Paul Guilhaume, AFC, looks back at the technical challenges of shooting Jacques Audiard’s "Emilia Perez"

Overqualified and overexploited, Rita uses her talents as a lawyer to work for a big firm more interested in laundering criminals than serving justice. But an unexpected way out opens up for her : helping cartel leader Manitas retire and carry out the plan he’s been secretly refining for years : to finally become the woman he’s always dreamed of being.

How did you approach a project like this as a cinematographer ?

Paul Guilhaume : When I first read the script, it wasn’t really a musical yet. At the time, Jacques was still pondering many aspects of the final project... He was hesitating, for example, between a filmed opera or a film with a musical dimension... but without knowing exactly what kind yet. Initially the project was supposed to be filmed entirely in Mexico, on location, which seemed the most obvious when reading the script. Gradually, something started to take shape, as we scouted out locations (we went to Mexico four times !), with Jacques eliminating more and more options during this preparation phase. Eventually, he finally told us that the film would not be shot there and that we were going for something much closer to opera, in a studio. Only a few documentary-style shots filmed on location would anchor the film in reality. In total, there were 45 days of studio work in Paris, involving hundreds of technicians, and then 10 days in Mexico City (where we shot in an almost documentary style).

What did you think of this format ?

PG : Making this film was a balancing act. Not going too far into burlesque, staying in the drama, without being too serious... The recipe was found through trial and error, through collective imaginative efforts. At one point during preparation, we considered filming everything against a black background, building the set only around the space where the actors would be standing : a Dogville with hyper-realistic foregrounds. For a street in Mexico City, we could have only created the asphalt and its cracks, and like in opera, the backgrounds would disappear into theatrical darkness... But we tested this option in the studio with the camera, lighting and actors, and it was a real disappointment. The result was dry, it looked like a recording.
It was the first time in my career that such concrete tests completely called into question the aesthetic path we had envisaged. Even when playing with spotlights to enhance the brilliance, the light simply didn’t adhere to anything, and would fall on the ground without having encountered anything in its path... That’s when we understood we wanted a bright, colourful film. In the end, we decided to recreate the sets with a sort of dreamlike realism. This new style was led by set designer Emmanuelle Duplay, artistic director Virginie Montel, and VFX supervisor Cédric Fayolle. We shot on sets built with 3D extensions. The film has 500 effects shots : set extensions, blue screens, full 3D, etc.

Did shooting so many very different scenes, all in the studio, change your working methods ?

PG : What’s certain is that I really found myself in a situation where you have to rely on the talent of others. It really wasn’t the kind of film where you can more or less control everything ! On Nicolas Loir’s advice, AFC, I called on gaffer Thomas Garreau, who involved the company Alien, the studio for light pre-visualizations. We imported 3D models of some sets into a lighting software, "Depence 3", and observed the different lighting design options. For instance, for the courtroom set, only two walls were built (the black backgrounds didn’t entirely disappear from the film). Here, the idea was not to build a ceiling, but to make it exist through light, creating a geometric shape of LED ceiling lights. Working with the software immediately gave us an idea of the final look, the number of projectors, the size of the light bridges, and the means to implement it. "Depence 3" is very powerful and the pre-visualization looks very close to the final result.

How did Jacques Audiard operate on this film ?

PG : He’s someone who tries to find a strong image for each sequence, the one that will remain in the viewer’s memory. The question for the cinematographer is always : how do we enter the sequence, what unique image do we remember, how do we exit the sequence ?
This approach gives him, I believe, a great formal strength, whether in image or sound, as he applies this rule to everything. It’s also a way for him to always propose a strong idea without locking things into a rigid script breakdown, leaving space for accidents and improvisation. Jacques enthusiastically embraced the possibilities offered by Alien’s Grandma2 lighting console. When he understood that we could make the light evolve during the takes on all sets, he integrated it into his working methods. In this perspective of ever-changing light, Thomas Garreau used only tungsten sources for the suns (the celestial vaults were LED) : the light intensity could always vary during the shot... Shifting from a realistic lighting to a white light shower during a dialogue. More generally, we ended up spending our time programming light variations in almost every scene, using these movements to pace the story.

Yes, for instance, that sunrise in Emilia’s kitchen in the second part of the film...

PG : In this sequence, Jacques’ initial idea was to have the sun rise in fast motion, but with the actors moving at normal speed. We used a sun (a 10kW tungsten) on a crane, combined with enormous, invisible special effects work to superimpose a view of Mexico City’s cable cars that we would later shoot there. This place was a reproduction in Bry-sur-Marne of one of the natural sets we’d found in Mexico during our location scouting...
For American screenwriters, this moment in the film is a scene that marks the end of the second act. A moment when nothing can get better, so it can only get worse.
It’s also the last scene of pure happiness for Emilia’s character, before the shadow arrives and plunges the story back into the darkness. This transition is symmetrical with the one at the end of the first act of the film : the entire first part of the story takes place at night, daylight only appearing after Emilia’s transition.

How did you organize things ? Did you start with simpler sequences ?

PG : Shooting was mainly organized according to technical constraints. The major studios are in high demand in France. The film’s opening set, a street and market in Mexico City, was built on a 2,000 m² set with lots of blue screen backgrounds. This meant losing about ten metres per blue background on the total surface each time. Since the Montjoie set was only available at the beginning of our shoot, we had to start with the pleading scene which takes place in the street, one of the most complex in the film to implement. It was daring, but we simply had no choice. We filmed the dance in a choreography of mobile market stalls, all equipped with practical lights (from real Mexican markets, fluorescent tubes, energy-saving twist lamps) and independently controlled at the console to, once again, vary the light in sync with the movements.

