‘Emilia Pérez’ director regrets comments made about Spanish: “I happen to enormously love the language”

Since being released last year, ’Emilia Pérez’ has received plenty of plaudits, but also no shortage of criticism.

‘Emilia Pérez’ leads Oscar nominations

The Spanish-language film, which tells the story of a trans cartel leader who enlists the help of a lawyer to help her transition into a woman and disappear, has received a leading 13 nominations at the 97th Academy Awards, to be held on March 2. It also won four Golden Globes in January. Both achievements are records for a non-English language movie at those ceremonies.

However, ‘Emilia Pérez’ has also had a significant amount of negative press, for different reasons.

Gascón, Selena Gomez and Audiard criticism

It was discovered lead actress Karla Sofía Gascón had made a series of offensive remarks, including ones that were racist and Islamophobic in nature, on social media, where she also controversially posted about diversity at the Oscars, China’s involvement in the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 death of George Floyd.

Selena Gómez was criticized for not working hard enough to get her Spanish up to scratch, which she herself admitted. There was a certain amount of backlash in Mexico about the way elements of Mexican life and culture were portrayed, especially related to drug cartels.

What did Jacques Audiard say about the Spanish language?

Additionally, director Jacques Audiard, who hails from France, caused outrage in the Spanish-speaking world by claiming last year that “Spanish is a language of developing countries, it’s a language of countries of few means, of poor people, of migrants…”.

In a new interview, however, he has attempted to repair the damage done by declaring his love for Spanish.

“I’m drawn to things that don’t belong to the domain of my native language, and I happen to enormously love the Spanish language," Audiard told Deadline. “I wanted to make an international film. Now, if you’re going to make an international film, there’s not a lot of languages that you have to choose from. There’s English and there’s Spanish.

“Spanish is such a rich language that crosses borders. What’s been said about my statement is actually exactly the opposite of what I think. I worked five years on this film and for it to now be denigrated in this way, it’s really simply too much.”

72-year-old Audiard is nominated in the Best Director category at the upcoming Academy Awards for the very first time.

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