Juliette Welfling has edited all 10 of Jacques Audiard‘s films, but “Emilia Pérez” still marked a milestone: It was their first musical. “At first he wanted to do an opera and then after meeting the musicians, he finally changed his mind to a film, which is what he usually does,” Welfling tells Gold Derby during our Meet the Experts: Film Editing panel. “How did he describe it to me? It’s difficult to describe because this movie is so weird, in a way so crazy. There are so many different genres in this movie and so many different things that he talks about.” Watch the video interview above.
A Spanish-language crime musical, the film follows Mexican cartel boss Manitas, who hires a down-on-her-luck lawyer, Rita (Zoe Saldaña), to secure gender-confirmation surgery to become the titular character (Karla Sofía Gascón, who also plays Manitas). Four years later, the two meet again and start a nonprofit to identify cartel victims. Selena Gomez plays Jessi, Manita’s wife who believes her husband has died. Adriana Paz plays Epifanía, Emilia’s new love interest.
“It’s about all characters — not only the transition of Emilia Pérez, but they all transform themselves during the film. The thing that Jacques always says is, ‘Can we have two lives? Is one allowed to have two lives or is it going to end if you have two lives? What happens in this second life?'” Welfling says.
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“Two lives” is also one way to describe the film. “Emilia Pérez” swings back and forth between the gritty violence of cartel life and heightened, neon-lit musical numbers. Welfling had no experience in cutting musicals before and has seen musicals “but not that many.” She chose not to watch any before working on the film “because I knew this film would be different.” For one, unlike traditional musicals, narrative scenes frequently flowed into a diegetic song.
“Obviously you have to stick to the tempo and you have to be very vigorous when it comes to choreographed scenes and scenes with songs. This I learned,” she shares. “I hadn’t even been thinking about it. I was just thinking, ‘Oh, wow, it’s going to fun. Music, dance, I love it.’ But I didn’t think about the technical issues. It also has to intertwine. I didn’t want to make a difference between a musical scene and a drama scene. To me, they’re all the same. They’re all drama. Particularly in ‘Emilia Pérez,’ very often when a song starts, it’s part of the scene and you don’t know that they’re going to sing. They start singing, but the singing is also the lines as if it was the script. It tells the story. It’s not everything stops and then you have a song. It’s not like this. It’s always like a fluid way to go from drama to singing.”
And despite this being their first musical, Audiard and Welfling did not have many conversations beforehand about the editing style — but that’s just how they’ve always operated. “He expects me to do something he wouldn’t expect. He’s rather not say anything and the end of shooting, he will discover what we’ve done. Otherwise, he doesn’t interfere. He never interferes during shooting,” she says. “He wants me to make choices so that he will have a surprise when he comes to the cutting room.”
