By Robert Goldrich, The Road To Oscar Series, Part 2

LOS ANGELES --

Editor Juliette Welfling has a track record of close-knit, heartfelt collaboration with writer-director Jacques Audiard, a four-time BAFTA Award nominee for Best Film not in the English Language–starting with The Beat That My Heart Skipped in 2006, then A Prophet in 2010, Rust and Bone in 2013, and Dheepan in 2017. He won for The Beat That My Heart Skipped and A Prophet.

Welfling cut three of those features: A Prophet, Rust and Bone, and Dheepan. And that shared filmography has since grown to most recently include Emelia Pérez, the Oscar buzz-worthy film from Netflix. Welfling herself is not stranger to Academy Award banter. In fact, she earned a Best Achievement in Film Editing Oscar nomination in 2008 for director Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Emelia Pérez is a hybrid musical/drama/thriller which introduces us to a talented but undervalued lawyer named Rita (portrayed by Zoe Saldana) who receives a lucrative offer out of the blue from a feared drug cartel boss who’s looking to retire from his sordid business and disappear forever by becoming the woman he’s always dreamt of being (Karla Sofía Gascón in a dual role as Manitas Del Monte/Emilia Pérez). Rita helps pull this off, orchestrating the faked death of Del Monte who leaves behind a widow (Jessi, played by Selena Gomez) and kids. While living comfortably and contently in her/their new identity, Pérez misses the children. Pérez once again enlists Rita–this time to return to family life, reuniting with the kids by pretending to be their aunt, the sister of Del Monte. Now as an aunt, Pérez winds up adopting a more altruistic bent professionally, spearheading a nonprofit/charity for those who have lost loved ones due to foul play or other dire, mysterious circumstances. Along the way Pérez meets one such surviving victim (Adriana Paz) and a romance develops between them. Eventually, though, trouble enters the narrative when Jessi falls in love with a man, sparking Del Monte’s jealous, dark side.

As for what drew her to Emelia Pérez, Welfling provided some backstory. “I read the first version of the script in 2019 and was immediately taken by the originality and modernity of the story. The script was very different back then, there was no song and dance yet, the character of Rita (Saldana) was a man… everything evolved enormously between 2019 and 2024, but from the start I knew that this script would one day lead to an incredible film unlike any I’d seen before, and that it would be a magical and inspiring working experience for me.

“I also loved the idea that this crazy film would also be a musical,” continued Welfling. “I love the singer Camille, who wrote and composed the songs with Clément Ducol, I love the choreographer Damien Jalet, I’d never done a musical before, and I was very excited to try my hand at such an adventure. And above all, I love Jacques Audiard!”

That love for Audiard runs deep and goes back many years. “Jacques Audiard and I met when we were in our twenties,” recalled Welfling. “We were both trainee editors at the time, and close friends. He always told me: ‘If one day I make a film, you’ll be the one to edit it.’ A dozen years later he made his first film, Look How They Fall, and I edited it.

“Since then, I’ve edited all his films. I can’t imagine not editing one of his films, and I don’t think he can either! Emilia Perez is our tenth film together, and I hope we’ll make many more. I trust what he shoots, and he trusts what I cut! The more the years go by, the greater our mutual trust. Jacques and I feel very free to try out anything that comes to mind, even the wildest ideas. We feel very free to deviate from the script if need be, to change the construction, to cut scenes without regret. Really, freedom is the key word in our work. I don’t know the ‘rules’–or if I do, I try to forget them. I just want to be guided by my heart and my emotions. That’s what we did on Emilia Perez, as on all Jacques’ other films. Emilia Perez isn’t a realistic film at all, which allows for all kinds of freedom and daring. The only thing about Emelia Pérez that was different from the other films was the musical part. The singing and, above all, the dancing parts demand great rigor. It’s the tempo of the song and the choreography that guide the editing, and you can’t deviate from that. Here, you have to try to respect the rules!”

Welfling noted that Emelia Pérez was inherently challenging in that it is “a multi-faceted film, mixing many genres: comedy, musical, drama, melo, film noir…The challenge was to make these genres cohabit in the most fluid and natural way possible. In the film, the four female characters are not the same at the end as they were at the beginning, which is perhaps also what justifies these constant genre changes and helps them to flow.

“Secondly, the singing and choreography. Often in musicals, everything stops when the characters start singing and dancing. Here, the songs flow naturally from the dialogue; they’re part of the scene. Within the scenes, we wanted to move almost imperceptibly from speech to song and dance and back again.

“From a technical point of view,” continued Welfling, “the challenge was, as I said earlier, to be rigorous enough to ensure that the singing and dancing scenes were technically perfect. I was helped in this by the entire sound postproduction team, and by the musicians themselves (Camille and Clément Ducol). Throughout the editing process, there was a lot of discussion between us. We all really worked together. And with VFX too. Almost the entire film is shot in studio, with blue screen.

“But I don’t know if they were really challenges, because it all came naturally. Once again, for me, following my emotions is the way to solve the problems that can arise in editing!”

Reflecting on her experience on Emelia Pérez, Welfling said, “What I take away first and foremost from the film is that it was a great and wonderful adventure for me, and I think for the whole team. A jump into the unknown. It was a lot of work, it took a long time, but I think we all learned a lot, because almost none of us had ever done a musical, and we also learned a lot from the characters in the film and their wonderful actresses. I can only speak of the postproduction team, but we were all very close-knit, we were all so enthusiastic, and we were all aware that we were making a very, very, very special film. A film like few others. And for every problem we encountered, we tried to solve them together. I don’t know if I can say that this film is the film of my life, because I’ve made many others which at the time were all the films of my life, but in any case I took great pleasure in it, and I can’t thank Jacques Audiard enough for giving me such a gift.”

This is the second installment of our weekly 16-part The Road To Oscar Series of feature stories. Nominations for the 97th Academy Awards will be announced on Friday, January 17, 2025. The 97th Oscars will be held on Sunday, March 2, 2025.

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