‘Emilia Pérez’ cinematographer Paul Guilhaume on finding ‘one grammar’ for the musical crime drama
“Emilia Pérez,” from from French writer-director Jacques Audiard, is a Spanish-language musical crime drama about a Mexican cartel boss seeking gender-affirming surgery. But it didn’t start out this way. When cinematographer Paul Guilhaume first read the script, it wasn’t a musical yet but rather two ideas.
“One was the story of Emilia Pérez but Jacques was talking about handheld film, maybe ‘Amores Perros’ vibe, very gritty and realistic,” Guilhaume tells Gold Derby during our Meet the Experts: Film Cinematography panel. “Another project was actually how he wrote the story. He wrote it like an opera, thinking of a stage with singers and five acts. Those two projects were evolving together between two parallel dimensions. And one day, I just received a call announcing that it would only be one film, it would be a musical, and he had a lot of things yet to be discovered at this time.”
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“Emilia Pérez” 2.0 meant figuring out how the two ideas could coexist as one. The original project was going to be shot on location in Mexico, where Guilhaume had already done location scouting the year prior. The team returned for another year to prep for the musical version when they got a message from Audiard. “[It was] ‘OK, we are getting it wrong. It shouldn’t be a realistic musical. It should be kind of off the ground, not too realistic. It should be shot in a studio on a soundstage, and there’ll be tons of blue screens and the film is going to be this piece that’s not just takes also from the opera in its form and the use of black background sometimes and less realistic sets,'” Guilhaume recalls.
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Some exteriors were filmed in Mexico, including the final sequence, but the majority of “Emilia Pérez” was filmed on soundstages in Paris doubling for such locations as Mexico, London, and Bangkok. The sets allowed the team to control the environment in a genre-defying film that could be highly stylized and fantastical one minute but gritty and grounded the next. To ensure that the film only has “one grammar,” Guilhaume had a North Star. “The way we shot sequences had to be driven more by the emotion of the sequences more than the technique we used to capture the scene,” he says. “And we were always [trying] to forget the technicality of each sequence and focus on what we really wanted to tell in each sequence.”
Like the film itself, the musical performances also volleyed between realistic and fantastical. Some songs, like “Papa” by Karla Sofía Gascón, are performed as diegetic speak-sing dialogue. Zoe Salda?a’s two big numbers, “Alegato,” which opens the film, and “El Mal” are true musical sequences where “you just leave reality for a while.”
“‘El Alegato,’ where she writes the plea that she will actually give to her boss in the beginning of the film, is in a market that’s building itself around her,” Guilhaume notes. “‘El Mal’ — she’s at a fundraising gala and suddenly she expresses what she feels, but you’re more like in her head. She, in this moment, takes control of everything in the film. She takes control of the camera movements, she takes control of the lights, and she’s pointing to the people where the lights should just go and reveal the image.”
And that’s also what Audiard did on set, thanks to the soundstages. “We also explore the same idea of isolating a character and just a face in the image, but we did it onstage with the use of practicals and lightings,” Guilhaume says. “In the studio, we were able to suddenly switch off the sun in the sky and just keep one small light bouncing on the table to light the face of two actresses who are talking together. We did that several times. As soon as Jacques understood that, we decided with the gaffer, Thomas Garreau, to only use dimmable lights in the whole film [and] everything’s controlled by a console. At one point, Jacques realized he can say, ‘On this line, everything switch off.'”
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