Three-time Academy Award-nominated composing duo Camille and Clément Ducol joined Jacques Audiard’s genre-defying musical “Emilia Perez” in 2019 when the film was still in its early treatment stage. This gave them the rare opportunity to experiment with diverse musical styles as the characters took shape on the page.
The French composers—whose songs “El Mal” and “Mi Camino” have both been nominated for Best Original Song at the Oscars—crafted a score that authentically embraces Spanish lyrics and musical arrangements, with a deep emphasis on storytelling through music.
“[The language] is very powerful, dramatic, and truthful,” Camille explains. “There’s something about the vowels, especially in Mexico—they’re very pure. I think it’s a key element in the storytelling.”
Premiering at Cannes in May 2024, “Emilia Perez” follows Rita (Zoe Saldaña), a disillusioned lawyer in Mexico who is hired by a cartel boss to help him undergo gender reassignment surgery and become Emilia Perez (Karla Sofía Gascón). However, years later, Emilia’s wife, Jessie (Selena Gomez), and their two children are unexpectedly pulled back into Emilia’s world when Rita is forced to reunite the fractured family—and Emilia’s carefully constructed life begins to unravel.
The film, which has won both the Golden Globe and Critics’ Choice Awards, is bold, vibrant, and highly innovative. The musical numbers serve as driving forces in the narrative, with each genre shift underscoring character evolution. This approach was particularly crucial in “El Mal,” a pivotal song in which Rita must persuade crime bosses to fund a nonprofit dedicated to finding missing persons.
“We had the song, but Zoe’s performance on set really blew us away,” Ducol recalls. “Initially, it was more electronically arranged, but when Jacques [Audiard] visited the studio during ADR, he told us it needed more range—it had to sound raw, dustier, dirtier. So, we rebuilt and reshaped the song to fit Zoe’s vocal energy, and now it feels like a cabaret in hell.”
Camille and Clément Ducol sat down with Awards Focus to discuss their journey through the awards season, how “Mi Camino” and “El Mal” evolved once Saldaña and Gomez were cast, and the compositional threads that connect the film’s soundtrack.
Awards Focus: You’ve been on a whirlwind awards circuit. What has been your biggest takeaway from meeting your peers and attending events?
Camille: Yesterday was the last Q&A with Rufus Wainwright, so that was so neat. He’s one of my favorite singer-songwriters. I remember in Middleburg, my first luncheon with my peers, I went with Diane Warren and Taura Stinson. You get to know these wonderful people along the way, and it makes us feel like we’re a part of a community for a very short time. we’re very happy we made the choice to stay in LA during the awards season to get in touch with these people.
AF: At what point in the development of “Emilia Perez” did you join the project, and can you talk about the initial conversations with director Jacques Audiard about the mixture of genres that would become the musical soundtrack?
Clément Ducol: It has been a long journey since 2019. We spent almost three years building a story in music because Jacques wanted us to build the story with music. We didn’t have a script, only a treatment. So we built everything: songs, music, and the score. Everything is linked and woven together. As the music shifts along with the character, it’s a story of emancipation and evolution and explains why we explored so many different genres in the music because the characters are always evolving.
Camille: We were having a discussion about it in the car last night. We have a very eclectic approach to music. We love lots of different kinds of music, and we listen to a lot of different styles. Also, myself being a vocalist, I felt the vocals allow you to go through so many different genres, so we explored different genres in the songs, especially because the characters are all different.
Rita is the rapper, preacher, and hot rocker; Emilia sings more ballads, talking about how she feels inside. Jessie is more of a pop icon in a way of freeing herself, and Epifania is more of a lady from the people. She sings a beautiful folk song at the end. These different characters imposed their styles, and the vocals allowed us, in the score, to bind it all together and to also explore different genres of choruses behind the story.
AF: So, when you’re exploring these different genres, is there a connective tissue through each song, like an instrument or composition, that you used as a throughline to connect the music?
Camille: In terms of the instrument, the vocals, the breaths, the percussions, the electronic effects, and the orchestra, they give power to the composition.
Ducol: There’s a song, one song that really marks out the drama of Emilia Perez. In this song, “Deseo,” where she talks about wanting to become a woman, we use the harmonical material of these songs. The song’s chorus is the harmonic framework for several parts of the score, before, after, and at the end of the film.
Camille: Before the song, during the confession to the doctor, and after the song for the final scene where Rita is in the desert, when they all fight, and when Emilia is dying.
Ducol: And also in the scene where Jessie calls her lover, Gustavo. The melody of the chorus is also used in several parts of the score, so from this same harmony of the song, two other themes were born.
AF: Were you writing the songs in French and translating them to Spanish as you composed them, or were you always translating them into Spanish to ensure a musical and lyrical connection?
Camille: There was no transposition. You can’t work that way because melodies derive from words. If you want to be genuine, you need to give into the Mexican language, and then you will sound generally Mexican. We are French, and we didn’t want to write like Mexican musicians because we are not, but the language helped us incorporate Mexicanity because it’s the Mexican language.
When you sing in a language, naturally, you evoke the landscapes, the birds, the flowers, people, smells, and languages. It’s so evocative. So, I wrote the lyrics in Mexican Spanish and had a Mexican language consultant because we wanted to make sure it was correct. When Clement was composing, he had that music in mind. Sometimes, I would tell him this doesn’t work for Spanish and that we need to change the melody slightly or put the accentuation there. Or, I’m going to have to drop a syllable or completely adapt the melody to make sure it fits.
Ducol: It’s a beautiful musical language, full of rhythm and great musicality. It’s so powerful.
Camille: It’s very powerful, dramatic, and truthful. There’s something with the vowels, especially in Mexico, it’s very pure. I think it’s really key to the storytelling because Spanish is a gendered language with the masculine and feminine, so I worked around that to echo Emilia’s puff.
AF: “El Mal” and “Mi Camino” have both been nominated for Academy Awards for best song. How did the songs evolve when Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez were cast in their roles?
Ducol: We had the song for “El Mal,” but we were very impressed by Zoe’s performance on set. At first the song was more electronically arranged. It was warm. Then Jacques came to the studio while we were doing ADR and said we need more range and to have a raw sound, dustier.. dirtier. We brought a live band into the studio, guitar, drums, bass, and a small keyboard I played, and we rebuilt the song and reshaped it on her vocal image, and now it sounds like a cabaret in hell. The orchestra is full of dynamics, variation, and surprise.
Camille: The staging was made possible because there are so many things going on with the extras’ faces, and Zoe’s interactions with them helped us enrich the arrangements and create those dynamics.
For Selena, the song didn’t exist before she joined the cast. There was a song for the scene, but it lacked depth. It was kind of luscious, a sexy tune. We also had a nice punk song for that scene, but that was a little redundant with the “Bienvenida” song that came before.
When Selena joined the cast, Jacques had an epiphany and said we need to save the soldier Jessie to save the character. The character is too superficial, and we’re not attached to her. She’s responsible for Emilia’s death in the end, and we need to love her no matter what; she needs to be someone you get attached to. Jacques asked us to watch her documentary “My Mind and I” before we met, and we found that self-portrait to be very brave and very touching. We immediately came up with “Mi Camino”. It’s a melancholic song, but it’s also a song that gives the character strength and that whoever Jessie is at that point of the story, she loves herself and wants to be loved the same way she loves herself.
It’s really pivotal because Rita’s worried that Jessie’s partying too much, and actually, the tenderness of the love in the scene just blows all these doubts away. This couple is so lovely, and you feel like you want to sing along with them. It’s very intimate and erases all doubts to make the ending even more tragic. Both these songs are at each character’s peak before the ending.