IBC
Cinematographer Paul Guilhaume explains how a
transgender cartel musical is told with magical realism.
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A musical melodrama about a cartel boss undergoing gender
reassignment surgery has no right to work on paper. Imagine Pedro Almodóvar
directing Sicario as Time Out put it. Yet the audacious staging of Emilia
Pérez by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard’s succeeds. The film has already
won plaudits at Cannes where, unusually, all four of its female leads were
awarded the Best Actress prize while Audiard picked up the Jury prize.
Despite being set in Mexico with a script that is 95%
Spanish language, this French production is the country’s nomination for
International Feature at the Oscars.
The director, who previously made Rust and Bone and The
Prophet, originally wrote the screenplay as an opera libretto in four acts.
When French cinematographer Paul Guilhaume AFC, DOP joined
the project things had changed.
“It was still going to be an opera but Jacques also had a
desire to make a film that was super realistic, shot in Mexico, and without any
music. Over time I saw the two projects converge into one.”
Less than a year before the start of principal photography
the film was set to be an opera but shot on location in Mexico “with a look
very anchored to reality,” says Guilhaume. “During the location scouting in
Mexico we realised that this would not work because the story would actually be
too connected to reality. Jacques sent us an email saying the whole film is
going to be exactly as we planned only it will now all be shot in a studio.”
So that’s what they did, building sets on soundstages
outside Paris for scenes set in Mexico, London., Bangkok and Switzerland and
shooting for 49 days there with five days of exterior work in Mexico.
Emilia Pérez (played by Mexican actor Karla Sofía Gascón) is
the rebirthed character of Mexican drug lord Manitas, introduced as a deeply
unsavoury figure who makes frustrated but ambitious criminal lawyer Rita (Zoe
Saldaña) an offer she can’t refuse.
“To me the film is almost like a chimera,” says Guilhaume,
“a mix of musical and drama elements.”
It is the fusion of song and dance with a story about
identity, loneliness, misogeny and the 60,000 people who have
been ‘disappeared’ in Mexico’s drug wars which renders the film
almost unclassifiable.
“Visually, it’s very stylised on the one hand, but with much
grittier moments on the other. There was a constant ‘to and fro’ between the
two concepts. We had no reference to work with, since no film had attempted
something like this before. So we made lots of tests, really trying to
understand what we are doing.”
The visual language borrows from classic noir films, to more
modern films like Uncut Gems but also from pop culture references and
music videos. Guilhaume was also inspired by the way the film’s choreographer
Damien Jalet had used bright white lights thrown into a dark space to create
the imagery in his own shows.
“The important thing for Jacques was that the music should
not come after the drama as an illustration of what just happened but that the
drama would happen inside the music,” Guilhaume says. “He was very clear that
he wanted the audience to still have something to learn as the song is going
on.”
“My starting point was the emotional message of each song.
Is it an intimate scene or one of anger? What’s the energy we are conveying?
Perhaps it’s a confession, or a plea for understanding, or about being a
prisoner. Each song had to be treated differently based on how it progressed
the story.”
The first scene featuring Rita in a Mexico City street
market soon erupts into full song and dance (of the song ‘Alegato’). It was the
first scene they shot and it became a test for how they would shoot the rest of
the film’s musical numbers.
“We spent three weeks on these first three minutes so that
it was both chaotic and extremely accurate. It also helped introduce a specific
language for the film where the dance numbers blend in with the characters’
body language, just as the songs blend in with the dialogue.”
After initially imagining the market street to be empty and
operatic with a black background heightening the focus on Rita, tests showed
that the approach wasn’t focussed enough on the story.
“We reworked it to include many more elements such as market
stores and crowds of extras and within that to have Zoe writing her plea for
the defence. The first scene creates this dynamic between the film’s different
artforms and gave it a sense of urgency and intensity.”
This scene and much of the rest of the film was shot against
blue screen with backgrounds replaced by 3D generated sets in post.
