The Hollywood Reporter's Patrick Brzeski sat down with Cinematographer Paul Guilhaume to discuss 'Emilia Pérez' in a THR Q&A powered by Vision Media.
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00:00Welcome to The Hollywood Reporter Presents.
00:07I'm here with Paul Guillaume, the cinematographer behind Jacques Audiard's acclaimed genre-defying
00:14cartel musical, Amelia Perez.
00:17Thank you for being with us, Paul.
00:18Thank you for having me.
00:20So this film tells the story of a ruthless Mexican cartel boss who dreams of transitioning
00:26into a woman and hires a savvy lawyer, played by Zoe Saldana, to facilitate the details
00:32of her journey.
00:34The story was very loosely inspired by a single chapter in Boris Razone's 2018 novel, Écoute,
00:42and I understand it went through a lot of changes during the development process.
00:46So could you take us back to the beginning, as you first came to the project, the conversations
00:52you had?
00:53So I first heard of the project during the first COVID, actually.
00:57I remember having a shoot that was cancelled and reading very, very early versions of the
01:05film.
01:06And at this time, Jacques was already working on the music with Camille and Clément Ducolle
01:14on an opera that was a five acts opera on stage.
01:19And he was developing, on the same time, a realistic cartel movie with the exact same
01:28story, but not on an opera, in location in Mexico with a very gritty style already attached
01:36to it.
01:37And it took a lot of time for the two projects to merge together into one and make Amelia
01:44Perez.
01:46So he was originally envisioning it as two completely distinct projects.
01:50Yes.
01:51And I think I didn't even know myself, which one would I be shooting, both, or was it one
01:57or the others?
01:58It was like the process.
02:02Maybe it was already there, what would happen, this merger of the two projects.
02:07But at this time, it was like that.
02:11Wow, amazing.
02:14And can you share a bit about your involvement, about how they came together?
02:18What did Jacques tell you about his visual intentions?
02:22So when we started to really build a team and imagine shooting dates and everything,
02:30we were supposed to shoot in Mexico.
02:32So we went there several times.
02:35I think I spent like four months there on several occasions.
02:40And we scouted a lot of sets and imagined a lot of possibilities for the film.
02:47And it was not clear how much the dance, the choreography would be present or anything,
02:56but we were building it anyway.
02:59And after what was supposed to be the last location scouting, I remember that was probably
03:05June, July, the summer passed.
03:08And at the end of the summer, we received this message from Jacques, addressed to all
03:13of his teams, saying that the movie was getting in a direction that was probably too real
03:24or too serious or even, yeah, too seriously intricated in reality.
03:33And he wanted to get away from that and do that film that maybe talks about very serious
03:39things, but to add an element of lightness in the treatment and in the process of doing
03:46it.
03:47So the starting point from there was that, OK, let's forget everything we have now and
03:53let's do the film in the studio.
03:55And let's use all of the location scoutings we've done as a starting point.
04:03Between none of the aesthetic and the aesthetic of the studio, probably with a lot of black
04:08backgrounds, but we didn't know yet for sure.
04:12So at one point, I remember it was extensive meetings at Jacques' place.
04:19We had this idea of maybe built sets around the actors, maybe, let's say, on a 10 meters
04:26perimeter that would be ultra realistic.
04:29So let's say we do a pavement with cracks and little flowers in the cracks, but as soon
04:36as it goes away from the center of the scene, it would just fade to black around them.
04:43We did some tests.
04:44I think the idea was beautiful.
04:46I was really loving this idea, but the tests actually were taking us so much away from
04:54the story and probably from the emotion of just seeing the story unfold in front of your
05:00eyes that suddenly it was not there.
05:05We realized it was a mistake to do it so extremely strange, detailed and realistic.
05:14Yes.
05:15No, I mean, the black background.
05:16With the fully black background.
05:17Yes.
05:18It was creating something that was too extreme.
05:22So we kept on that aesthetic, but made it involved, including now a lot of blue screens
05:30and much more construction than we should have planned.
05:34And that actually created the final Emilia Pérez look.
