Audiard explained to Indiewire that he initially planned to tell the story of ‘Emilia Pérez’ as an opera after making the movie. While those plans were eventually put on hold, he folded his operatic ideas into the film to make it feel even more expressionistic and politically charged.
“The operatic way of thinking led to a certain stylization which is still in the DNA of the project,” Audiard said. “There’s always a social or existential tragedy behind it, which makes it all worthwhile. So you have a country that is falling apart, or you have people that are not well in their own skin. So the musical comedy style helps carry that through musical drama, where singing and dancing do play a role. Because when you write a standard script, you start out, you have a setup, you have a few pages of that, and then the plot moves forward. But when all of a sudden, you have a song that breaks out, within a second, you hit the emotion immediately, you understand the meaning. There’s an efficacy that a standard script would not grant you.”
