At its heart, Emilia Pérez, Jacques Audiard’s unclassifiable transgender Mexican cartel telenovela musical, is a film about transition, transformation and rebirth.
The transformation is not just that of Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, a Mexican drug kingpin who longs to escape a life of violence and death and undergoes gender affirming surgery to become her true self: the glamorous, vivacious Emilia Pérez. (The magnetic Spanish trans actor Karla Sofía Gascón plays both roles).
Emilia Pérez is also the story of the transmutation of Zoe Saldaña. The Avatar and Guardians of the Galaxy star finally gets to inhabit her own skin on the big screen, neither blue nor green, as Rita Moro Castro, an overworked, overlooked defense lawyer closing in on 40 who has spent her career keeping unrepentant cartel slime out of prison. Manitas gives her an offer she can’t refuse: Help me transition, relocate my family and organize my disappearance, and I’ll pay you so much you can retire in style.
Then there is Manitas’ wife, Jessi, played by pop star and onetime Disney TV princess Selena Gomez channeling Barbara Stanwyck as a gangster moll who escapes the cartel life to Switzerland with her children and starts anew as an independent single mother more at home in the snowy Alps than in Mexico City’s barrios.
Emilia Pérez, the film, changes its identity, not once but multiple times during the course of a pace-y two hours and 12 minutes. The gritty crime thriller slips seamlessly through telenovela melodrama, political commentary — Emilia reinvents herself as an advocate for the victims of Mexico’s narco crime — and finally broad comedic farce when, years after her transition, Emilia tries to reconnect with her children, posing, Mrs. Doubtfire-style, as their auntie.
There’s a lot going on. But the musical numbers tie everything together. In “El Alegato” (“The Plea”), the folk-infused opening sequence, Saldaña as Rita storms through the nighttime streets of Mexico City surrounded by a tap-dancing army of the downtrodden. Later, she prowls table to table at a gala charity dinner in the hard-edged, rock-and-rap inflected “El Mal” (“Evil”) whispering the dirty secrets of Mexico’s ruling elite. “Mi Camino” (“My Way”), Jessi’s signature tune, is an almost karaoke number written specifically for Gomez that takes inspiration from the singer’s own public struggles with mental health. Emilia’s songs, performed by Gascón, are more intimate and minimalistic, like “Papa,” a lullaby between Emilia and her son, which is accompanied only by a piano and acoustic guitar.
Given all that, perhaps it’s not surprising that Emilia Pérez started life as an opera. Audiard was inspired by a character in a chapter in Boris Razon’s 2018 novel Écoute (Listen): a narco trafficker who asks a lawyer for help to transition and become a woman. Fascinated by this image of a “hyper-macho, violent character who has a desire for femininity,” Audiard sat down and quickly knocked out 30 pages. “But the surprising thing was, they didn’t come out as a film script, they came out in the form of a libretto for an opera,” he says, “with scenes and tableaux and archetypal characters without any real psychological development.”
Audiard called Clément Ducol, the composer who served as musical director for Leos Carax’s rock opera Annette, and his partner and frequent collaborator, Camille, the French singer-songwriter who composed music for the animated feature The Little Prince (2015) and Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage (2022), but is best-known in the U.S. for her performance of “Le Festin” on the Ratatouille soundtrack. The duo began in early 2020, writing songs and music for Audiard’s new project, unsure of where it was going.
“Jacques didn’t give us any pitch, he came with questions: ‘Should this be an opera, or should it be a musical?’ ” Camille recalls. “Should everybody sing the dialogue, wall to wall, should the songs and the soundtrack be one unified thing, or should there be a score and the songs bring something else? It was questions, questions, questions, and we were there to come up with answers.”
“All we had was a little 30-page short story to work from,” remembers Ducol. “But Jacques wanted to integrate us from the very beginning. He wanted the music to not simply be an illustration of the writing, but to have everything woven together — the score, the songs, the script. Music really was supposed to be part of the architecture and the structure from the beginning.”
Audiard was writing furiously, adding scenes and characters and expanding plot lines, adapting to the music Camille and Ducol were composing, all while trying to find the right form for the story he wanted to tell.
