musicals. It’s a little pretentious to say, but maybe I had the pretension to try to make a musical that I would like from my perspective as a viewer.
Are there any examples of movie musicals you feel work to your liking?
I have a great passion for Bob Fosse’s “Cabaret”: it’s a great musical. I also really liked “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” and I like “Hair.” All these films that I’m mentioning have both a political and a historical background, and maybe that’s why I made “Emilia Pérez.”
Did you first write the screenplay without the songs, only dialogue, and then the songs emerged?
When the screenplay really started to exist as a screenplay, and not as a libretto anymore, we knew that some scenes would be sung or sung and danced. For instance, the opening, “El Alegato,” I knew in the writing that it would be sung. But then along the way, desires would come up for certain things to happen because the characters were changing as we went along. I became obsessed with the idea that there should be a sung duet between Emilia and Jessi [Emilia’s wife, played by Gomez], which as if by chance, came along at the very end.
I’m interested in the writing process for the lyrics and the music.
In the United States you have a real culture of the musical. In France, it’s a different case. If one were to publish a history of the French musical, it would be a very slim volume. With the musicians, we really had to start from scratch. We had to learn together in a very empirical manner. They would write lyrics based on the dialogue. We’d listen to demos together. Many songs they wrote wound up in the garbage. We really had to learn by doing.
The Spanish spoken in the film sounds rather colloquial. How did you achieve that?
Camille worked with a great translator, Karla Aviles, who’s Mexican. But throughout the shoot we had problems, for instance, with Selena’s accent in Spanish. She is Texan. Karla Sofía Gascón speaks Castilian Spanish. She’s from Madrid. Given that I don’t speak Spanish, the nuances of the Mexican accent versus the Castilian were lost on me. We had all these problems with accents, but we fixed them in the edit. We did a lot of dubbing.
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