
Emilia Pérez is one of the most striking films of the past year with an incredible cast, direction, music… everything especially the cinematic scope of the film. Expertly lensed by cinematographer Paul Guilhame, he captured this fever dream of a movie in perpetual motion. Guilhame recently spoke to Immersive via Zoom about his experiences shooting this exciting film.
[This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.]
How did you first get involved with this?
The first time I heard about this film, Emilia Pérez was six years ago. I was working with director, Jacques Audiard on another project. I saw all of the different steps of the process and how the project evolved from being at one point, maybe just an up-around stage to ultimately a musical almost on stage on the sound stage.
This is a fairly large-scale production with a well-known director and cast that is wildly experimental in terms of theme, but also in terms of shooting. Talk a little bit about your approach to this project which was different from your previous work…
The project evolved from being a pure opera, but it has kept the operatic elements. At one point we even felt that maybe the whole film would be shot on a black background with realistic foregrounds. Maybe we would build the street. Rita is walking in at the beginning, but we wouldn’t have anything around it. It was just fade to black in a way. We tested, and I think that was too extreme, so we just brought back the film to a little more realism. There’s always something strange or a bit dreamy in this film.
This was a truly international production. You had so many different dialects on set. What was it like navigating that?
It was between French, Spanish, and English regarding who was talking to who, and it was Jacques who had a translator on set, but sometimes he would just talk French to the actresses. I remember one day he talked in French to Zoe Saldaña who didn’t wait for the translation. She said, okay, got it. Sometimes it was more like telepathy.

One of the things that sticks out in this film is the musical sequences. What was your approach to shooting those scenes?
The first dance sequence for Zoe, which is happening in a street market building itself around her… that scene was choreographed and the blocking and the way we would shoot it was predetermined from rehearsals that we had done with 50 dancers with decoration elements already moving around her. The only unknown was maybe the light and the look because we rehearsed that in the daylight in a big room, but we knew how we would cut it and how it would be edited. We filmed the rehearsal with iPhones on stabilizers and everything.
How about the ballroom scene…
The idea was that Zoe is kind of taking control of the film at this moment, and she also takes control of the cinematography. She can point that very hard light that follows her to the people she talks about. She’s also able to bring the camera with her. We had built this lighting system that remotely operated and was able to point at every time ever she would go, you had a lighting operator that was able to follow her in the space.
It didn’t work at first… I remember Jacques turning towards me at the beginning of this day, saying, “Oh my God, what do we do now?” Because we saw that the camera was not found, we created something much freer and much more dynamic on the day, cutting the scene into eight pieces just to have more control over it.
We just worked with a short lens on the steady cam, and it was movement per movement. But on the day she turns her head to this side the camera will suddenly move with a very short lens, very close to her face, and then she will just push back and the camera will push back at the same time, and then maybe he says a sentence that makes the camera do a 360 and come back to her. So we just, with that choreographer, with Zoe, with a steady cam operator, and myself who were just trying to see what was the best movement at each second, and that’s how it happened.
It’s an incredible sequence. How did you come up with the composition for the different actors, and actresses? They’re kind of shot in different ways. One of my favorite moments in the movie is when Emilia wakes up after her procedure, it’s almost shot in a noirish way…
I think visually, the movie was driven by the script. The lighting element was very present in the script already. The first act is all happening by night. Then the sun arrives when Karla Sofía Gascón wakes up as Emilia, and Jacques wants the light to be piercing at this time with still dark shadow. The light will slowly fade away from this moment for this whole second act where it’s more realistic.
The end sequence in the desert is very striking as well…
It was very strange because, in the first part of the film, we used practical light as much as possible. The night in the end scene, which was much more controlled and lit in a more cinematic way, let’s say we created a moon above this house in the desert with a big crane with a lot of lights on it.
I was talking to Jacques, especially about the moment when Emilia is singing with Jessi inside the restaurant, and all the lights are switched off because there’s this gunfight going on. So they switched off the lights in the house but we needed light. Jacques wanted the light to come from nowhere. That’s extremely complicated to handle but we realized it was almost maybe a light coming from a bit everywhere and creating this very low-level light where you just can see the faces and the volumes, but you don’t have any highlights.
You almost don’t have any direction of light. You can see things a little bit like this at the end of Zero Dark Thirty, for example, where you explore the bottom 20% of the signal. Everything is so dark. We created this semi-transparent ceiling above the restaurant. So as soon as Selena switches off the light, you have these very low ambient lights coming through the ceiling and lighting the actresses with very, very low levels.

Selena Gomez’s musical number, ‘Mi Camino’, how did the concept of how to shoot it come about? That’s such a fascinating sequence. I love mirrors and double images and things like that.
I think from very early stages, we knew that there would be something with a big screen. We wanted one or two walls of the room just to be a screen. We explored what we could feed into the screen, we realized that we could feed the live eye image of Selena with a third camera, not a second camera, not the camera from the film.
It’s like placing two mirrors in front of each other, it is a reproduction of the infinite of the same image that goes darker and darker and darker as it goes more in the distance. There also something very beautiful is the slight delay you have from one image to the other.
It works well. Can you talk a little bit about your relationship with the editor?
We share the same obsession, and that is the obsession from Jacques. Jacques doesn’t have aesthetic frames that you can just print and keep a still of. He has an aesthetic of movement. Everything should be in motion all the time. That’s true during the shoot and that’s true during the edit. I think Juliet, all of her work with Jacques, besides building a good story and sticking to the characters, all of her visual work is to keep that aesthetic of movement going on in the film.
What’s it like being on the other end of this now…
I try really to enjoy every bit of it. I realize that we are very truly lucky to be defending this film. I’m right now in Los Angeles for this film. We were a million miles away from imagining this when we were shooting this in this studio in France, and trying just to figure out every sequence with the tools we had with us, and to see that the movie has its own life right now, it’s a joy.
Emilia Pérez is now streaming at Netflix.