Feeling he needed “to put some reality into this libretto,” Audiard began location scouting in Mexico. For the visuals, he brought on cinematographer Paul Guilhaume. They had first met on the set of French detective series The Bureau, and Guilhaume shot Audiard’s black-and-white feature Paris, 13th District (2021). But it was Guilhaume’s work on music videos for such genre-bending artists as Kanye West and Rosalía that Audiard was interested in for Emilia Pérez — even though the director still wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted.
“At first, Jacques was talking about two projects: One would be a realistic cartel movie, shot on location with a gritty energy — without any music — and another project was an opera onstage, and both projects would have the same name,” says Guilhaume. “But with work, with months of preparation and location scouting in Mexico, the projects merged into one.”
Recalls Audiard: “We had been working with the composers for several months, we had music, lyrics, the script was getting denser, and at a certain point, I said, ‘Is this an opera, or is this a film?’ [The composers] said film right away. Honestly, I think it’s because if they had said opera, it would have meant having to write another two hours of music.”
The musical is one of the few genres Audiard had yet to tackle. The French director prides himself on being a cinematic chameleon, shifting to adapt to whatever form best suits his story. He’s made a prison movie (The Prophet), a romantic drama (Rust and Bone), a refugee thriller (Dheepan), even a Western (The Sisters Brothers). But until Emilia Pérez, Audiard had yet to go full musical.
“My relationship with music in my films has always been tremendously important, however,” he says, noting his decades-long collaboration with composer Alexandre Desplat. “I realized, in a sense, that my whole career has been driven inexorably toward this point, to make a musical. It was right there waiting for me, in plain sight, unseen.”
But during location scouting, Audiard found a gritty reality that felt out of sync with the film that was forming in his mind.
“I wasn’t satisfied with what I was seeing,” he says. “It was as if I was trying to make what I had written fit into reality. But the film was demanding more stylization. So I decided to come back to France and shoot in a studio. It was like I returned to the project’s DNA, back to the stage, back to the opera.”
With Emmanuelle Duplay, production designer on Anatomy of a Fall and 120 BPM, Audiard began to re-create Mexico City — and London, Tel Aviv and Switzerland — on a backlot in the Paris suburb of Bry-sur-Marne, using extensive backdrops with photographic plates shot on location. The production spent 49 days in the studio, with five days of exterior work in Mexico for the final scene, the showdown in the quarry in which narco criminals come to take out Emilia.
At the moment when Audiard decided to shift production to the studio, when he freed Emilia Pérez from the constraints of straight realism, he began to rethink his casting. If Bry-sur-Marne could play Mexico City, why should he only consider Mexican actors for the roles? He began to widen his search, looking for people he hadn’t considered. He flew to New York to meet with a young actress he’d liked in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012) — a young actress the rest of the world knows as billionaire recording artist and star of Only Murders in the Building.
“No, I didn’t know Selena Gomez the music star, but there’s a simple reason for this,” says Audiard. “She’s 30. I’m 72. I’m not on social media, not on Instagram.”
After the meeting, Gomez did a Zoom audition for Audiard. When he asked her to perform one of the film’s musical numbers, she cut loose. “I acted insane in the audition, surrendered and completely gave myself,” Gomez recalled, speaking to THR in Cannes, where Emilia Pérez premiered.
It was weeks before she heard back. Gomez recently shared a video, on Instagram, of the moment she heard she landed the part. “I can’t believe I got the movie! … This is going to be so cool!” she yells, dancing around her house in pajamas and barely holding back tears.
“Jacques, who really didn’t know anything about me, took a chance and believed in me simply based on what I was able to do, and that was really special for me,” says Gomez.
When Saldaña got the call to audition, she didn’t like her chances. The 46-year-old actress started onstage as a classical dancer and — New York-born with Dominican roots — “I was always surrounded by musical theater,” she notes. But Saldaña has built a career playing sci-fi action heroes: Uhuru in Star Trek, Gamora in Guardians of the Galaxy, Neytiri in the Avatar movies. The role of Rita, a self-doubting Mexican prosecutor belting out songs about cartel violence and vaginoplasty, seemed a stretch.
“Sometimes those opportunities are not there, because if you started out doing one thing and people think that you’ve mastered that field, you can’t really jump into another place,” Saldaña told THR in Cannes. “[So] when the audition came in, I took it even though I’m not Mexican and I didn’t know if I could sing or act in the way it required. I didn’t know I could do it.”
