The synopsis of Emilia Pérez is intriguing, to say the least: a lawyer in Mexico is enlisted to help a cartel boss disappear and start a new life as a woman. Also, it's a musical.

After winning the Best Actress award at Cannes and being submitted for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars, there's a fair amount of hype around the upcoming release. FILMHOUNDS spoke to choreographer Damien Jalet about what it was like to work on such an ambitious project.

How did you get involved in this project?

It was absolutely amazing. I was in Mexico, and I'd just had a series cancelled because of COVID — it was so difficult to be in the performing arts at that time. I was with my partner, and I told him I would love to work with a great cinema director.

The next day, I got a message saying that Jacques [Audiard, director] wanted to meet. I said, “I'd love to, but I'm not in Paris. I'm in Mexico for one more month”. He said, “Actually, the film may be shot in Mexico and I'm arriving on Friday.” We met three days later, he sent me the script, and I chatted with him and his crew for two hours. He asked me if I would be able to choreograph the film and I immediately said yes, even though I had absolutely no idea what this thing was going to be like when I read the script. There was absolutely no mention of any kind of movement or choreography in the script.

That sounds challenging — how did your approach to choreographing differ from previous work?

Compared to what I worked on previously, this was the first time that dance was absolutely not invited. There weren't even musical segments where I could choreograph something. It was my responsibility to come in with ideas of where it would be right to add something in.

It took us time quite a long time and many failed attempts. I didn't want to make the dance element decorative, an accessory. That wasn't enough for me, and it wasn't enough for Jacques.

There was a lot of research and a lot of experiments. Formalising movements in acting, while you also have to think about the singing, is a lot. When someone like Zoe [Saldana] or Selena [Gomez] came in, it was a huge relief for me. Zoe was a dancer before even being an actress, and Selena has danced a lot in music videos; they were taking the dance element really seriously, and they were capable of multitasking. They actually wanted to be challenged, and understanding their potential allowed me to to push the choreography as far as I could.

They made dance feel like a continuity of the characters, not something that happens in the background or is just there to support the actors. Dance, in this film, is a tool to reveal certain parts of the characters and to reveal elements that can't be expressed in other ways.

My direction in dance is usually more lyrical, but I felt we needed to bring a certain kind of modernity to it, maybe somehow influenced by contemporary dance or even TikTok videos. The manipulation of objects was important, too; in one scene, the guns became part of the choreography and then part of the music. Earlier, when Selena was working with the phone, we wanted to use it to create a sense of vertigo, because the music was like a bolero, a waltz.

We were also working on things that would be extremely subtle. The whole beginning, for one minute she's walking in this market It doesn't look like dance, but every single action and passage is choreographed. It was a way to subliminally prepare the audience, so when the dance arrives they've already felt it. Sometimes those scenes took us the most time to film because it was extremely hard to get right. It was always a lot of work.

Emilia Pérez has a completely original soundtrack, with the songs specific to the events of the film. How much were you considering the lyrics when you were choreographing?

There's so much information in what they say, in the tone of the music. It's hard not to end up either miming or doing something so abstract that it completely disconnects the character from what they're saying. We literally took it word by word.

The first thing that I found really inspiring was the first song, ‘El Alegato', where Rita (Saldana) is almost rapping, saying a lot of things in a very short time. It's much easier to put gestures on each of the words — the speed of it prevents you from making it too literal. It's already quite hard to catch what it said because it's so quick. The gestures can help you.

Jacques and I love the film Cabaret from Bob Fosse. The element of the musical is used in a way that's constantly in friction with the political background of the film. We were trying to get something of that, where the movement would be inspired by what's going on today. We get a lot of information, and a lot of gestures, in a very short time.

Speaking of influences, the hospital scene and Selena Gomez's main dance scene reminded me of the massive soundstages in old Hollywood musicals. Was that a deliberate reference?

It's interesting because it was not necessarily the point of reference. I like musicals, but I also was very scared to do one because I know how corny they can get, and how easily you can fail — especially with such a story as Emilia Pérez. We all knew we were working on eggshells and we had to be extremely vigilant.

We also didn't want to go down the ‘paying homage to other musicals' route. This whole film started out as an opera rather than a musical; the musical element was there, but it was there to kind of bring the whole story in a more epic and less realistic direction. Less psychological and more transcendent, like a legend or fairytale.

The whole theme of the film didn't completely match the theme of a musical, and I was very excited about that. How do we reinvent the codes of the musical? How do we give it another tone?

Emilia Pérez is the final result of an opera loosely inspired by a book; it's already been on a long development journey! How did it evolve during production?

The film has moved a lot from its original intentions. The biggest dance scene was supposed to be ‘Para', where they talked about cartel violence and disappearances. Early on in the conversation though, we realised we could not dance to this pain. We could not transform this into something that feels entertaining; it's too tragic.

The opening scene was supposed to be in many different locations, but we decided to stay in the market. We worked on that scene a lot. We knew that the code of the film had to be accepted at this point, because if not, the door would close and audiences would not connect. It was the first scene we shot, with the most extras and the most complex camera movements. It was definitely the most challenging one.

The process of this film included a lot of exchanges with other departments; collaborating, discussing and understanding how we were going to do this thing.

Lots of the dances are connected to the more staccato, sharper songs, and a lot of the more angry songs. Was that a conscious decision?

We did a test on every single song of the film, and most of the pieces that survived choreographically were songs with a very fast BPM. The dance would accelerate the heartbeat of the film, and give a certain kind of emergency and urgency to it. In the case of ‘El Mal', the speed of both the singing and the dancing makes the scene look like it's speeding up.

Resistance is a common point to many of the songs in the film. The first big dance is a lawyer preparing her defence; she has to resist, to convince. So we tried to find gestures or body language that would be extremely convincing, pushing every word and insisting on certain things so that the body itself is so convinced that the audience is too.

It's not just the words, it's also the way they're physically. In ‘El Mal', Rita has an angry, resistant energy. She uses dance a bit like a weapon. When Jessi dances in her room, it's a mixture of rage and boredom. I love when I have a very clear emotion behind movements.

Looking at the completed film, what's your favourite of the dances?

It's tough. To be honest, I think ‘El Mal' was the only track that I really pushed everyone for. It wasn't supposed to be a dance scene initially. Zoe was meant to be next to Karla Sophia [Gascon], and they were meant to point to the people in the audience, and there was very different music. I asked if Clément [Ducol, composer] could rewrite the song; we had an amazing dancer, Zoe, and she only had one moment, which was the opening. I was like, we need to give her another moment! 

It comes at the right point in the film; you're prepared for it. This is the point d'orgue, the moment when dance is given its space and is executed with extreme precision. It was one of the last scenes we shot, and by then Zoe was really on top of her game. It changes the energy of the room.

Emilia Pérez is released on Netflix on November 13th. 

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