05:37Yeah, it's such a unique look.
05:40Could you share?
05:41Did you have references or inspirations, touch points from art history, cinema, music videos,
05:49perhaps?
05:50Yes.
05:52So the film, it was strange because we didn't have a unique reference.
05:56Sometimes, very often, when you make a film, you're like, OK, it's, I don't know, a sicario,
06:03but it was not the case here.
06:05It was so different with the music, the choreography, the kind of, the genre of the film that was
06:12not even really something we could say, this is this genre of film.
06:18We had references for each of the aspects of the film, so it was more like a combination
06:24of references and backgrounds from all of us that combined.
06:29I know as a cinematographer before every project, I look at No Country for Old Men, for example.
06:36It's like the movie I see on the day before the shoot, just to have a reminder of what
06:41is what is in a way perfect to my eyes.
06:46But the film is not that.
06:48It's not No Country for Old Men.
06:49It's like Jacques has an aesthetic of movement.
06:54He uses a lot of long lenses, but not only.
06:58There is something that comes from my collaborations with him, because now it's three projects
07:02we did together.
07:05For him, he has visual ideas, very strong ones, but it always has to be in a motion
07:13somehow.
07:14So it can be either a hand in front of the lens or a light that changes during the take,
07:21that would be temporal change, or it would be a camera movement if the scene is to fix.
07:27For example, he would always film seated people, handheld, and maybe the opposite, walking
07:32people with a long lens on a tripod.
07:35So he always tries to bring movement and to keep the film in a kind of motion.
07:41And that's really in this way the etymology of cinematography.
07:46It's like telling a story through movement.
07:49And that's really what he does.
07:52And this is continued in the editing.
07:54There is something with Juliette's cut that very subtly just makes your eyes travel from
08:02one part of the frame to the other, and then take your attention point back in the cut
08:07to another place.
08:08But it's always like a smooth movement that she creates, and it creates this kind of energy
08:13of continuous movement and something unfolding in front of you that's very fluid, actually.
08:22So that's, I think, it's hard to define Jacques' style, maybe.
08:29But to me, that's the key, the aesthetic of movement.
08:32As you were describing that, I began picturing the first song sequence.
08:39There's so much going on in that scene.
08:41La Legato.
08:42Yeah.
08:43Yeah.
08:44And it really announces the film as something you've never seen before.
08:48Can you talk a little bit about the creation of that first piece?
08:51Yes.
08:52So in that sequence, we wanted to have Rita, played by Zoe Saldana, in her everyday life
08:59where you can realize that she has a very demanding job.
09:03She did a lot of studies, she's brilliant, but she's not appreciated for that enough.
09:13She doesn't have the lifestyle she would deserve, but she's fighting.
09:20So in this scene, she's writing the plea for her boss that he will just appropriate on
09:26the next scene.
09:27And she's just starting to build something in her head.
09:30And the idea was, OK, we have to be in the motion of the process of imagining things.
09:37And we knew we wanted her to start in an empty street with the world, with the actual people
09:46from the city arriving around her and kind of bringing a layer of politics maybe to what
09:54she does.
09:55So the street starts empty and then suddenly the people arrive and a market is building
10:00itself around her.
10:02All the market stalls were on wheels.
10:05And we had to shoot this film first thing on the shoot.
10:10It was one of the most complicated, but it was a scheduled thing with the studios.
10:15It was the only time the big studio was available.
10:19So we built the street.
10:20We knew that for the length of the scene, we would have to go four times back and forth
10:26in the street with different combinations of the markets.
10:32And we knew also, and that's part of Jacques' style, we didn't want it to look maybe to
10:39studio or to like a musical in a bright and shiny way.
10:44So we decided, and that was very scary for us, but to light only with practical lights.
10:52So actually all of the lights come either from a street lamp or, and mainly from the
11:00market stalls, little lights, low energy lights or neon lights or fluorescent lightings.
11:08And all of these market stalls was controlled by Wi-Fi and auto-powered by a battery and
11:16controlled on a console.
