EXCLUSIVE: Though hardly a song and dance guy, French filmmaker Jacques Audiard has made the most compellingly original musical in years in Emilia Pérez, and it has become one of Netflix‘s most celebrated awards-bait film in years. The film got 10 Golden Globe noms, a record for the musical/comedy category; five European Film Award wins including Best Film and Best Director; 10 Critics Choice nominations; and numerous other accolades. The three actresses atop the call sheet — Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, and Zoe Saldaña — are all up for Globes, and the film is well positioned for the upcoming Oscar nominations. The versatile Audiard founds his audaciously original while thumbing through Boris Razon’s 2018 novel, Écoute, where he got the idea for a cartel boss determined to kill his past, and transform into the woman he always wanted to be. Here, he explains how he did it, in a moment where Netflix has licensed for its service The Sisters Brothers, Dheepan, and A Prophet and Rust and Bone, the latter two of which will be available on the streamer in January.
DEADLINE: Describe the eureka moment, when you are reading this novel and come across this character who inspired your heroine?
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JACQUES AUDIARD: In the novel, the character was not a small time dealer. He was a full fledged cartel boss. But what really struck me is that the author of the novel, in the subsequent chapters, did not develop this character at all. And that’s what really intrigued me, and that’s where my imagination started to go into action.
DEADLINE: You added a daring storyline, with singing and dancing. You’ve described it as having the structure of an opera, a libretto. Might you stage it as an opera one day?
AUDIARD: Speaking for myself personally, no, I won’t stage it. I thought about it early on when we started with this work, but four years later, I can tell you that my desire has severely flagged.
DEADLINE: Carrying a project that long must be wearing. How did having three major female characters impact the dynamic and the possibilities of what you were writing?
AUDIARD: I see what you’re getting at. I am trying to, I think of a good answer.
DEADLINE: Consequences, virtues…
AUDIARD: I don’t know exactly how this came to be, but I think I had the idea for a character, in this case, a female character whose life experience would influence the lives of the other people in the story. And for this, I had a model which was Pasolini film Teorema, in which the arrival of this character transforms the life of an entire family. I wanted Emelia’s transition to not be without consequence on the lives of those who surrounded her, and I wanted that these consequences should be beneficial, virtuous.
DEADLINE: At what point in your writing did the musical and dancing elements come into it? Was there a cinematic inspiration for that addition?
AUDIARD: The initial text that I wrote when I was adapting this strangely resembled a libretto. They were divided in acts, they were tableaus. And I think that came from the fact that I was in lockdown and I wanted to write fast. I didn’t want to dwell on intermediary stuff. And so once you’re writing a libretto, that of course is asking for music. So I always saw this as a project with music in it, and I think that’s due to the subject, the change of voice, the destiny of this character. I think that was of an operatic tragic nature.
DEADLINE: You needed a trans actress for the title role. What about Karla Sofia Gascon Carla and her own life made her right. She wasn’t that well known, but if you watch the film you couldn’t imagine anybody else playing this role.
AUDIARD: Well, first of all, if I hadn’t met Karla Sofia, I’m not sure what this film would’ve been or where we would even be with it today. As far as I see it, she’s truly a great actress and I’ve worked with a lot of actresses. She really is someone that I found remarkable. And if you’re asking, what exactly is her quality, her character as an actress, I think after all this time, what I would say, and maybe it seems a little naive, is that her talent is due to her life, to the specific drama of her life. The specificity of her talent comes from that.
DEADLINE: Zoe Saldana and Selena Gomez are two of the busiest actresses in Hollywood. How did you sell them on this film?
AUDIARD: See, they wanted to do it. I didn’t have to sell it to them.
DEADLINE: When you make a movie as audaciously original as Emelia Perez, studios often choke on the risk, because there’s nothing really to compare it with. You cannot logline this in a single sentence. How receptive were buyers, and what was the big challenge in getting the film financed?
AUDIARD: If we’re going to talk about commerce or business, it’s a little bit trivial, but let’s talk about it. I think that this movie demanded names and Zoe and Selena delivered that for this movie to exist in the eyes of people who were going to invest money. We did need that. Now, I don’t know if I really pitched this film. People read the screenplay. I don’t think I had to serve as its sales representative. It wasn’t like that. I’m sorry if it’s pretentious to say this, but people do know me a little bit.
DEADLINE: True, but we haven’t often seen a trans actress leading a production like this. And there’s a lot of daring and provocative things that happen here. As much as they might want to work with you, I wonder if you got some interesting reactions from financiers about taking this creative risk with you?
AUDIARD: there was no reticence at all in terms of subject matter that we struggled with. I think what made all the difference is from the moment that I decided to shoot in a studio. We realized that we would have to keep the budget within a certain range. And given those conditions, that allowed the people who were going to accompany us financially to be able to join up. It made it relatively easy to finance the film. I say relatively because we did have a gap for a time, but it was relatively easy to finance the film because we kept it within a certain budget range.
