Camerimage: How Did They Shoot That ‘Emilia Pérez’ Final Scene?
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, cinematographer Paul Guilhaume takes us through the climactic shootout in Jacques Audiard’s transgender crime musical Emilia Pérez. (Spoilers follow)
Karla Sofía Gascón as Pérez has been taken hostage by her former wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and her new lover Gustavo (Edgar Ramírez), who don’t know Pérez’s true identity. When Rita (Zoe Saldana) arrives, with armed backup, for the ransom exchange, a shootout ensues and Emilia finally reveals her true identity to Jessi through a song. The scene encapsulates the film’s themes of identity, transformation, and the price of redemption. And, as Guilhaume tells it, it was among the most challenging to shoot. See the acclaimed DP’s first-hand account of the sequence’s production journey below.
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“The final act, where Rita and soldiers mount a night operation to get Emilia, was particularly challenging to set up. Most of the film was shot in a sound stage in France, but here the desert exteriors with actors were shot in a quarry, with background extensions in post. The shots of the car convoy would be 3D generated [by MPC Paris] and the interior of the abandoned restaurant was shot in a studio. There was a challenge to make it hold together and keep a consistent look and energy to the scene.
When we talked about that scene, we imagined a night that would be very different from the bright and contrasting look of the first act. There are no more practical lights here, it’s like the night is eating up the world and everything is matte. Jacques [Audiard] was saying that the ‘light should come from nowhere’ in these scenes. That’s probably the hardest thing to achieve. Outside we built a lighting structure on a 200ft crane, with automatic lights on each corner to precisely control the falloff on the backgrounds. Inside, when they switch off the lights, we used a semi-transparent ceiling to get the feeling of a light without an origin.
My favorite shot from the sequence is when Rita and the soldiers are preparing for the attack. We filmed the whole choreography from outside the room through the windows, with a slow zoom-in combined with a camera movement. The shot starts as a wide of the soldiers preparing their weapons, and this sound is the only one we perceive from their world. The shot ends on Rita’s face, so close to her emotion and anxiety. I like how this continuous zoom creates the feeling that what’s going on can not be stopped. It’s like the drama is unfolding and the ending is written already.
We wanted the film to be a mix of a light musical feeling and dark realism. In a way we wanted to keep the timeless imagery of an opera stage [Emilia Pérez began life as an opera], with the characters standing in dark environments, but including in it modern elements of light, using LED, projections, lasers, and very contemporary light fixtures.
The film’s electric color palette had its cues in the costume and production design and also acts to contrast with scenes set in the dark and strong daylight. For all of the night scenes, I had full reign from Jacques to explore darkness so as long as we saw the actor’s faces. In those dark environments, we focused on deep reds, and some deep greens and tried during the whole film to avoid pastel colors. By the end, in this final sequence, the color palette has blended and become greyer.
We shot on the Sony Venice for its light sensitivity, usually with just a single camera, though occasionally with two. The Blackwing7 lenses from Tribe gave us this perfect balance of style without being overly sharp or digital. In post, our colorist Arthur Paux took time to add in textures which I felt were missing from the studio-shot digital footage.
The scenes were extensively planned — I had a notebook containing a hundred pages of detailed ideas — but we still retained the flexibility to improvise in the moment. I’d describe Jacques’ aesthetic as an aesthetic of movement. If the camera is too static, he won’t be happy, something in the image has to have motion. If not the camera then maybe it’s the light. If it’s not the light, maybe it’s the performance.”
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