11:18So the camera could do 360s around her, go into the crowd and the lights behind the camera
11:24would just switch off for a moment and go back on as the camera was turning around her.
11:29So it was like, but we had the chance for this scene to have a very precise choreography
11:34and to have almost a proposition of what scale of shots and from where approximately to be
11:43from the choreographer who, we discussed it, we did tests, we filmed with actress and extras
11:51and dancers.
11:52Weeks before the shoot, we actually pre-edited the sequence.
11:55But without all the elements of the lighting, obviously, or the set, but just the bones
12:01of the sequence were already edited when we started that.
12:05And was there any room left for improvisation or is it so complex that everything had to be?
12:10So yes, on this scene, you have this main steadicam movements that are mostly planned
12:15in advance.
12:16And there is also all of the life moments where she's eating at this small restaurant
12:23in the market.
12:24She's talking to her friend or she is interacting with the people around her.
12:32That's something we shot handheld on a much more gritty way.
12:36And we wanted the camera to be kind of immersed in the world as much as we could.
12:44Yes.
12:45Oh, I see.
12:48So I'd love to hear a bit about the color and the lighting and how it relates thematically
12:53to Amelia's journey.
12:55Because at the beginning of the film, it's all very dark and murky, although there's
12:59some kind of electronic elements threaded through the look.
13:03And then obviously, after she transitions, the light emerges.
13:11So yeah, what she says is almost included in the script.
13:15So it was kind of the natural travel in the making of the history.
13:25You start at night in a very urban night, or at least when it's not urban, when it's
13:30a desert, you have this light from the cars or light from small fixtures or from LEDs
13:38or screens in the background.
13:40There's always something very, yeah, it's only practicals and it's modern practicals.
13:47And it creates, when you have the practicals in the shot, it creates an image that's naturally
13:53very shiny.
13:55If you add some highlights in the frame, suddenly the blacks around the highlights seem much
14:03more black and it creates something that Jacques actually really likes.
14:08He wants a shiny image.
14:11And it's very rare as a cinematographer to read a script and the first act is all happening
14:15by night.
14:16It's a blessing because Jacques was really happy to go deep into the darkness of the
14:26first act because it would only make more impactful the moment where the light arrives
14:32in the story.
14:33And that's something, as soon as we could just see the shape of the face or it was okay,
14:40we didn't have to, yeah, we could be very extreme in that first act.
14:47Then you have this much more, let's say, happy intermediate in the middle of the story.
14:54And then there's a last act of the film that's happening by night again.
14:59But that's an extremely different light.
15:03It's a night that's much more matte as opposed to shiny and contrasty.
15:09And that's a night that maybe would resemble the ones from probably Zero Dark Thirty or
15:17even the nights that we saw recently on Nope.
15:20It's a night where you don't have any highlights.
15:22You're exploring the bottom 20% of the signal and the feeling is very different.
15:28It's much more grayish.
15:29It's like you have to scrutinize just to be sure that you saw something.
15:35So the real question in the grading for this last act where in the desert you don't have
15:42any highlights anymore was, okay, how dark do we go?
15:46How can we avoid to be gray?
15:49Because if you look at especially a cinema screen for a long time, even if it's a black
15:54screen after 30 seconds, you perceive it gray and not black anymore.
15:59So the only way to perceive it black anymore is either to have the highlights inside the
16:04frame or to have the highlights in between the frames.
16:07And the strategy there was to rhythm the sequence where you don't have any highlights anymore
16:13in the frame with explosions, night vision googles, or sometimes when you have a practical
16:20just integrate it in the frame just to reset the eye and you can go back.
16:27You fill the tank for another 30 seconds of almost pure darkness.
16:32Interesting.
16:34And thematically, what's your interpretation of what that light means about that stage
16:38in Amelia's journey?
16:41So that's really the last moment.
16:43I think it's almost the defeat of her hope at this time, the hope that she could live
16:50the life she wanted.
16:51And it's a pretty dark ending.
16:55There is a scene just after this final act that just opens up again to hope.
17:02But this moment, I remember Jacques, because there is a miracle in the film.