DEADLINE: The movie feels like it takes place in Mexico, but you shot in France…
AUDIARD: I went two to four times to Mexico, to do casting and for location scouting. And it was when we were coming to the end of these location scouting sessions that I realized that Mexican reality, or it could have been another reality, was weighing the film down. It was preventing the film from taking off. And I was not finding myself able to create the images that more and more were coming to me in prep, in that reality. And that’s how we decided that we were going to make it on a sound stage. And there’s really nothing closer to an opera stage than a sound stage. This was a film that needed an important degree of stylization. And by coming back to France, we would benefit from all the French regional funding and all the institutional funding that we have there.
DEADLINE: Karla Sofia turns in a wonderful performance, as she dangerously reenters the world she ran. She gets to see how destructive it was when she was leading a cartel, and rekindles the relationship with her children. She has become the first trans actress to be nominated for a Golden Globe. And it’s very possible that an Oscar nomination awaits her. How important to you is that distinction? You never want to marginalize somebody who turns in a great performance no matter how they identify. But this is all unprecedented. What does that all mean to you, Jacques?
AUDIARD: It’s strange. I don’t think that I’m analyzing things on that level. Now, of course, I can’t put my head in the sand and say that Karla is not a trans actress. But first and foremost, she is for me, an actress. And I’m proud that I wasn’t wrong about her. As for the rest, I don’t really think about it. I would’ve been upset, offended if she hadn’t been noted as an actress.
DEADLINE: What did Zoe and Selena bring to their roles that most surprised you?
AUDIARD: Originally in the screenplay, the characters ages were completely different. The character of Rita, Zoe, was 25. The character of Manitas, or Emelia, was 30. Epifania (Gomez) was 17. And what happened is that after a very, very long fruitless casting process, I was introduced to Zoe and Karla Sofia in the same range of time. I don’t remember who I saw first, but the moment I saw one of them, there was really a shock. I realized the second I saw them, that I had written the wrong age for these women. That they were actually women of 40 with the experience of 40-year-old women. So that’s what I saw. Then there was a very strong inflection with the character of Zoe’s Rita character, something that I really hadn’t thought of, which is not only that she was 45, but that she was mixed race. That was a shock to me as well. And then Zoe and I started working together. We rehearsed and the job was done. She was incredible. The thing about Zoe is that she comes from dance. She can act, she can sing, she can dance.
As for Selena, it may seem curious to you, but I only knew her through Harmony Korine’s film Spring Breakers, and a Woody Allen film. I didn’t know what a huge media presence she had or how public her life was. I met her one morning in a bar in New York City, and we talked for maybe 10 minutes and she just had everything I wanted for the character. It’s actually hard to explain, but very quickly I said to her, if you want it, I want you to do this part. And in fact, it went so quickly that I don’t think she really believed me at first. Because when we called her back later, I think it was her agent who said she thought you’d forgotten about her. I find that extraordinary, which means that when you want to declare your love to someone, you shouldn’t go too quickly.
DEADLINE: You move deftly from one genre to another. In your formative years, what artists and films most inspired the direction that you’ve taken in your career?
AUDIARD: I need to kind of distinguish two things to start with. I didn’t come to cinema that quickly. I started being an editor around that the age of 24. I think what was really important was what came before that: my years as a cinephile. As a Frenchman, as a young Parisian in the years 1968 to 1975, to 1981, I could basically see everything that had been done and that was being done. I was very impressed with the Italian cinema of the sixties and seventies, the Swedish Cinema that included Bergman. I also had the tremendously good fortune to see in real time the appearance of the young German cinema, and also what would later come to be known as the new Hollywood. I really adored cinema. It’s difficult for me to pick specific names. This has changed now with the advent of digital. But there was a time when one could have the feeling that one had seen everything basically, and that even those films you hadn’t seen, you could guess through the films that you had seen. And that has really changed nowadays.
DEADLINE: In what way has it changed? How has it hurt up and coming artists who maybe don’t prize the theatrical experience as much as you did as when you were forming?
AUDIARD: I think if I answer that question, I would very quickly be putting myself in a reactionary position, which would be to say it was better before. What I can say from my personal position is, yes, it was better before, but I’m not going to make that into a religion. It’s simply my personal experience. So what happened in the 1980s, digital came along and from that point on, it was impossible to see everything. The digital flow crushed everything. And what do we keep from that? I’m not sure, but I remain convinced that in some places around the world, there are young people who are going to create new stories with new images, with new technologies. But I’m not sure that we should call that cinema. Maybe they need to get to work thinking of a new name for this. Initially, cinema was analog. It was intimately connected with the real. If you had a certain amount of light and a duration, you could record reality. The tears on the cheek of an actress, even if it was water that was placed there were real, they existed. Now that pact with reality has been broken. The machine can now create these things and the reality will now be a false reality.
DEADLINE: Have you got a next film you’ll jump into?
AUDIARD: Generally when I would start shooting a film, I had my next project, either in the form of a treatment or a book to adapt. But what happened in this case is that Emelia Perez took so long, a little over four years, that the project I had ahead of me, which eventually became Paris 13th District, got done ahead of Amelia. So now I’m not sure what I’m going to do next. My pockets are empty.
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