And the Bangkok sequence really makes an impression on the viewer, with its musical comedy feel, expressed for the first time in the story...

PG : This scene aligns most closely with what one might imagine of the classic musical comedy codes. A white set, a major key song, lively choreography and a Busby Berkeley-style top shot... But it’s ultimately a scene that remains on the fringe of the film. Many of the scenes are dark, and the plan was to use dance and song to keep the narrative evolving. This is the case with the song "Papa", where we directly touch on the characters’ intimacy, playing out the second act’s stakes : "Will Émilia Perez’s true identity finally be revealed ?

And the rhythm..., is that crucial for a film like this ?

PG : Yes. The film is a score with constantly changing rhythms, with breaks and accelerations. That’s also what Damien Jalet’s choreographies bring. We were filming dance, but we wanted to avoid the Broadway Music Hall style, with the inevitable wide crane movement that starts on a crowd dancing and ends in a close-up of a face... So, most of the musical scenes are shot with a Steadicam or handheld, merging with the choreography and immersing in the movement. Steadicamer and operator Sacha Naceri brought his extensive music video experience to the project. The central dance sequence of the song "El Mal" was mostly his work.
Jacques Audiard is a filmmaker of movement. Whether for the camera, the light, the acting or even the sound... It’s when things start moving on the scene’s scale that he finds what he’s looking for. As long as things remain too static or ‘tight’, as he likes to say on set, he’s not satisfied.

We were talking earlier about the light changes during takes, and there’s also a very theatrical one in the restaurant scene, supposedly set in London.

PG : Actually, there are two important tipping points in the story that we deliberately chose to highlight visually by using such a change in lighting. This sequence, set in London, around a table, where the restaurant’s light suddenly gives way to a powerful spotlight that bounces off the tablecloth, illuminating only the two actresses’ faces. The ambient sound fades in parallel, and the other actors are reduced to mere shadows. The same principle is applied earlier in the film, when Manitas proposes a deal to Rita inside the military truck that serves as his headquarters. In the restaurant scene, we were in a very large set, making it easy to suddenly make the walls disappear into darkness.
Conversely, in the truck set, it was really cramped, and we had to replace it with a second set where we removed the walls. When the lights went out, we transition to a 400 square metre stage where all the objects were suspended in the air. Only the floor, a table and the set light remain.

Did you shoot with multiple cameras ?

PG : The film was shot with two cameras, especially in shot-reverse shot situations. But most of the time we avoided using two cameras simultaneously. You almost always end up with one camera in the right place and the second camera wherever it can, leading to compromises on the choice of focal length. A B crew often went to the adjacent set to shoot additional shots which were decided on the day before.
Embarking on a musical with 55 shooting days and about ten musical numbers, the second camera became essential due to a lack of time. For example, if we draw a parallel with music videos, for Saoko, by the singer Rosalia, which we shot with Sacha Naceri in Ukraine in 2021, three days of work were needed to capture the choreography. On Emilia Perez, more than once we had to shoot two musical sequences and one dramatic scene in the same day... We needed tools to manage that.

Why Full Frame ?

PG : It all started with the sensitivity of the Sony Venice. We had 45 studio days with daytime settings over thousands of square metres, which mechanically requires large quantities of light. Shooting at 2500 ISO instead of 1200 sometimes meant halving the cost of lighting. Full Frame 8K also allowed Juliette Welfling, the editor, to reframe, pan and scan or digitally zoom to pace the cuts. She doesn’t consider herself confined by the frame or the duration, frequently using varispeed.

What about the focal lengths ?

PG : I dream of making a film with a single focal length, maybe a 27mm... But the project didn’t lend itself to that at all... Emilia is a hybrid film ; sometimes we wanted to be very close to the actors, and sometimes we wanted to see them from a great distance. Filming a choreography with a 12mm on a Steadicam and another with a 500mm. The 12mm Signature Prime and its incredible rectilinearity was used in the Bangkok clinic sequence, to achieve the famous top shot.
We literally glued the camera to the top of the studio to get the widest possible shot on the ground, the battery actually touching the ceiling of the tallest studio in Bry-sur-Marne. Conversely, at the other end of the focal length scale, some shots were taken at 400mm with a doubler (making it an 800mm). In between, the 37mm and 57mm became our main focal lengths for medium and close-up shots. The film was shot with the Tribe 7 ’T-Tuned’ series to soften the extreme precision of the Sony Venice sensor, for its lively but controllable flares, unless pointed directly at a light source. In my kit, I had a 57mm ’X-Tuned’, much more sensitive to flares. It was kind of like a katana sword, adding effect when we lacked it.
The Tribe lens texture is both soft in definition and glossy. The make-up team worked around this quest for brilliance to find the right texture for the skin. For this, I love the final close-up on Emilia’s face at the end of the film - the patina and sweat they achieved remind me of faces in western movies.
The question of the texture also guided our work with Arthur Paux, the colourist who has worked on many music videos. He gave the image its substance. A combination of settings on micro-gloss, textures and local contrasts associated with the LUT. We kept noticing that, while definition is slightly reduced, the glossiness can be enhanced itself, as it gives an impression of... definition.

(Interview conducted by François Reumont for the AFC, and translated from French bt Chloé Finch)

Emilia Perez
Director : Jacques Audiard
Director of photography : Paul Guilhaume, AFC
Set designer : Emmanuelle Duplay
Art Direction and Costumes : Virginie Montel
Sound : Erwan Kerzanet
Editing : Juliette Welfing
Music : Camille and Clément Ducol