When Jacques Audiard started envisioning what would become his four-time Golden Globe-winning film, Emilia Pérez, it was apparent that it was unlike any film he’d done before. Loosely based on Boris Razon’s novel Écoute and inspired by opera librettos, the musical crime drama is the story of Emilia Pérez (Screen Actors Guild Award nominee Karla Sofía Gascón), a cartel leader who seeks the help of defense attorney Rita (Golden Globe winner Zoe Saldaña) to fake her own death in order to seek gender-affirming care. The film also features arresting performances by Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, and Edgar Ramírez. “Emilia Pérez doesn’t just tell the story of one woman,” said Audiard of his SAG-nominated ensemble. “It’s about four very different women.”
While Emilia Pérez took Audiard to new creative heights, including collaborating with musician-composers Clément Ducol and Camille on original music and staging intricate moments of dance with choreographer Damien Jalet, it is not the first time the audacious auteur has defied genre in his three-decade-spanning career. From his directorial debut with the 1994 crime thriller See How They Fall to the neo-noir The Beat That My Heart Skipped and his modern love story Paris, 13th District, the renegade director is not bound by convention but rather driven by examining complex characters and their distinctive worlds. “I don’t like to define a film by its genre. I think most of my work revolves around this principle,” the filmmaker told Netflix.
“Often in the films I make, there are these themes of double life, or more precisely, the choice of life. How many lives do we have a right to?” said Audiard in a recent conversation with fellow filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. “We know how much it costs to live the first life. If you want to change your life, how much will the second one cost? I think the second will always cost more than the first. This is a recurring theme with me.”
In honor of Audiard earning his first Directors Guild of America Award nomination for his work on Emilia Pérez, take a look at some of the films from his wide-ranging career currently available to stream on Netflix.
Audiard’s tenth film is an encapsulation of his bold approach to storytelling and his genre-defying sensibilities. “You have an action movie that’s not an action movie, a drama that’s not a drama, a comedy that’s not a comedy,” Gascón told Netflix. “It is such a great gift, and I’m so proud to be part of it.” “It was described to me as this film noir that didn’t really exist in any of the conventional kind of genres, but it was a musical,” said Saldaña, who won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture for her performance as Rita. “I was just like, ‘What?’ I had to read it more than once. And then, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
Featuring an enviable cast — including John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Riz Ahmed — The Sisters Brothers marks Audiard’s first English-language project. With a subversive approach to the Western genre, the 2018 film tells the story of two brothers turned assassins in pursuit of their latest hit, which takes them across the American West. Based on Patrick deWitt’s Booker Prize–shortlisted novel, the film premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, where Audiard won the Silver Lion for Best Direction.
When Audiard’s timely exploration of the refugee experience premiered at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, it was lauded by audiences and critics alike, winning the festival’s prestigious top prize, the Palme d’Or. Anchored by a powerful performance from Antonythasan Jesuthasan in his first leading role, Dheepan follows a Tamil soldier who flees war-torn Sri Lanka, accompanied by a young woman and child pretending to be his family. As the characters begin to reconstruct their lives in France, the auteur takes a deeply human look at what it means to start anew.
Selena Gomez was initially introduced to Audiard’s work through this romantic drama, which stars Oscar winner Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts. “The first film I’d ever seen of his was Rust and Bone, and I instantly fell in love with his style of filmmaking,” says the actor, who earned a Golden Globe nomination for her turn as Jessi in Emilia Pérez. The heart-wrenching Rust and Bone is a character study of a former boxer and a killer whale trainer, drawn together as they heal from emotional and physical traumas. Based on Craig Davidson’s short story collection, the film was nominated for Best Motion Picture – Non-English Language at the Golden Globes in 2013, an award that Audiard would take home this year for Emilia Pérez.
A Prophet is a high-intensity journey of a young man named Malik (The Serpent’s Tahar Rahim in his breakout role), who descends into — and ascends within — the underbelly of the Corsican mob while in a French prison. A visceral examination of crime and morality in modern-day Europe, the film features a score by Oscar-winning composer Alexandre Desplat (The Shape of Water, The Piano Lesson.) A Prophet was nominated for an Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.
