‘Emilia Pérez’ composers Clément Ducol and Camille on how film’s music ‘is about breaking the rules’
Duo behind the music for the Netflix hit share the joy of writing songs in a language they don’t know for a cast largely of non-singers.
Back in 2019 when they began the journey that would result in Emilia Pérez, the singer-songwriter known simply as Camille (pronounced “Cami”) and Clément Ducol — partners in both life and music — were pitched an idea that seemed at the time almost impossibly audacious. The proposed movie would center on a brutal Mexican drug cartel boss who wishes finally to live as his authentic self, hiring an attorney to help him arrange to undergo gender-reassignment surgery and disappear while at the same time relocating his wife and children to start a new life without him/her.
It’s not exactly mainstream territory on which to craft a full-on musical. But this was the loose idea that French filmmaker Jacques Audiard had in mind, and Camille recalls in an interview with Gold Derby that neither she nor Ducol was much fazed by the concept. In fact, they instantly took the bold premise to heart.
“My first thought was that it was genius,” Camille remembers, “that it was Shakespearean. And I’ve continued to think the same the whole way through. There’s not one minute where I haven’t felt inspired by the story. … Art is about breaking the rules and breaking barriers and making worlds that have never met.”
The ultimate result is a film that has generated universal praise, especially for the wildly original 16 original songs crafted by Camille and Ducol along with a powerful score, for which they are also responsible. Their score and the standout Emilia Pérez tunes “El Mal” and “Mi Camino” made the Academy Awards shortlist while also earning nominations for the Golden Globes, the Critics Choice Awards, and the Society of Composers and Lyricists after having won the Soundtrack Award for Best Composers at Cannes last spring. Not bad for a French couple having to write songs in Spanish, a language they do not in fact know.
When Audiard initially contacted the duo, he didn’t even have a script first draft finished, just a loose 20-page treatment for a story that would significantly evolve. Having the opportunity to start with the filmmaker from scratch “gave us a lot of freedom,” Ducol points out. “We were just pointing out a scene that could be used for a song and we were absolutely free to work on our songs without any structure.”
“Jacques never came with preconceived ideas,” Camille adds. “Especially in the first stages when you’re writing a story, it’s so nice because the mind can go anywhere. It’s limitless.”
Camille emphasizes that the character of Rita played by Zoe Saldaña was originally written by Audiard as a male character but the filmmaker changed his mind “within a day” of pitching Camille and Ducol his premise.
“He was going to be named Kaminsky,” Ducol notes.
“And come from Argentina,” Camille says.
Emilia Pérez stars Saldaña (Rita), trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón (Manitas del Monte/Emilia), Adriana Paz (the widow Epifania), and Selena Gomez (wife Jessi) in key roles. Gascón, who plays the film’s titular character first as a man and later a woman, sings on camera for the first time in the film. Saldaña, who portrays the attorney at the heart of the movie, had sung before but never in Spanish or onscreen.
“I really enjoyed working with non-singers,” Ducol explains through an interpreter. “It was very inspiring to me. I come from a classical music background, so I’m used to having a lot of theory in my head. I really enjoyed working with actors and actresses because I had a much more direct connection to the emotion. It added inspiration.”
Camille also took to teaching non-singers like Gascón to croon. “Zoe too sometimes felt insecure with her singing because she’s such a performers, such an accurate artist that she was not in her comfort zone.” But particularly on the showstopping tune “El Mal,” Saldaña brings plenty of vocal ability to the table. “Many times, Zoe told me, ‘Listen, Camille, I’m not a singer’,” Camille recalls. “I told her, ‘Yes, you’re a wonderful singer.'”
How were songwriter-composers whose native language is French able to convincingly pull off writing a collection of songs in Spanish? Camille took Spanish in school, and Ducol spent his early years in Spain, but neither had a sufficient underpinning in the language to craft lyrics on their own. That’s where the project’s language consultants Karla Aviles and Ignacio Chávez were so valuable. Both are Mexican, and they served as guides to Camille and Ducol.
“Karla and Ignacio really helped us make everything correct in a very early stage in terms of pronunciation and cultural accuracy,” Camille stresses. “We had lots of conversations about the language and the culture and everything that’s going on in Mexico.” She grew to love, and learn, the language as the project went on. “Mexican Spanish is very beautiful, very pure. It’s a very interesting language to write songs with because it’s full of vowels but also very percussive. There are lots of accentuations you can play with.”
“For me,” Ducol interjects, “Spanish was [merely] one more instrument in the orchestra that we used.”
Emilia Pérez is streaming on Netflix.