Angelina Jolie and Pablo Larraín on How Opera Being ‘Beyond a Description’ Inspired Their Major Contender ‘Maria’

Angelina Jolie and Pablo Larraín had been wanting to work together for a long time when “Maria” came up. The filmmaker got his star interested in the role before he wrote the script (with her firmly in mind). The film, the third in his Great Woman trilogy (“Jackie,” “Spencer”) debuted to solid reviews in Venice (where Netflix picked it up) and Telluride and could return the Oscar-winning Jolie to the Best Actress race (she won Best Supporting Actress for “Girl, Interrupted” and received the honorary Jean Hersholt award).

In the film, plays the Greek opera diva in her last days in 1977 Paris, when she was losing her voice and taking strong drug cocktails that gave her hallucinations. She wanders through Paris in one fabulous outfit after another talking to imaginary journalist Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee) about many of her past lives, which we see in black-and-white flashback.

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The movie starts off with Callas in black-and-white close-up singing “Ave Maria” from Verdi’s opera “Otello.” She’s clearly singing, as her face muscles and breathing demonstrate. Ahead, the pair walk IndieWire through the preparation and production of an operatic film, in both sound and vision.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Anne Thompson: What was your reaction when you first saw the script?

Angelina Jolie: We met and talked about “Maria,” and then listened to music a lot. When the script came in, there was so much about it I loved. We talked even further, and we were discussing the character together. So it was a long process.

When I look at those luminous close-ups of you as Callas, I feel so much pain. What is her anguish, her unhappiness?

Jolie: There’s a beautiful thing about discovering, really listening to opera, where it’s a feeling that’s beyond a description, right? It’s such a complete feeling of being so open and human, and the totality of so much of the tragedies that she lived or played or felt or performed. Most people carry a great deal of pain. And so much of her art was the exploration of depth of emotion that she was able to connect to because she carried quite a lot. So I would never pretend to understand her completely, but I’m not sure it was an unhappiness as much as it was a relationship to deeply feeling life and tragedy.

Pablo Larraín: What you felt on those close-ups that you described as pain? Probably what drives you to think that is the music that you hear. If the music would have been different, wouldn’t that make you feel different too? The music of Callas is so charged with deep, deep emotions that not aren’t necessarily sad, but often it creates a layer where it’s unsettling, but very beautiful. It’s very moving, and it transports you into a space of transcendence.

Jolie: I’m 49. I do feel like an older woman now and I embrace that. When I was younger, there were certain pieces of music and certain sounds that matched what I was feeling: I was falling in love, or I was curious about this, or whatever I was going through. There is nothing that meets what you’re feeling like opera. [Some pieces] are so beautiful, so full of hope and so full of yearning. Opera is bigger. It is bigger than we allow ourselves to feel in every moment.

Did you do a deep dive into learning about opera, or were you already well-versed?

Jolie: I was not. I grew up in America. In other countries, they understand how essential and important it is, and it’s much more a part of the culture, but not where I was raised [Los Angeles]. I had been introduced to [Callas] but it was a complete discovery of this new art form, to come in and transform my life and teach me all of the different operas. I hope that most people however they relate to the film go into a discovery and they let themselves feel it and they try to sing it. If I can do it…

How did you both prepare for Angie to sing opera on-screen?

Larraín: Besides the technicality and the process that she went through, probably the best way to approach the character was to get into her music. I read eight biographies and I heard all kind of stories. I saw every single documentary that’s around. But it’s the music that lets you in and makes it so different. It was so important to open the film with “Ave Maria.” I said to her: “Let’s just kill the ghost in frame one. We are going to open with a close-up of you singing this piece of music.” And she was bold and said, “I love it.” OK!

Jolie: I had six months to go. So I thought, “we got plenty of time.” I was so terribly nervous that day. I was terrified.

Larraín: .I’ve been operating the camera lately in the movies that I do. Now no one else touches the camera, I don’t do the Steadicam, but everything else, like handheld or whatever. So we were very close, yeah, sometimes during the place of the performance.

It’s 35 millimeter?

Larraín: Yes.

Were you recording in a studio?

Larraín: She had different trainers. The first one was posture, breathing and accent, being able to properly sing mostly in Italian. And the second is the singing itself. That is about pitch. If we just play a song from a pop music say from Madonna, we could all maybe sing it out loud and be quite decent. You can’t do that with opera. No. You can’t follow the melody because of the pitch. So you have to follow the structure of the music and get there. John Warhurst, who is a musician and an engineer, has developed a way to work. He did it with Rami Malik, and now the new Michael Jackson movie, and Bob Marley and so on. He had never done it with opera before, so it was new for all of us. Angie had to wear an earpiece on the set and sing it out loud. And there was no other sound in there but her voice.

