Emilia Pérez is one of the most celebrated films of the year—a musical crime comedy of identity, duality, and love. A groundbreaking original film that was a sensation at Cannes starring Zoe Saldana, Karla Sofía Gascón, Adriana Paz, and Selena Gomez.. they are uniformly amazing in their historic award-winning performances. Directed by Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, Rust and Bone) with a top-notch international team that brought this fever dream together. Music Supervisor + Music Producer, Pierre-Marie Dru oversaw the film’s music which was so integral to this story. He recently spoke to Immersive via Zoom.

[This conversation was edited for clarity and length.]

So tell me about your experience with Jacques Audiard, how you met him, and how you got involved with this specific project.

I met Jacques during the lockdown. I was in the south of France. At the time, I was working with Clément Ducal on the film Annette, which is also a musical. Jacques had this idea for Emilia Pérez, and when it was just a few pages of the script, he met with Clément, who told Jacques that if he was doing a Spanish opera, he had to meet his partner, Camille, and they started working on three or four songs. They needed somebody to help organize everything, so Clément suggested Jacques bring me on board. We did a zoom together and hit it off.

Tell me a little bit about your background.

I have my company, Pigalle Production, that I founded over 20 years ago. I do music supervision, and I produce artists and soundtracks for film, television, and advertising. When I started there were not many music supervisors in France… I fell in love with it and it became a career.

Music Supervision is a hard job that most people don’t know how much work goes into…

That’s true. For example, Emilia Pérez’s last song wasn’t written by Camille and Clément Ducol, it’s a French song called ‘Les passantes’ that Camille and Jacques reworked (new lyrics for the film). It took me one year to clear it!

And you were also in charge of music production…

I always do this kind of thing when I’m working on a film. It was important for Emilia Pérez to have someone very polyvalent in my place, because most of my work consisted of executive music production. I mean finding the musicians, the vocal and accent coaches, the music editors, the sound engineers, so many things to do, and choosing the right people so that they have the same artistic approach as Jacques. And then you have to know how to coach someone as extraordinary as Selena Gomez or Zoe Saldaña… I love doing my job. It’s an extraordinary job.

How did you become aware of Karla Sofía Gascón and how did that lead to her being vast in the film?

Jacques was with Annette Fradera in Mexico looking for Emilia Pérez and they had seen lots of people. I was in the south of France and I was looking at the Spanish language newspapers and I found her. I arranged a meeting and when Jacques first saw her, he said that’s Emilia Pérez.

The film is about identity… can you change yourself and it’s just like you can, but you’re always you within. I thought the movie did such an incredible balance of that…

For every character. Emilia, but the same story for Zoe Saldana’s character Rita… She needed to change something in her own life. She is amazing in the movie dancing and singing – we coached her and she was great. We know this actress because she’s very famous, but she’s so special in this movie.

The same for Selena Gomez. One week before she arrived, in the middle of shooting and just one week before Selena’s arrival Jacques said, we need a new song for her talking about her life, her feelings, telling the people that she doesn’t care about what they think of her. ‘Mi Camino’. The songwriters wrote this song in one day just after that. One week later we were in studio in Paris and we recorded the song.

The same for Adriana Paz because of the character of Epifania. She finds love with Emilia that she needed. So we have all these kinds of transformations which are very different and Jacques is a maestro because we can feel all the metamorphosis of all the characters. So you are completely right with your question. It’s the main thing of this movie, which is amazing.

You sourced most of the music talent for this film…

It was important for me to have the feedback from Mexico for real. So with this amazing lady Annette Fradera… a team with a vocal coach, accent coach, conductors… There were a lot of different kinds of music, pop, strings, woodwinds, percussion, and vocalists. And then the mixing, the sound team did an amazing job.

The question Jacques would ask every day, “What is the sound of my movie?” We didn’t have the answer, but we did a lot of things to be sure that in the end, he would have the answer. So coaches were there when you needed them. When you need a live musician, we’ll do playback now we’ll record it when we are shooting. Now we will do it in post. I was one to coordinate all these things.

It’s very much a multicultural international production. What was that like having so many backgrounds, and cultures in one environment?

Emelia Pérez is and will remain the craziest and most exciting adventure of my entire personal life. A French movie, all in song, in Spanish, in Mexico with performers and crew from all over the world.

You were with this movie for a while. There was the wrap of the actual movie, which I’m sure was an experience, and now there’s the afterglow. It won awards at Cannes, and now it’s on Netflix. What’s it like being on the other end of that?

It’s very moving also because everybody on the team gave everything, everything, everything, everything. We are very happy. I was at the American French Festival one month ago and when for a French guy like me, having Filmmaker Michael Mann saying that this is a masterpiece is wonderful… It’s very important in our lives to have this kind of reception. It’s nice to do this kind of project that’s transatlantic like this and to have this kind of reception. I’m very, very happy about that.

Emilia Pérez is now streaming at Netflix.

Eric Green
Author

Eric Green has over 25 years of professional experience producing creative, marketing, and journalistic content. Born in Flushing, Queens and based in Los Angeles, Green has a catalog of hundreds of articles, stories, photographs, drawings, and more. He is the director of the celebrated 2014 Documentary, Beautiful Noise and the author of the novella Redyn, the graphic novel Bonk and Woof, and the novel, The Lost Year. Currently, he is hard at work on a book chronicling the lives of the greatest Character Actors.