Audiard on Mashing Up All the Film’s Genres and Casting Trans in the Lead
This film is about “giving a chance to someone who deserves it,” says Zoe Saldaña who, along with the cast, unveiled their movie at the New York Film Fest.
Emilia Perez is a Spanish-language musical that’s also a family drama that’s also a cartel thriller that’s also a study in Trans identity, seen from the POV of the French auteur, Jacques Audiard.
The distinguished director has previously directed The Beat That My Heart Skipped, A Prophet, Rust and Bone, The Sisters Brothers and Paris, 13th District.
The queer musical features Trans actress Karla Sofia Gascón playing a male drug kingpin in Mexico who enlists Zoe Saldaña’s lawyer Rita to help him transition to a woman named Emilia Pérez. This sets off a chain of events in which Emilia poses as a distant cousin to work her way back stealthily to her wife (Gomez) and children who think their husband/father is dead — with plenty of meditations on class and violence along the way.
The movie has been selected as France’s official submission for the best international Oscar.
Netflix bought North American and U.K. rights at Cannes for release this fall.
The path to the screen wasn’t straightforward. Audiard adapted the screenplay from an opera he wrote based on a novel titled Listen by the French newspaper editor Boris Razon — who only included the Emilia-esque character as a subplot in a very different story.
Pérez director Jacques Audiard says it was a simple decision for him to cast a trans woman in the title role of his award-winning film.
Audiard, whose film picked up a Best Actress award shared between the female cast at Cannes Film Festival this summer, cast Spanish trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón in the role of mobster turned activist.
“It just makes sense to cast a trans woman to portray a trans woman. And the specificity of Karla Sofía is that she transitioned at 46, and that informs her performance. What does it mean to have suffered for 46 years, and then not to suffer any more?”
Of potential controversy arising from the subject matter of the film, Audiard said: “I take a very specific viewpoint here. As an artist I am free to have an opinion and to give my perspective on anything at all, anything that happens in the world. My only red line is, ‘Don’t hurt anyone.'”
Co-starring with Karla Sofía Gascón is Zoe Saldaña as Emilia’s resilient lawyer and consigliere figure, Rita Castro. Audiard said of his mission in making the film which is part musical, part comedy, part crime drama:
“Ultimately, what I wanted to do was to make a film that would make me cry. We live in such dark times that it’s important just to give ourselves the permission to be moved collectively, and to have the opportunity to cry.”
If audiences will be surprised by the mashup, so was at least one of its stars. Gomez said she was terrified auditioning in front of Audiard for the complex part but that the outcome made it worthwhile.
“I don’t know how to explain it but I love real film,” the actress said. “I feel like I’m doing the things I’ve dreamed about since I was a little girl.” Gomez has starred in movies by Harmony Korine and Jim Jarmusch.
You can add another genre to the list too, according to Saldaña: the underdog picture. “The love you feel for characters that are unredeemable,” she said when asked on-stage to describe its appeal. “To give a chance to someone who deserves it.”
Saldaña gave an impassioned speech at the festival premiere — much of it about her co-star. “I got to see this volcanic artist bring together two people at once and I saw this woman dig into the deepest part of herself and then share it with Emilia,” she said of Gascón. “But standing next to that force of nature was sometimes scary,” she added, laughing.
Gascón laughed too. “I have an absolutely wonderful relationship with Zoe,” she said via a translator. “It’s similar to the relationship between Emilia and Rita, which went from fear to love.”
