Pierre-Marie Dru is the music supervisor of Netflix’s Emilia Pérez, a film that proved incredibly challenging but very satisfying creatively and emotionally for him. The film introduces us to four women whose lives intersect when a notorious drug kingpin (Karla Sofía Gascón) enlists the aid of an attorney (Zoe Saldaña) to live his life as a woman. Selena Gomez plays Emilia Pérez’s wife who thinks her husband is dead.
Director Jacques Audiard constantly surprised and delighted Pierre-Marie Dru with his unique approach on set to the unique material. He was also impressed by the lead actresses and their penchant for singing and dancing despite all coming from different backgrounds in music. For Dru, Emilia Pérez became a more personal project than one might expect due to some of his own history, including his love for Pedro Almodóvar.
The Contending: What was the creative process like working with Jacques Audiard since this was his first musical?
Pierre-Marie Dru: It is a long story that starts about 5 years ago. He had already started working with Camille, the song composer, a few weeks before I met him. They just had a few pages of the scripts and one or two songs, and the big question had been how the scripts and songs would work together. For the first month as they worked together they weren’t even certain it was going to be a movie. Auduard originally thought it would be an opera. But over three or four years, as the songs got written and the main story of Emilia Pérez was created, it became a film. To help Jacques we put together a kind of podcast of the script and music to show how they would go together in the film. We did a lot of pre-production work with the sound mixer to get across the sound of the film. Then another aspect of the work was my team in Mexico, including my friend Annette Fradera who was the music producer there and did a lot of work with the Mexican Choir, who then had to send their work back to Paris to get mixed together. So there were a lot of people in many different parts of the world putting this all together.
The Contending: What was it like getting three actresses who have different experiences with music to be in sync for this film?
Pierre-Marie Dru: It was different for all four of them (Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz). Zoe Saldaña had questions with the dancing so she worked with the dance choreographer Damien Jalet. We wanted to capture the Spanish language and get the Mexican accent, so we had different coaches to help them. With the music obviously we know Selena is already a singer. Zoe was a singer and a dancer as well, but it was more complicated for Karla Sofía Gascón. I was the one who proposed Karla to Jacques. We had been looking for our Emilia for a long time, and when we found her it was amazing. It was obvious she was our Emilia, but she wanted to do the “Manitas” role as well, which was not the original plan. But she pushed Jacques on the importance of that and delivered. With the song, she worked really hard to practice because she was not a singer when we first cast her. We had coaches in Madrid, Paris, and Mexico to help her during the shooting. Then in post-production she worked for two years to deliver the songs, and it was very moving by the end.
The Contending: This was a small moment in the film that I really loved where we see people packing guns, and the movement of their gun starts moving in a very specific rhythm. What was behind that decision?
Pierre-Marie Dru: It is the story of this movie! Whenever you’re talking about your work on a film you always talk about how amazing the crew is but it really is true of Emilia Pérez. We talked a long time before shooting with Clément Ducol, the composer of the score and one of the composers with Camille, and with the leader of the sound team, Cyril Holtz, to create these bridges between music and sound, so at the end music and sound are one thing. For this scene the sound editor, Aymeric Devoldére, said to Clément that maybe we could do something with the guns and Clément tried to create in music something like it could be guns. After that Aymeric Devoldère worked on the real sound of the guns, and they went back and forth between the music and the sound. Then, at the end, we had the choreographer work with the cast to create the rhythm of the guns to match the sound and music. It was the whole team of sound, music, and choreography.
The Contending: What was your role in helping with the composing of the songs? Did you have a favorite?
Pierre-Marie Dru: It was a great opportunity getting to work with Clément Ducol and Camille, who are such amazing creators. I didn’t help with the creation, but I was helping them move forward and reassure them. In the conception stage, it is a very fragile time. You don’t know if you’re going in the right direction, and you need friends to help direct you. Then, most importantly, being able to find production solutions. Like finding the accent coaches, getting the choir in Mexico, working on the lip sync, everything to help make the songs as best as they can be. Or working with the sound team and the cast to find a good tempo, seeing when we needed to coach the actresses, and when we needed to work with the choreographer.
One of the big things that needed to be done was to make certain Jacques recalled all the voices during the shooting. For example, at the beginning of the film, we have that sequence in the market and all the dancers are singing. That was not planned at first so we needed to recall so we could show them more in those shots. Overall three things that were very important for me were making certain the story was credible so that people believed it, creating the musicality for it of course, and something very special in Emilia Pérez showing the vulnerability.
The Contending: One part with the choreography I was really interested in is that at times the extras freeze and the primary singer does stuff all around them and they don’t move. How were you able to capture that?
Pierre-Marie Dru: There were no rules when we were making this and so it was a very song-by-song process. The first time we did that was with the song “El Alegato” in the marketplace, where the extras are dancing a lot and at the end they pause and let Zoe do this amazing singing with her computer. In making that one it was a lot of repetition with Damien Jalet working with the dancers. We also tried different endings for that scene. One with very fast music and a lot of dancing, then we did one where the music was very soft with a different tempo. We filmed both versions and then our amazing editor Juliette Welfling managed to run the two mixes in the same sequence.
Then with the song “El Mal,” Zoe is at a charity event and she is dancing and the people around the table were not moving at all. Jacques found it very interesting, and so he and Damien Jalet decided in just one hour to shoot the scene like that. So sometimes it was very prepared and sometimes it was improvisation, and that’s why it was amazing to see how Jacques found a way to direct everything each day with a different feeling.
The Contending: “El Mal” and “Mi Camino” are the songs that seem to be dominating the award conversation. I am curious why you think those two songs have been the ones that have struck a chord with so many people?
Pierre-Marie Dru: That’s a good question! I never thought about it like this. “Mi Camino” was obviously the hit from the soundtrack, and maybe it’s because it was a way for the audience to connect with Selena Gomez in a new way. I don’t know if that’s it but what I love about the story of this song is that it was written during the shooting a week before Selena Gomez came to Paris. Jacques wanted us to feel more empathy with Jessi, and Selena was really moved when she heard the demo for the first time. Jacques, Camille, and Clément captured something personal in her, and when you get that from the actress that is something the audience feels in the theater.
The same thing with “El Mal.” It’s amazing what Zoe Saldaña is doing! She is dancing, singing; it is joyful and you can feel and share the energy she has. She also did it in one day. We didn’t have a lot of time to shoot, which just makes it more amazing. So you have two songs that are very different but very personal for both actresses. Zoe got to show us what she can do and it’s quite a lot, and for Selena getting to be more personal in her artistic expression.
The Contending: I read that working on this film was deeply impactful for you. What was it about this story that hit you so hard?
Pierre-Marie Dru: Simply working on a movie in Spanish was a real chance for me. I got into this profession because of Pedro Almodóvar. I was very young when I saw my first movie of his and so thanks to him I’m a music supervisor. I also lived in Spain with my grandmother, who is Spanish, when I was very young, studying things like flamenco. So it was really exciting and challenging to have the chance to do my best for this movie. Also it was great and crazy to work with Camille. She is very famous in France and an amazing artist and I’ve been a fan of her since her first record. So my family history and the connection to Pedro Almodóvar felt like a return to my roots while also being able to dive into the unknown with this crazy story.
The Contending: Final thoughts?
Pierre-Marie Dru: It is important to say that this movie was filmed in different places in the world. We shot in Paris with an American actress, and we were helped a lot with our Mexican team. So the film was multicultural and has been appreciated in all those places, so I’m very happy about that.
Emilia Pérez streams exclusively on Netflix.