A specific example is the shot near the beginning of the
film showing Rita waiting in front of a newspaper shop when she gets abducted.
The backdrop here including of the courthouse was a 3D replacement. The street
market scene was augmented with trees, telephone cables, and more shops.
The film’s climactic gun fight in the desert was shot at
night in a quarry with the foreground dressed and backgrounds replaced in post.
Other scenes featured backgrounds of photographic plates
shot on location in Mexico. While there a practical reasons for extensive
bluescreen (such as giving the filmmakers more control) the result also evokes
a dreamlike quality in keeping with the film’s hybrid fantasy and reality.
“The first act of the movie happens entirely at night so we
knew we would explore darkness, but it had to stay shiny and bright in some
elements of the frame. That could be elements in the set design, like the giant
TV screens behind Zoe at the karaoke bar.”
Another constant inspiration for Guilhaume was the Italian
photographer Alex Majoli, whose images of realistic scenes are lit with magical
contrast and shiny flashes.
“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, 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 colour palette had its cues in the
costume and production design and also acts to contrast with scenes set in the
dark and strong daylight.
“The first act happens at night and 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, some deep greens and tried during
the whole film to avoid pastel colours. In the second act there is more
daylight. Everything had to be a bit more joyful as the story unfolds. By the
end, the colour palette has blended and become greyer.”
Music video elements
Audiard had met Guilhaume on the set of French detective
series The Bureau and invited him to shoot the 2021 feature Paris,
13th District. However, it was Guilhaume’s music promo work for artists
including Rosalia, Beabadoobee and Kanye West that also inspired the look of
two showstopping numbers in Emilia Perez, one at a fundraising gala and
another in the courthouse.
“Jacques wanted the film to be infused by something of the
music video world but we had to be careful not to make a big music video.”
Audiard wanted to bring on board Steadicam operator Sacha
Naceri who shoots a lot of music videos to help make the camerawork integral to
the choreography.
“I’d describe Jacques’ aesthetic is an aesthetic of
movement. He applies that to every craft in a film. In the cinematography it's
obvious. 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 of the dancers.
“You could extend this to music or editing to the general
rhythm of the film and even to the script - you always have something going in
motion.”
Typically, movie musicals play prerecorded tracks as the
musical sequences are filmed, with the actors lip-syncing to their own vocals.
Audiard ultimately became more interested in having the actors perform live on
the set. What we hear in the film is a combination of original recordings with
on set performances.
For all that the scenes were extensively planned (Guilhaume
has a notebook containing a hundred pages of detailed ideas) they retained
flexibility to improvise in the moment.
“We always tried to have something that we called an ‘eye
image,” he says. “It didn’t have to be for the whole mise-en-scène, the whole
blocking of the scene. It was just an image that we keep with us in our memory
after the sequence. It could be a particular lighting design or could be a car
in flames. Sometimes we had a very clear idea of the blocking. Very often we’d
throw everything out when the actors arrived on set and gave us something new
but we always knew what we were looking for.”
Camera choice
When the film was still envisioned as an opera shot against
a black background, Guilhaume planned to shoot anamorphic to accentuate
lighting. After tests he chose Blackwing7 lenses from Tribe which are marketed
as able to produce images of “musical fidelity…” that can be tuned “identical
to how EQ adjustment is used in music production… across the audio frequency
spectrum.”
“Jacques loved the simplicity that they convey, but also
that it's not too digital and not too sharp,” the DP says “It was a good
balance between style and an image that is not overly visible.”
Sony Venice was selected for its light sensitivity, notably the
day exteriors of a snowstorm in Lausanne filmed in the studio which had huge
ceiling. “Daylighting a studio is extremely expensive because you have to
reproduce the whole sky. We knew we needed a camera that would be sensitive.”
Mostly they shot single camera, occasionally with another,
which was also a Venice. Colourist Arthur Paux took time to add in textures
which Guilhaume felt was missing from rushes shot in a studio on digital video.
Netflix will stream the film following a theatrical release
in October.
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