[Winces.]

Jolie: Exactly how I felt.

Larraín: So why do we do that? So we capture that sound. We not only have her voice, but we have breathing, every sound that comes out of Angie’s physicality is captured in the mix. So sometimes you hear most of it is Callas, as it should be in a movie about Maria Callas, when she’s singing well, right? And then in the present of the film, there’s more of Angie. Sometimes it’s 5 percent, sometimes 50, sometimes 70.

How do you sing badly?

Jolie: Callas not at her best is still better than everybody, the rest of the world.

Larraín: Because we do have some pieces of her own singing. A singer that is “losing her voice” is someone that cannot reach certain sort of notes anymore, and projection.

Did you have fun with the costumes by Massimo Cantini Parrini?

Jolie: I loved the costumes. Of course, they transform you. In my mind the Maria of the moment is when we were meeting her, the woman with the Greek features and the hair, who’s alone with her glasses and her life and her faith and her fragility. And so that [nubby white] robe actually was first for me, because it anchors the present. It was interesting being an actress, playing an actress, performing a role, because it felt like me and her were then performing a third character, which I’d never done.

Was she was always performing? Even with her own house team, she’s pretending, she’s lying.

Jolie: When she was in public, she was performing, certainly.

Larraín: She’s playing. It’s a game, of emotions, and it’s a game of relationships among them.

And you’re also monitoring Callas’ drug intake, because it’s affecting how she behaves? She’s on quaaludes and steroids.

Jolie: Yeah. The way that Steven Knight and Pablo handled that in the script, if you look closely at this film, there are many brave, unusual moves in the writing that could have been captured the wrong way. The drugs were handled in a unique way, because it was about what they were doing to her, what it was recalling, what it was opening, and why that was relevant.

The character Mandrax gives her the ability to talk and recall.

Jolie: And it brings her back to different operas. It brings her back to her mother. It makes her alone with herself in a way, as certain things do. It puts her in a slightly different place where she’s trapped inside so much of the past. It’s like a haunting.

ow documented is her past? Did her mother make her sing and also sleep with the Nazi soldiers?

Larraín: Among all the biographies, 70 percent of things are in common, they agree. And there’s a fragment of the different visions, different documentations that lends to different facts.

Did she talk about it?

Larraín: Not directly. She was oblique in certain letters that she wrote, but there’s enough documentation to think that that was possible. What happened in Greece back then, we wanted to be in a place of ambiguity. You could feel that that actually happened. Or some people don’t.

Jolie: We know she was under occupation. We know that she sang and her mother pushed her to sing for them.

Pablo Larrain: She was dating soldiers. That is something she said.

Anne Thompson: Pablo, is this the end of your famous women trilogy. It said, ‘final.’ Nothing’s ever final, right?

Larraín: It’s so true. I never planned to do three movies about these enormous figures of the second half of the 20th century. It accidentally happened.

I love when Callas disses President Kennedy.

Jolie: I love that scene too. It’s so good. You could tell I enjoyed performing it.

Larraín: That group [Aristotle Onassis, Jackie and John Kennedy, Maria Callas], it is quite extraordinary, the overlap. They were together that night. The famous scene when Marilyn Monroe sings to Kennedy, before that the same night on the same stage, Maria Callas sang “Carmen” to Kennedy in Madison Square Garden. Oh, it’s a hidden map. Every piece of music has a meaning in the opera and it’s related to what we’re saying in the film.

When Callas says goodbye to the dying Onassis as Jackie Kennedy is about to arrive, she was loving and sweet.

Larraín: Angie would always go for the exorcism of Maria, which is what I think happens to you in this hospital. She made me believe in the stoicism in the character that I didn’t foresee.

Jolie: Maybe that feels like how women handle those moments. She’s not somebody who allowed herself to be a victim. That’s the way she survived her life, her childhood, her mother’s cruelty, the press, by having that.

And you understand that too.

Jolie: Uh huh.

Larraín: She was able to understand it and to sing it, because that’s stoicism. It’s in the music.

“Maria” world premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, followed by a screening at Telluride. It will be available to stream on Netflix later this year.

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