It’s safe to say there’s never been a film like Emilia Pérez, the musical crime drama from renegade auteur Jacques Audiard. Starring Karla Sofía Gascón in the title role, the story follows a fearsome cartel leader who hires gifted yet overlooked attorney Rita (Zoe Saldaña) to help her fake her own death so that she might begin a new life as her authentic self. To do so, she’ll need to leave behind the drug empire she operates, as well as her wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their two sons. Also starring Adriana Paz and Edgar Ramírez, the Spanish-language film is loosely based on Boris Razon’s novel Écoute and features 16 original songs from songwriting duo Clément Ducol and Camille.

Ever since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May — where the French filmmaker’s latest won the Jury Prize and Gascón, Saldaña, Gomez, and Paz collectively took home the Best Actress award — Emilia Pérez has earned fans excited to champion Audiard’s latest visionary feature. Count Guillermo del Toro among them. The Oscar-winning Mexican filmmaker was eager to sit down with the venerated writer-director following a recent screening at the DGA Theater in Los Angeles to discuss the genre-defying film and the intricacies of the years-in-the-making project.

An edited version of the conversation follows.

Jacques Audiard on set

Guillermo Del Toro: I want to start by saying I’m not a dispassionate observer because I’ve been part of two juries — one in Cannes [in 2015], one in Venice [in 2018] — that gave Jacques the Palme d’Or and [Silver Lion for] Best Director. I think he’s one of the most amazing filmmakers alive today. So it’s a privilege to be here.

Jacques Audiard: You’re making me blush.

I think that in many of your movies, there is an energy that is profoundly emotional, but that leads to this irreconcilable conflict between what we want to be and the world. And that clash is both very romantic and very dramatic.

That’s a good analysis. Often in the films I make, there are these themes of double life, or more precisely, the choice of life, the cost of living as we have. How many lives do we have a right to? And how much does it cost? 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.

This movie came nominally out of a passage from a novel — that was the starting point. What exactly was that seed that prompted you to say, This is what I’m going to do?

I have a friend, Boris Razon, who’s a novelist. I read his novels. I read [one], it’s called Écoute, and about halfway through the book, the central character, [who is] a lawyer, meets a gang leader who asks him to help him make a transition and change his gender. I turn the pages and then the author doesn’t follow through. I [was] very surprised. I called him the next day [to ask,] “Boris, do you have any plans for the character in the novel?” And Boris says, “No, no that’s it.” So, I stole the idea. I ran with it.

Karla Sofía Gascón and Jacques Audiard behind the scenes

Can you talk about how it came to you to make it a musical and why?

The idea that I really liked [was] the paradox of someone belonging to [a world of] hyper-virility, hyper-machismo, hyper-patriarchy wanting to move toward femininity. I find that a paradox that’s interesting to deal with. 

It goes back four and a half years. I was confined at home with my girlfriend during lockdown, and I [wrote] the treatment in 28 days [as an] opera libretto. [At the time] I didn’t understand — [I thought,] What’s come over me? It’s the strangest thing. It’s divided into acts, more like tableaux than scenes, and these are very archetypal characters. It’s like an opera. The characters don’t have much psychology. It was more like feelings in motion. The idea of [doing the film as a] musical comes from the opera. The form is operatic to begin with. I had the feeling that the film would have to change genres all the time — perhaps this reflects the transition of the main character. But mostly, I think it comes from the fact that I knew I was going to shoot in a studio and that the film had to have a certain rhythm to escape the static nature of the studio.

As a Mexican, I adore melodrama and adore the telenovela, the pitch of melodrama. For me, your view of Mexico was hypnotic and beautiful. I wonder if you fell in love with Mexico yourself when you visited?

I went to Mexico about 40 years ago, and I traveled north, south, east, west. I love Mexico, I love it. I’d been to Morelia not long ago. It’s sublime. There’s a level of music in the street, it’s incredible. Since I shot it all in Paris in a studio, it’s actually as if we’d brought Mexico to us. Virginie Montel, the costume designer and art director, did a large part of that work. I [went] to Mexico City three times with the team. We were looking for sets and then I was casting, too. I understood after the third visit that if I shot on location in Mexico, I’d stay glued to the ground. You see, I had many more images in my head that didn’t apply to the street in Mexico City. It didn’t apply to the interiors that I saw in Mexico City. I needed a bigger stylization tool. And it’s normal if you start with the idea of an opera; what looks more like an opera stage than a movie studio? So it was only natural for me to go back to the studio.

Jacques Audiard and Guillermo del Toro

I don’t think Gene Kelly was in Paris in An American in Paris, so you’re okay. But truly what I think is, for the tone to exist, the movie needs to exist in a cinematic reality. And that it does. You start with a choreography that is more traditionally fluid, and little by little, the movie itself, its rhythms, the use of the light and the camera, become musical. The loading of the weapons, the kid driving through the streets with the bicycle . . . the world itself becomes very, very musical.

I wonder if I did Emilia Pérez for this reason. I’m wondering if, in fact, the project of Emilia Pérez was because I wanted to see the operas that I don’t see. For example, there’s very little contemporary opera repertoire, and I have sought to fill that by making Emilia. In terms of the things you’re mentioning, there are a lot of operatic stylizations. Stylization is operatic. The D.N.A. of opera is stylization.

Now, the female figures at the center of this, speaking of opera, are each limited and sort of prisoners of different circumstances — characters that get to escape that reality in one way or another and then crush against that reality. But they’re very different actors and the casting is wonderful.

Actually, earlier, I was telling you about the treatment. I write a lot of versions and I don’t know, maybe up until the third or fourth version, the female characters were not the correct ages. Rita was 25; [drug lord] Manitas was 30. What happened was that I wasn’t finding people to play these roles. I did castings in Mexico. I saw a lot of actresses, and it didn’t work. Through a combination of circumstances, I met Karla Sofía Gascón in Mexico City, and I had a conversation with Zoe on Zoom. One thing is clear to me now. The actresses dictated the ages of the characters. I was completely wrong. I mean, a 25-year-old girl, she has no history. If she has problems with ambition, wait a minute, it’ll work out. A woman between 40 and 45, it’s going to be harder. It’s really the actresses who gave me the ages of their characters and proved to me that I was completely wrong.

You found a mezzo-soprano, a coloratura, a soprano. Their voices, their presence brought different instruments. I wonder if this affected the writing of the songs?

Recently, I came across some versions of the music again that were Paleolithic. So immediately the answer to your question is that between early demos, middle demos, and the demos after the actresses were cast, it’s night and day. They changed a lot. I’m not saying that the musical base has changed — the melody may be the same, but the whole envelope around it has completely changed because of the cast. I had the good luck to work with these actresses, who have such different talents. They were very different. Karla Sofía has nothing to do with Zoe, Adriana has nothing to do with Selena. And that for me was a constant pleasure because it imposed on me a form of tension. I don’t speak Spanish, I don’t speak English, yet every morning, I had to figure out how to speak Zoe. I had to figure out how to speak Karla Sofía. I had to figure out how to speak to Selena. And these were vernacular languages, incredibly interesting every time. I thought it was great,

When you have a song and dance scene and it’s actually happening in front of you, well, normally you pay to see that. Now you’re getting paid to do it. It’s incredible.