Meeting Saldaña via Zoom, says Audiard, was a revelation.
“When I had this woman in front of me, a determined woman in her 40s with a strong past, [I realized] I had gotten the casting wrong. I realized my characters were too young! They needed to be older,” he says, “The character that became Rita was originally written as a man, as in the novel, and was much younger, about 25. But what can a 25-year-old really tell you about life being cruel? At 40, 45, you can really say how hard life can be.”
Audiard had a similar flash meeting with Gascón. Her history — the Madrid-born actress was 46 and a successful telenovela star in Mexico when she transitioned — gave her deep insight into the Emilia character. But Audiard had initially planned to cast two actors, using a cis man and a cis woman to emphasize Emilia’s dramatic shift from pre-to-post transition. Gascón had to convince him she could pull off both roles.
“I sent him videos and photographs of me wearing prosthetics, TikTok videos with filters,” says Gascón, “I changed my voice, doing a deeper register, so he saw I could perform as Manitas, so he would start to see me as both these characters.”
Says Audiard, “I took a while to convince, but Karla showed me she understood a lot more about the character, about the experience, than I could ever hope to, which is a great thing for a director.”
Gascón says she was able to draw on the painful period of her own transition — “I was in a very dark place, and I just wanted to be swallowed up by the Earth and just disappear” — to “feed the darkness” in the Manitas role and to use “the calm and the hope I feel now” for the film’s second half, playing Emilia.
On set, the transformation was physical, with hours of makeup, prosthetics and face tattoos required for Manitas — “Post Malone was my biggest inspiration,” says costume designer Virginie Montel — and an almost equal amount of stylization went into the “effortless elegance” of Emilia. “Jacques’ reference here was Catherine Deneuve,” says Montel, “so you can see how radical a shift it was.”
The transition of Emilia, and Rita and Jessi, is reflected in every aspect of the film’s design. The movie “starts as a dark thriller,” says cinematographer Guilhaume. “There’s no daylight in the first act.” The sun only comes out, notes Montel, “when Emilia wakes up from her operation.”
The dark and broody night scenes — with visuals inspired by Italian photographer Alex Majoli, whose images of street life are lighted with magical contrast and shiny flashes — give way to bright colors and contrasts via lasers and LEDs. Euphoria season two and the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems (2019) were references.
“In the costumes, we added color and shifted to more soft, refined fabrics and designs,” says Montel. As Rita, Saldaña spends the first half of the film “almost invisible [in an] unchanging gray suit,” with extra bulking in the lining to make her movements stiffer, less free. By the “El Mal” sequence in the second half of the film, Rita has ditched the heavy gray wool for a fiery, flexible red pantsuit. She struts and twirls around the room, in control.
“Zoe even takes control of the camera and the light,” says Guilhaume. “We follow her with a crude white spotlight as she goes from table to table, exposing the criminals seated in the room, and she literally dances with the Steadicam operator.”
“[Choreographer] Damien Jalet and I worked for months to get the choreography right,” Saldaña recalls. “We would workshop things during rehearsals and see what Jacques thought when we were on set. Me jumping on the table, for example, was something we had to convince Jacques of — and we did!”
The idea of Emilia Pérez, from start to finish, was bonkers. There were a thousand ways the film could have gone off the rails. But in making his Mexican crime-telenovela-transgender-musical shot in a studio in Paris and starring three non-Mexicans, the septuagenarian Frenchman embraced the idea of transformation and transition, both for himself and his actors. In telling a story about a woman who becomes who she has always been, Audiard gave his cast — who collectively won the best actress honor at Cannes — the opportunity to do the same.
“I have spent a lot of my life trying to break the mold and the perception of who I am,” says Gomez. “[The film] has allowed me to go places I never thought I could go to. I was just willing to go to these places with Jacques and this crew.”
Adds Gascón: “I’ve been reflecting these past few days. What I’ve been thinking about is that beyond what can happen to myself or to my career as an actress, there’s so much more. I am somebody who has spent her whole life being insulted, being rejected and being a target of violence. And now, all of a sudden, I have this opportunity in my hands to be able to change things for the better, to change other people’s lives, as well.”
This story appeared in the Nov. 13 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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