“Maria” auteur Pablo Larraín brought the closer of his trilogy to the 62nd annual New York Film Festival on Sunday, September 29. Set during the last days of opera icon Maria Callas’ life, the film follows Angelina Jolie transforming into the role of a lifetime, singing through grief, tragedy, and despair.
“I honestly have been seeking the story for many, many years,” Larraín told IndieWire. “Unlike the other two movies, ‘Jackie’ and ‘Spencer,’ this is the story of an artist. It’s a story of a woman that ended up being very shaped by the opera that she sang on stage.”
“I always wanted to make a movie about opera,” he continued. “It’s not easy. It’s unusual for cinema, but those are two of my greatest loves in my heart, opera and cinema. I’m very happy to be able to put them together in a movie, about a singer that really changed the history of opera, not only with the life, but with her voice and with her with her acting capacities. Maria Callas was someone that obviously had a wonderful voice, but also had a very strong discipline to work her characters.”
Though Jolie was not very familiar with opera before the film, the actress and Larraín previously shared with IndieWire how she prepared for the through extensive training. On the red carpet, the director walked us through how much of Jolie’s voice we actually hear in the film, versus Callas’ own.
“She had to train for a long time. She trained for over seven months. There’s breathing, there’s posture, there’s accent,” he said. “She sang in Italian and French, but mostly Italian. There’s, you know, what in music is called the pitch, which is the capacity to reach each note and follow the melody, and that was very challenging for her.”
He continued, “Everyone that does not sing, [including] myself, would have a very hard time doing it. This is not pop music. It’s not like you get in a car and put on a David Bowie song and you’ll be able to sing it. That’s not what it is. It’s just you can’t really sing opera unless you really, really train. We also wanted to capture her voice through certain technical things that you do; capture her voice, her breathing her, her every sound.”
Much of the work was also completed in post-production. “Later, in post-production, we were able to mix it with Maria Callas’ voice. So sometimes you hear 1 percent of Angelina’s voice, sometimes it’s 5 percent, sometimes it’s forty percent, in a couple of times, not very often, but it does happen, you listen to sixty percent or seventy percent of Angelina’s voice. Obviously, this is a movie about Maria Callas, so you wanna have Maria’s voice, but in order to make it believable, Angelina had to sing out loud in front of her crew and and hundreds of extras in order to make it possible.”
He added, “I think she did beautiful, beautiful work and makes it believable and makes the movie possible. Without that, none of this could happen. Even if you have a great performance and everything is beautiful, if you don’t believe that she’s actually singing, there’s no movie, and I think she pulled it off. We had the help of a number of people that are experts are on it and so I’m happy that that it actually works.”
In the United States, the film will have a two-week run in over 25 cities through Netflix, before being showcased on the streamer itself. While a different theatrical run and experience from his other two biopics, Larraín praised Netflix and is optimistic about how the movie watching landscape is constantly evolving.
“I think it is good. Look, I think it’s the reality. We can try to do things. We can try to improve things, but the reality is that streaming is conducting how things are,” he said. “They have a very strong voice and a very strong influence in how we see movies. When I make a movie, I prefer that it is always on the big screen. But at the same time, you get to meet and work with people like the team that they have at Netflix and they’re like family. They’re very nice people.They’re very organized, very respectful. They care about movies. I think they do care about cinema. That’s my experience with them. I did ‘El Conde’ with them, and now I did this movie. I’m happy and proud to work with them.”
He added, “I think everything is going to change very quickly. I have that feeling. I think that everything changed very fast from the classical theatrical system to the streaming. And now it’s going to change again.”
“Maria” will debut in select U.S. theaters on Wednesday, November 27 before hitting the streamer on Wednesday, December 11. Check out the teaser here.
