Emilia Pérez was unlike any other project cinematographer Paul Guilhaume has ever worked on — because he didn’t rely on any main reference from a past movie to conceptualize ideas while making Netflix’s groundbreaking musical.
“We actually had no references of what the film could do,” Guilhaume tells MovieMaker. “We had small pieces of references, like maybe the color is more like Euphoria Season 2, for example, or maybe the costumes are more like this series of photos from this photographer, or maybe the choreography of that sequence could be more like Crump or something like that.
“But the overall film, for the first time of my life and of our lives, for many of us, it was something we were figuring out little by little, and we had absolutely no main reference. That was probably the hardest thing on this project.”
Emilia Pérez follows the story of Emilia, a transgender woman who leaves her wife, children, and former life as feared drug lord Manitas Del Monte in order to follow her dreams of living her life as a woman.
The main role of Emilia is played by Karla Sofía Gascón, with Zoe Saldaña playing her lawyer, Rita, and Selena Gomez as Emilia’s former wife, Jessi.
What sets the movie apart is that it’s told in the form of a musical, where the characters break into song and dance. But it’s unlike any musical you’ve ever seen before.
Guilhaume met director Jacques Audiard on the set of the show The Bureau, on which Audiard served as a co-writer and director on the last two episodes alongside Guilhaume, who was behind the camera. They worked together again on a Audiard’s 2021 rom-com Paris, 13th District, which had its world premiere at Cannes that year.
Although Guilhaume had worked on music videos before, including Rosalía’s “Saoko” and Kanye West’s “Heaven and Hell”, Emilia Pérez marked Guilhaume’s first time working on a musical.
Also Read: Karla Sofía Gascón on the Many Transitions of Emilia Pérez
“I think it was the first time for almost all of the crew,” he said.
“In the heart of the project, there’s this idea that in every song, the story should be unfolding, as opposed to the kind of musicals we didn’t want to be doing [wherein] the story goes on, and then we get to a certain point of tension, and then you have a song that just summarizes, says the same thing again,” he added.
“The script was written in a way that you actually cannot delete any of this, these songs that you see on screen, because you would miss a very important part of the story and the narration.”
Another element that gives Emilia Pérez a distinct, unique quality is its lighting choices. Because the project was filmed on a soundstage, Guilhaume says the team could play with light as a way to “switch off the world” during scenes where characters have a private moment while being surrounded by other people.
“Jacques at one point just was completely free with the idea that on a certain line, the light can switch off, or the sun can switch on,” he says. “Everything that you can imagine in terms of light can happen in the studio.”
More About Emilia Pérez From Cinematographer Paul Guilhaume
In the scene in which Rita sees Emilia for the first time since her gender affirming surgery, a bustling dinner table suddenly becomes a private spotlight for their intense conversation, leaving the rest of the guests in shadow.
“Suddenly all of the restaurant switches off, and you just have one strong white light bouncing on the table and lighting their faces, and they have this discussion, and there’s this song, and then things start to clear out a little. It starts to be a bit less dangerous for Rita, and the sound and the light comes back. It’s something that we use a lot, the idea that you can actually switch off the world and just focus on two characters for a while and then switch the world back on, in a way. It’s something that you really cannot do like this without the studio.”
Another distinct choice from a cinematography standpoint was the scene in which the camera follows a mysterious bag, the contents of which we will not spoil, as a delivery boy drops it off at Rita and Emilia’s office. But instead of following behind the delivery boy, the camera is rigged to a bicycle, allowing it to keep the bag as the focal point of the frame throughout its journey to the office, underscoring the significance of its contents and setting an ominous tone.
“When we started thinking about the decoupage, the mise en scene, we decided, with Jacques, just to follow, actually, this bag, and have it always on the screen, because if you multiply shots where you follow this bag, you create a tension and you just want to know what’s in it,” he says.
Guilhaume said the decision to not draw on specific references for the film made it hard to explain it to his friends and family, who often made confused faces when he tried to describe what he was working on.
“It’s a project that was very scary for all of us and and for Jacques in the first position, because we knew that there was no crash test for this film,” he says.
Guilhaume says the project was originally conceived as two components: a stage opera and a separate, more dramatic, non-musical film that was was going to be shot in a more documentary style. But then, over time, it morphed into a combination of those two concepts.
“I think at first, when it was a project in Mexico without any music, I could have said it’s like Amores Perros but with this new character in the center. But here it was not the case anymore. So the references were just tiny pieces of references, as if we were building this constellation or this mosaic of references to just actually find the film.”
Emilia Pérez is now streaming on Netflix.
Main Image: Karla Sofía Gascón in Emilia Pérez, courtesy of Netflix
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