Emilia Pérez make-up artist Julia Floch-Carbonel talks to Screen about her Bafta‑nominated work on Jacques Audiard’s ode to the power of transformation.
It would be fair to say Emilia Pérez, which marks the second time make-up artist Julia Floch-Carbonel has worked with Jacques Audiard, represents a big leap forward in scope and scale from her first film for the director. Black-and-white drama Paris, 13th District (2021) is a low-key drama focusing on characters sharing an apartment in the Les Olympiades district of the French capital. Emilia Pérez, an audacious musical melodrama about a Mexican cartel boss who fakes his own death and undergoes gender reassignment to start a new life, presented a more challenging proposition.
“Emilia was a lot more ambitious because of subject matter, the casting, the stylisation and how much we pushed the envelope,” says Floch-Carbonel, who first came to the filmmaker’s attention after working on films such as Elia Suleiman’s It Must Be Heaven (2019) and Blandine Lenoir’s I Got Life! (2017), then meeting Audiard’s artistic director Virginie Montel.
Floch-Carbonel serves as chief make-up artist on Emilia Pérez alongside Simon Livet, and worked closely with make-up special effects head Jean-Christophe Spadaccini. All are Bafta-nominated for their work alongside the fourth corner of the make-up and hair team, hair department head Romain Marietti.
All of the film’s characters undergo a change of some kind as the story progresses, but none more so than Karla Sofia Gascon, who plays the title character. We first meet Gascon as Manitas, the powerful but troubled drugs lord desperate for a new life of fulfilment, and then as Emilia, the sophisticated, monied philanthropist she transforms into. For Floch-Carbonel, the challenge was in finding a way to underline the differences without tipping over into clichés or caricatures.
While Manitas was initially designed to look like a classic 1970s narcos with curly hair, that approach was ditched when Floch-Carbonel joined the project six months before the film began shooting. “Jacques wanted a scary look,” she says of the director’s vision of Manitas. “‘Chimera’ was a word he used a lot. Karla has a very full mouth and that made me think about Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler. I thought that would work as believable and scary.”
Floch-Carbonel and Spadaccini came up with a look that made Gascon’s eyes seem closer together which, along with a prosthetic nose and cheeks and the teeth grill, began to bring out the character. “We added pockmarking to the skin to suggest old acne scarring and tattoos under the eyes because facial tattooing still has a stigma in many cultures,” says Floch-Carbonel.
The half beard that Manitas sports came about by chance. Livet had added a full beard and Floch-Carbonel was taking photos while it was being removed; a picture with the moustache missing caught Audiard’s eye. “The whole Manitas look was about blurring Karla’s features as much as possible, so we get a wow effect when we see her as Emilia,” says Floch-Carbonel. “[With Manitas], we wanted to lose Karla’s features and the only thing that remained was her mouth, but even there I put shadows on the inside to change the shape.”
Powerful transformations
The team approached the task of working with Gascon with some trepidation, worried that perhaps the transgender actress would find the process of being transformed into a man triggering. “Karla begged to play both roles,” says Floch-Carbonel. “Manitas is so far from her own self and she was happy to have so much to play with as an actor. She was such a great help and the most joyful collaborator. She was also completely at ease with the prosthetics. The make-up took three hours first time, but we got it down to two.”
Floch-Carbonel was keen to present the first appearance of Gascon as Emilia, swaddled in bandages as she recuperates in hospital after the operation, as a rebirth. “I wanted a lot of texture to mirror that,” she explains, “so there is moisture and bruising to show the violence of the surgery. Karla offered us a lot of documentation from her own transition. Jacques wanted to reference Gustave Courbet’s [graphic painting of an unidentified woman’s vulva] ‘L’Origine Du Monde’ so we would see what she sees when she holds up a mirror to herself. We made a prosthetic that we were very proud of but in the end it wasn’t used, which was the right decision.”
After that introduction, Emilia is next seen four years later in a smart London restaurant, now relaxed and confident in elegant cocktail wear and refined hair and make-up. “Karla is a sexy Latin woman but Jacques didn’t want [the kind of] sexy which could be a cliché,” notes Floch-Carbonel. “When the audience and Rita [played by Zoe Saldana] first see her as Emilia she has to look like a movie star, but it’s a softer look so we gave her a timeless, maternal beauty. And we gave her a soft blonde wig, which helped change her aesthetic.
“I also adapted her make-up as the film progresses,” she continues. “At the fundraising gala she has red lips to match the passion of the speech she makes and to match Rita’s red velvet suit. And we made her softer and more simple as she gets her charity going.”
Gascon’s co-star Saldana brought her personal make-up artist Vera Steimberg onto the project, but the team had already planned the look before she arrived. “Zoe is very beautiful, it’s like she’s in slow motion when she walks into a room,” says Floch-Carbonel. “So the first step was to make her as inconspicuous as we could, because she needs to disappear into the background in the early part of the film. We gave her bushy eyebrows, lines around the mouth and shadows under her eyes and a wig which was curlier. In the second half, she’s herself, with her own eyebrows and hair because now she has the confidence that has come with professional success.”
Simon Livet was tasked with designing the look of Manitas’s wife Jessi, played by Selena Gomez. “Jessi is very girly, with dark hair and long nails. She’s a bit of a cliché,” says Floch-Carbonel. “During the four years she’s in Europe after Manitas ‘dies’, she becomes independent and strong, free from Manitas’s power over her. We thought of Debbie Harry [as inspiration] so gave her a peroxide wig with black roots.
“Her make-up is shiny,” she continues. “When you shoot in the studio, you have to catch the light as much as you can so the make-up had to be shiny. Studios offer a lot of possibility to highlight the stylisation, which was great, but we always had to think about catching the light where we could. That can sometimes be tricky, especially when you’re working with prosthetics.”
After Emilia Pérez — which Netflix acquired out of Cannes last year for both North America and the UK — Floch-Carbonel went on to work with Luc Besson on Dracula: A Love Tale, her second film with the maverick French director after Dogman, which also played with gender identities. She has several projects lined up, including a futuristic film and a gender-flipped Count Of Monte Cristo project.
“I studied drawing at school because I wanted to paint people, then I went into film make-up because I’ve always been a film lover,” recounts Floch-Carbonel. “So now I’m still painting people, but in a different way.”
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