The team that engineered the audio for musical Emilia Pérez had an intriguing and entirely unique task: They were charged with creating the soundscape for a film about life in Mexico that, for the most part, wasn’t filmed in Mexico at all. French director Jacques Audiard, ever the innovator, took on the Kubrickian task of building sets and filming most of the film on a soundstage outside of Paris, lending a sense of operatic, stylized grandeur. And that meant that everyone on board — from stars Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, and Zoe Saldaña to the expansive team of filmmaking artisans — had to ride with Audiard through this audacious creative journey, one with more twists, turns, and ear-splitting exuberance than a rollercoaster. 

Audiard’s singular vision — an unexpected and captivating story of a cartel leader who seeks the help of defense attorney Rita (Saldaña) to fake her own death so she can finally seek gender-affirming care — is part crime noir, part family drama, part comedy. In addition to the stellar performances and script, Emilia Pérez is told through incredibly evocative music and songs crafted by Clément Ducol and Camille. For audio team members sound supervisor and re-recording mixer Cyril Holtz, supervising sound editor Aymeric Devoldère, and supervising music editor Maxence Dussère, that meant bringing equilibrium between spoken and sung portions of dialogue. “One of the primary goals of the film was to create a completely organic sonic and musical fabric in which the boundaries between dialogues, songs, music, and sounds are seamless,” says Holtz, who worked on the project for about two years from prep all the way to mixing. “It’s about the subtle and lively integration of all the sound elements — their energy, their movement, their unpredictability, and the way they quietly or wildly reflect the situations and emotional states of the characters without drawing too much attention.” 

Rita (Zoe Saldaña)

To do so, the team — which also included voice editor Hortense Bailly, ADR supervisor Carolina Santana, re-recording mixer Niels Barletta, and production sound mixer Erwan Kerzanet — turned to fascinating technological solutions, including originative manipulations of reverb and pitch. “We used a technique we call parlé-chanté in French, which could be translated as ‘spoken-sung’ — a mode that often served as a bridge between conversations and songs. In some cases, we requested A.D.R. retakes to perfectly match the tone and timbre of the songs, which were themselves an intricate blend of multiple sources,” Holtz says. It was made all the more dynamic because different emotional beats in the genre-defying musical had different needs; the team created sound bubbles, for instance, to connote isolation in some moments, whereas for a song like “Deseo,” where Emilia reveals to Rita her deep longing for a life as her authentic self, they musicalized the sounds of a truck to contribute to the rhythm. “There was never a systematic method,” Holtz says. “Each song dictated its own rules and approach.”

For the more atmospheric aspects of the film, they strived to capture the way particular slices of Mexico would actually sound. “There was a need to re-create Mexico,” says supervising sound editor Devoldère. “Knowing that the film was shot in the studio, it really had to be the embodiment of these atmospheres. This was a second axis of hard work.” Which is to say, like all good musicals, it needed to blur the lines between reality and illusion, the environmental sounds of day-to-day existence in balance with the razzle-dazzle of fantasy and cinematic magic. “There were many challenges, but in a general sense, I’d say the biggest one was creating a soundtrack that doesn’t just revisit the codes of a musical but,” Holtz says, “without claiming absolute truth, convinces the audience of the authenticity of something that is pure fiction.”

Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón)

Take scenes set in a bustling Mexican market. Since the team wasn’t able to travel to Mexico to record audio themselves, they accessed a sound library, compiled by composer Leo Heiblum, of general sounds from Mexico City, including cityscapes, traffic, markets, and crowds. They also reached out to French engineer and artist Félix Blume, who had done extensive recording in Mexico, and, under the supervision of Rodrigo Sacic, the sound librarian at Poly Son, where the film’s sound was finalized in postproduction. They itemized all of the libraries to make the various noises easily accessible during the editing process. For one market scene — an encounter with the so-called “lady in black,” a grieving mother who reminds Emilia of her past crimes as a cartel leader  — they were hoping to portray “the density, colors, and unique soundscape of Mexico City.” “The sequence begins with a long Steadicam shot sweeping through various stands and stalls in the market,” Holtz says. “We used production sound recordings as a foundation, precisely editing voices to place them spatially in line with the camera movement. We also created ‘outside’ market layers — cars, trucks, or mopeds, some with and without music. The Doppler effect on these passing vehicles helped convey the ‘offscreen’ environment of the market.”

All in all, sound editing is a delicate and incredibly important art, especially for a film like this. And paradoxically, the better it is, the more it can fade into the background. But that was okay for Holtz and the rest of his team — they were there to serve the story, a squad of sound experts to ensure that Emilia Pérez would end up as sonically compelling as it was in plot, appearance, and performances. “We tried to contribute to the pact that Emilia Pérez offers its audience: to believe in its world, its story, in everything it has that is both deeply serious and wildly absurd,” says Holtz. “Because if you believe in this pact, you will be surprised and moved, like in a magic show, or in life itself.”