[Editor’s note: The following interview contains some spoilers for “Emilia Pérez.”]
“Emilia Pérez” begins and ends in darkness — literally and figuratively.
The latter comes courtesy of writer/director Jacques Audiard and his audacious script, which delves deeply into the prisons we make for ourselves and for others based on expectations, perceptions, and self-deceptions. As Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofia Gascón) transitions from cartel boss to a champion of those whose lives were lost to cartels, her attorney Rita (Zoe Saldana) matures into a woman with a satisfyingly successful career but a wisp of a personal life, and Emilia’s ex-wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) — who does not know that Emilia has undergone gender-affirming surgery — steps from a gilded cage into one even more dangerous. As their lives and relationships intersect and collide, cinematographer Paul Guilhaume takes the film from dark to sunny to a dark night of the soul come to life in the desert.
“The first act of the film is happening by night, and the last act of the film is happening by night,” Guillaume told IndieWire. “Between there is the daylight, there is a bright moment in the story. And the question for me was, what was the difference between those two nights?”
Ultimately, the answer was the difference between being on the cusp of and at the end of something. The bustling city night that begins “Emilia Pérez” is lit mainly with practicals, bringing Guilhaume’s desired pure black and pure white into the frame and flares that create a “lively night,” he pointed out. “A lot is happening in the frame. And the night in the end is completely different. It’s like the night is eating up the world. You can see death coming,” he said.
Trapped in a room in the desert during a shootout, Emilia is facing death for the first time in years — and at the hands of Jessi, no less. As Rita watches through night vision goggles as bullets fly, Audiard wanted something very specific for the entire tense sequence: “The light should come from nowhere.”
That, as Guilhaume wryly pointed out, was “disturbing.” “I always need to know, when I light a scene, what is the scenario of the lighting? It’s very hard for a cinematographer to put a light source and not imagine at least a story of, what is this light? Is it a bounce of something outside? Is it the residual light of a candle?,” he said.
But Audiard had a vision, and Guilhaume set to work bringing it to life. He and gaffer Thomas Garreau decided that, until the lights are cut in the scene, they would use overhead lights in the restaurant, and they asked set decoration to build a semi-transparent ceiling. “So as soon as [Jessi] switches off all of the practical lights, then it’s just ambient,” he said. “And the image suddenly is very matte, as opposed to the very bright dark that we had.”
From then until the end of the shootout, Guilhaume had to explore the possibilities of the bottom 10-20 percent of the signal. He cited Greig Fraser’s work on “Zero Dark Thirty” as a reference, but there was still one major concern: For a movie in which Guilhaume eschewed bright colors in favor of dark, rich ones and insisted on crafting pure black and white, these scenes ran the risk of turning gray for audiences. “If you project a black screen for one minute, the audience will see it [as] gray and not black,” Guilhaume said. “And so how to make make this gray look black, that’s always a question for me. One of the strategies is like in painting. You can see [a] Georges de La Tour [painting] will put little highlights everywhere in the painting for the black to look pitch black.”
Highlights were not an option for the scene, so Guilhaume switched tactics. “It would be a temporal strategy,” he said. “It was through the flashes of the gunshots and also through [Rita’s] night vision [goggles] that it suddenly could be very bright and tune your eye to the bright image. And when you cut to a dark image, it doesn’t look gray. It just looks black.”
But the film doesn’t end on that black; there’s a brief coda in the house Emilia made a home, where Rita greets her children. And, as most of the shots in that house and in Emilia’s office were, it’s a warm and enveloping space. “The light in Mexico is very often pretty white,” Guilhaume said. “And it’s something we wanted to recreate. One film that’s always with me before prepping any film [is] ‘No Country for Old Men’ from [cinematographer] Roger Deakins. The lighting techniques he uses just to bring the feeling of this piercing light coming from inside, but very often using bounce light, a bounce HMI on a white fabric, very often unbleached muslin, for example. But using a bounce light as opposed to direct light in this space was very important.”
Focusing on the specific quality of the light in Mexico was always a goal of Guilhaume’s, even as early as location scouting. “We knew that we wanted to recreate some gloomy days, just different imagery from what we can sometimes see in foreign films about Mexico, where there’s this vision that everything would be sunny and yellow,” Guilhaume said. “We knew that we wanted to avoid that. Also, it was a joke with the Mexican teams when we were location scouting because they would see my camera, and I had a LUT that was actually very white and desaturating. And I remember someone from my crew say, ‘Oh, thank you. We are not doing the Mexican filter. When you have a foreign DP coming here, they always turn the camera completely orange.’”
“Emilia Pérez” is now playing in select theaters. It will start streaming on Netflix Wednesday, November 13.
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