With Festival Hit ‘Emilia Pérez,’ Jacques Audiard Jumped Off a High Diving Board
French auteur Jacques Audiard has been flirting with musical moviemaking ever since “Self-Made Hero” in 1996, when he and composer Alexandre Desplat discussed adapting that film into an opera. But it wasn’t until Audiard read a friend’s novel, “écoute,” that he responded to the idea of a Mexican drug kingpin transitioning to become a woman. In that case the cartel boss was trying to escape from his life, not his gender.
“So the novelist actually introduces this character, but then doesn’t fully develop it,” said Audiard at the Telluride Film Festival, where the Cannes prize-winner “Emilia Pérez” played well at multiple screenings and generated serious Oscar talk going into its September 9 presentation at the Toronto International Festival. “I’m fascinated by the paradox of this idea of the hyper-violent and hyper-masculine world, and the idea of wanting to transition.”
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When Audiard made his Oscar-nominated “A Prophet,” he and co-writer Thomas Bidegain again played with the idea of writing an opera set in the world of drug trafficking. “And so the seed for the idea was there all along,” said Audiard. At first he wrote a 30-page treatment, a sequence of set-piece tableaus. “The characters were archetypal and one dimensional.”
Three years ago, Audiard, who is now 72, planned to start with a musical movie and then turn it into an opera. “And then, well, I loved every minute of making this movie,” he said, “but I it exhausted me. It really did. I’m no longer a spring chicken. At my age, we stop kidding around and we just do what truly matters, what is essential.”
For “Emilia Pérez,” Audiard, Bidegain, and Nicholas Livecchi wrote the story, with 16 songs from writer Camille and composer Clément Ducol, about a violent drug trafficker’s transition to womanhood. The fascinating thing is what happens afterwards. How does her character change? And not change?
Why tell the story as a musical? “The operatic way of thinking led to a certain stylization which is still in the DNA of the project,” said Audiard. The musicals he admired growing up also had a political undertone: “Cabaret” and the Nazis, “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and the Algerian War. “There’s always a social or existential tragedy behind it, which makes it all worthwhile. So you have a country that is falling apart, or you have people that are not well in their own skin. So the musical comedy style helps carry that through musical drama, where singing and dancing do play a role. Because when you write a standard script, you start out, you have a setup, you have a few pages of that, and then the plot moves forward. But when all of a sudden, you have a song that breaks out, within a second, you hit the emotion immediately, you understand the meaning. There’s an efficacy that a standard script would not grant you.”
Clearly. Audiard had fun playing with musical forms, adding split screens and dissolves to his usual cinematic lexicon. But the most challenging aspect of making a movie musical is always the transition from speaking dialogue to breaking into song. You have to signal the audience ahead of time. So Audiard altered the look of the set. “I can do it through lighting, which is a classic technique that you use in theater and in opera as well,” he said. “But I also do it with a style that is used in operas, which is a mix of singing and speaking.”
In terms of form, “‘Emilia Pérez’ is not a movie I could have made 10 years ago,” said Audiard, “because it’s a movie that tackles contemporary issues. And Emilia Pérez transitions, and along with her, the movie transitions. It switches forms. It goes from a narco movie to a tele-novella to a musical. There’s that revolution as well.”
Then Audiard added another degree of difficulty. Because the story is set in Mexico, he shot the movie in Spanish, which he does not speak. “It’s a language that is suited for singing,” he said. “And it really carries the songs well. I am always accompanied by a translator.”Getty Images
That gave Audiard specific parameters for casting. His actors had to be able to both speak and sing Spanish. Selena Gomez, it turns out, doesn’t speak fluent Spanish and had to memorize her lines. “That was a challenge that she pulled off,” said Audiard. Dominican Saldana was fluent, but had to adjust her accent to Mexican, as did Castilian Karla Sofia Gascón. Her lead character was by far the most difficult to cast. “I want to be very clear. If I had not found Karla Sofia, I would have had a hard time making this movie.”
The director also had to recognize that he had written both Saldana’s lawyer and Gascón’s transitioning kingpin as far too young. “That was a mistake, he said. “Then I eventually saw the two [fortyish] actresses, and I met them close to each other in terms of time. And to some extent the two of them told me what the age should be. I needed for people to have history, and when you’re 25 years old, that’s difficult.”
When the time came to ask Gascón to play hyper-masculine Manitas under makeup, Audiard was nervous. She was going to have to pretend to be a man. “I didn’t want to put it her through that,” he said, “as in my own experience, it’s not something I’ve been through being a white male in my late 60s, and I didn’t want to have her endure that. But it turns out that she insisted she wanted to do it, and she did great.”
Gascón was always available to consult on questions about being trans. “She helped me to a great extent in terms of the psychological component,” said Audiard, “but also with practical elements, such as, what is an operation like, and what is the recovery period like? What kind of pain is it and what kind of joy is it as well?”
In the movie, Pérez is more sympathetic as a woman. We like her more, we feel for her, we root for her. But then she reveals herself to not be so sympathetic, to be quite selfish. “The question is to what degree is Manitas still within her?” said Audiard. “She dreams of paying off her debt, of redeeming herself, but the world around her is not going to change. Changing the world is a delusion at some level. Where we do see her selfishness is in her relationship with her ex-wife [Gomez].”
So far, Audiard has not been challenged by the trans community in France, where the movie opened to strong reviews and numbers. Again, Gascón has helped by being active on social media.
If Audiard had the energy he would write the prequel to “Emilia Pérez,” showing what Manitas was like when he was struggling with Emilia Pérez deep inside him. “It would be a movie about the time when Manitas is already Emilia, but they’re also the drug kingpin, okay?”
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