17:07I think it's something very subtle in the end now, but Amelia is woken up as she passed
17:14or died maybe at this very short moment.
17:17It's not a spoiler, but at the moment she's not there anymore in a way.
17:21And the smoke from the guns are attracted back inside the restaurant where she's held
17:28captive and close to her nose and she wakes up again.
17:33And that's a moment, a whole moment, even the scenes just before and after.
17:41Jacques wanted the light at this moment to come from nowhere.
17:43That was his world.
17:45Because as a cinematographer, you always need to have a story for a light you place.
17:51It's almost impossible to light a face if you are not having in your, even in the back
17:58of your head, maybe it's a small lantern, maybe it's a tiny window or a huge window.
18:05You have to have a scenario for the light always in order to be able to imagine something.
18:11And at this moment of the story, for the first time of my life, the answer was no, no, there
18:16is no scenario of the light.
18:17The light comes from nowhere.
18:21So what we did was that this restaurant has a lot of practicals for the first part of
18:28the scene before Jessie switches off the lights.
18:31And at one point the lights are switched off and there is an actually transparent ceiling
18:38that was built by our department for us to light it from above.
18:42It's almost like the light from the stars or the moon, but putting a very soft and without
18:50any shadow, very low ambient light to the scene.
18:57And somehow it looks maybe like in 3D, when you build a 3D world, you know, before you
19:02add the light sources, you have a kind of, to work, the 3D artists use a kind of light
19:09that comes from everywhere.
19:11So that may be the answer to a light that comes from nowhere.
19:14It was a light that comes from everywhere, but that's very, very dimmed down.
19:17Right.
19:18Yeah.
19:19It almost felt like everything was slightly glowing, like an ember or something.
19:24Fantastic.
19:26So you have a background in music videos.
19:30That's pretty recent.
19:31Yes.
19:32Yeah.
19:33Okay.
19:34Well, you shot videos for Kanye West and Rosalia, very high profile music videos.
19:39Was that a background that you could leverage for this project?
19:42It's natural.
19:43Yeah, I think it shot it.
19:44So we had been working together with Jacques, but I think it's videos that he mentioned
19:49very early in the process when he sent me the film.
19:52He wanted to do something that would maybe sometimes go a little off the tracks of cinema
19:59and of musical just to, but the answer is not easy because there's not only one answer.
20:08In the film, you have musical moments that are treated like a normal moment of the story.
20:16Some scenes are very, it's a kid recognizing the smell of a parent and that's just, you
20:24know, the camera is there, it's just there to see the face and the emotion of the actors.
20:29And some scenes are much more epic in the filmmaking and the camera work and the lighting
20:37work because suddenly it's moments where we know that we want to give a new impulsion
20:41to the story.
20:42So for this moment, I actually built a team that I worked with a steadicam operator, Sacha
20:53Nasseri, which was only shooting his second feature ever on this film.
20:58But he's like a superstar of music video.
21:03And there's a sequence around the middle of the film where Zoe Saldana is singing on
21:10a charity gala.
21:12And that sequence, we had the visual idea that was, it's a gala, the walls are completely
21:20black.
21:21So that's one of the reminiscences of the early stages of what the film could have been.
21:30And she is followed by a very strong light, almost like on a stage.
21:35And she's able to take control of that light and point it to the people that she talks
21:39about.
21:40And so Zoe had to be able to just do a gesture and the light would follow and focus on someone.
21:47So for that, we called a company that's called Alien Le Studio.
21:51They are specialized on live event lightings.
21:54They built rigs and they had like infrared cameras in the ceiling just to be able to
22:00see in the dark and to point a place and the light fixture would just follow whatever spot
22:06we would point in the frame, in the space.
22:09But for the camera work, it was much more different.
22:11We needed much more, so it was a lot of work and anticipation, but we needed freedom for
22:16the camera.
22:17So that's the scene that's shot almost exclusively on steadicam with a short lens.
