Throughout Jacques Audiard’s groundbreaking film Emilia Pérez, characters express their most profound emotions through song. So, when a drug lord’s widow named Jessi, played by Selena Gomez, feels her anger and frustration boiling over, she pours her fury into the aggressive track “Bienvenida” — and is abruptly transported from her bedroom into a dark and moody space where she fronts a troupe of dancers, all of them channeling rage through movement.

Veteran performer Gomez was committed to perfecting the choreography for the sequence, designed by Damien Jalet (2018’s Suspiria). “I have about a thousand videos of me doing my song ‘Bienvenida’ on my phone,” says Gomez, who along with co-stars Karla Sofía Gascón and Zoe Saldaña had to master complex music and movement for the crime musical drama. “Damien is a beast, a complete master of all different styles of dance. I had to lose myself a bit. When I felt like I needed to be more in control, those were actually moments I needed to give in. It was very therapeutic in a way.”