22:22And we actually cut this scene in eight bits and we proceeded step by step, bits by bits
22:30with the camera, finding the best position with Zoe and Damien and saying, OK, and now
22:36we do a 360 and it's something that we just built on the day, actually.
22:46And that wouldn't have been possible, I think, without someone who has this experience in
22:51video that Sasha had.
22:52Yeah.
22:53Her choreography is really wild and elaborate.
22:56She's jumping on tables and spinning around.
22:58Interesting.
22:59And yeah, it occurred to me that, you know, we talked earlier about how the lighting follows
23:04Amelia's character journey, but it sounds like in that sequence, it's also kind of mirroring
23:10Zoe's character's journey.
23:12She's like taking power.
23:13Yes, exactly.
23:14Compared to the early.
23:15Yeah.
23:16She almost takes control of the form of the film.
23:19Yeah.
23:20Wow.
23:21How cool.
23:22Maybe we could talk about Selena Gomez's signature song, Me Camino, or My Way.
23:28It's presented almost like a karaoke performance, and I guess that one probably felt the most
23:33like a music video to me.
23:35Yes, it was.
23:37So it's happening in a nightclub.
23:41We are starting the scene with Zoe and she's having a very boring meeting with a guy and
23:47she hears this familiar voice in the background.
23:51She peeks an eye and she sees Selena singing with her lover.
23:59And that's a scene that embraces all of the codes of the pop music video.
24:08But there was an idea that was very strong from Jacques and he wanted one of the walls
24:15or maybe two of the walls, we didn't know yet at one point, to be a screen in the background.
24:21And the question was what would be on the screen.
24:23But he had this intuition that it would almost look like a virtual production set or something
24:28like that.
24:29Okay.
24:30And what happened is that when we explored the possibilities, we started to realize that
24:37the video Larsen that's created when you put, it's like when you put two mirrors in front
24:42of each other, you can see the repetition, the endless repetition of the characters that
24:47are in front of one of the cameras.
24:50So we fed the signal of this practical camera, let's say, in the screens and there was two
25:03things that occurred when we had to choose and pick the screens.
25:08We had budget problems, obviously.
25:11And what I was constantly being told was like, you have two elements that cost a lot of money
25:17is to have a tiny pitch.
25:20So a good resolution in the screens behind the actress and to have a very small latency.
25:28So not too much delay between the image that you shoot over and the image that is repeated
25:34in the background.
25:35Okay.
25:36What we realized actually that the less perfect it was, the more interesting was the result.
25:46The low resolution was creating this kind of pixelized face that we really loved.
25:51So we went for the lowest pitch we could ever find.
25:55And the latency was creating a delay between Selena's images.
26:00So when she moves, it's like a snake, you can see a delay between her and her images
26:06in the background.
26:07So, and we improved that latency also.
26:10So that was actually how we found the scene.
26:14Okay.
26:15And it adds to sort of like the karaoke parlor feeling of it.
26:19It's a really sweet moment too.
26:22There's another moment with Selena, her song called Bienvenida.
26:26Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
26:29So yes, the Bienvenida was, so the idea was that Selena is always, Selena's character
26:38is always taken from one place to the other.
26:41She's been sent to Switzerland, now she, it's the end of the first act and she has to come
26:47back to Mexico because she's just told to.
26:51And she's starting to be pretty angry about that.
26:56And that's actually one of the motors of the story itself.
27:00So she wakes up into this beautiful room and Jacques was saying that he wanted some dance
27:10here because she had dark ideas in her mind and he wanted to film the dark ideas.
27:15So the question was, how do we connect this dark world that she's looping into and the
27:24beautiful sunlight that comes through the curtains on her beautiful shiny bed.
27:31And what we did is that we actually removed one wall from her room of the set and we built
27:39a huge black room on the background with black floor and black walls.
27:45And we replaced this wall by two very strong lasers that would just materialize the transition
27:51between those two worlds, her inner world and the real world, so to say.
28:00And the camera had to be able to track with her from one world to the other.
28:04And that's where the studio makes a lot of sense because you can actually switch off
28:10the sun and the sky when she crosses this wall.
28:16So if you look carefully, you can see, we shot very long takes, but obviously the editing
28:21had other questions about reasons and being with the character and everything, but it
28:29was working on set and you can still see it in the film that as soon as she crosses this
28:35wall, the light of the room switch off, there's one light above the dark ideas that switches
28:41on and back and forth, she's able to switch from one world to the other and each world
28:47is just switching on and off as she moves.
28:50Wow.
28:50I can't wait to watch the film again after all this.
28:54And I'm assuming the final sequence in the desert was the section that you shot on location.
29:03Some of it at least, or what was shot on location?
29:06This last act was maybe the more complicated in terms of how do we do it.
29:14Because we were shooting mainly in France, we knew we could shoot some things in Mexico.
29:22We shot 10, 15 days there.
29:27But for each shot of this sequence, there was a meeting almost like, how do we do this
29:32one?
29:33And in the end you have shots that are shot on stage, that's the interior of the restaurant.
29:41Because you can see that the front ground of Selena and Carla singing together is shot
29:49at normal speed, 24 FPS, but the background, the battle and the men fighting in the same
29:55room is shot like 100 FPS.
29:59So we separated the space in two, put blue screens in the middle, did two takes to be
30:04able to separate the temporality of these two spaces.
30:09And you have the exteriors of the restaurant that are shot on a quarry.
30:15A quarry?
30:17In Mexico?
30:18In France.
30:19In France.
30:21And so actually all of the...
30:24So we built the facade of the restaurant, we brought a lot of decorations to the quarry
30:30to make it look like the desert we loved when we were in Mexico.
30:36And there were huge extensions, then around this 300 meters perimeter, VFX extensions
30:42to make it look like the desert, because we were surrounded by walls, actually, inside
30:48this big quarry.
30:50So that was the second kind of setup.
30:54And the third setup is blue screens with cars, where you have a lot of the riding moments
31:03that we shot on blue screens.
31:05And then you can see in the sequence, there is like three shots, wide shots of the cars
31:12riding through the desert very fast.
31:14And that's a full 3D shot, that's a full 3D shot.
31:17So each shot was a combination of different techniques and with a lot of pre-visualizations
31:25and discussions with the VFX teams and decoration to say, okay, what is the best way to do this
31:31shot?
31:32Wow.
31:33I appreciate the challenge of threading all that together.
31:36And the problem is how to keep the consistency to the scene, actually.
31:42And do you have a favorite shot in the film, a personal favorite?
31:45I like very much, so it's one of the, it's maybe the beginning of this last act, it's
31:52Rita is building a team of soldiers, they are still in La Lucecita and you can see through
31:58the window they are preparing the weapons for this war.
32:04And so there's a few shots in the beginning of the sequence, but then you have a long
32:08zoom in that covers most of the scene from the situation with the music, concrete music
32:15from the clicks of the guns that create a rhythm and you zoom to Rita's face actually
32:23and isolate her in the space.
32:25So I like the feeling that this continuous zoom movement on a motor gives you that you
32:32cannot stop what's happening anymore.
32:35It's going to happen.
32:36Inevitability.
32:37Yes.
32:38Oh, wow.
32:39Very cool.
32:40Very cool.
32:41I guess I'm curious to hear how you view this film within the context of your career.
32:47Do you see it as another stepping stone in your filmography or do you think the experience
32:53of making it will stick with you?
32:55Well, for sure is that I never had done anything like this.
32:59I had no references, but I think no one in the team had.
33:03So it was just experimenting together and knowing that we were trying to do something
33:09that we didn't know completely what it would be.
33:14So sometimes it was pretty scary for all of us.
33:18I think for Jacques also, you know, you're doing this thing and you're doing your best,
33:25but you have no idea where it will lead you in the end, you know, just hope it will be.
33:33You just hope you'll be proud of it in the end.
33:36Yeah.
33:37I mean, that's what makes it so miraculous for the viewers.
33:41Well, how original it is.
33:43Truly original.
33:44Thank you so much for joining us today.
33:47And congratulations on the film.
33:49It was a pleasure.