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EXCLUSIVE: Angelina Jolie says that roles such as her portrayal of Maria Callas — arguably the greatest prima donna assoluta soprano of all time — in director Pablo Larraín‘s Maria, come along “once in a lifetime.”
The Academy Award-winning artist laughs, then adds, “I mean, it’s certainly the most challenging,” clearly referring to the seven months she spent learning six of the many dramatic arias most associated with Callas, who died of a heart attack at her Paris home on September 16, 1977. She was 53.
Larraín’s awards season movie, using a screenplay by Steven Knight, concerns itself with the coloratura soprano’s last days as she summons up memories of triumphs on the world’s most iconic opera stages and the realization that those artistic heights will not be achieved again, coupled with the tragedy of her love for shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis.
Jolie says that she had wanted to work with Larraín for a very long time, :and this kind of work is not asked of me very often. And if it’s asked of me, it’s not often with this kind of material and this director, so these things come once in a Iifetime.”
Her experience on the film, “to be in the footsteps of someone you truly admire,” as she puts it, “was beyond anything I could imagine, and it was a gift emotionally for me.”
The role, she says, “changed me as a person. It helped heal a part of me.”
How so, I asked? Jolie begins to answer, then hesitates as she imagines, one assumes, the headlines that would follow. Studying the life of Maria Callas would become strife with Brad Pitt.
“In some ways I can’t tell you,” she says. “It would be too personal to explain. But from that first day [on set] not being able to breathe and crying to singing at the top of my lungs at La Scala, Milan, those moments changed me.”
The scene was of her performing the mad scene in Gaetano Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, a moment of high, three-octave intensity that seamlessly melds the voices and Callas and Jolie. It’s a thrilling moment that places you, the audience, into an intimate space watching one supreme artist embodying another. Hers is a dizzying portrait of the utter depths that an artist of any theatrical discipline is required to explore to bring about an exultant performance. Pain, it’s clear, is a necessary component.
Jolie says that she hasn’t been able to listen to recordings of Callas performing “for some time” since filming ended, although, of course, she has attended screenings of the Netflix film at the Venice Film Festival, where the film had its world premiere, and its US premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. The Freemantle/The Apartment-produced picture plays the New York Film Festival screening Sunday and Monday, Sept. 30.
Maria receives a headline gala screening at the BFI London Film Festival on Oct. 18, with further showings on Oct. 19-20. The Netflix film plays in theaters from Nov. 27 and streams on the platform on Dec. 11, optimum dates for awards voters to focus on prestige movies.
But Jolie since hasn’t allowed herself to listen to Callas personally.
At a recent photo shoot for the film, she tells us, someone, “to be nice to me,” had Callas “blasting” out of speakers and it triggered “quite traumatic memories” of what it took for her to perform “these pieces.”
There’s a “sense memory of deep pain,” connected to hearing Callas’s arias, Jolie says. “So it’ll take a moment for me to listen to it, separate the experience of it, and then just listen to her again. I think it will take a moment. But I care for her deeply.”
Jolie says that to prepare to portray Callas, she started with the music. “The wonderful thing about Maria Callas is that Maria was a teacher and there’s a recording of her teaching how to perform, so I listened to her description and followed her instruction and she describes how discipline is everything. Don’t think about the feeling, don’t interpret the scenes… Understand the music, your voice is the instrument,” she explains.
Callas called the process “straight-jacketing,” says Jolie. “And you learn exactly what the composer intended. And until you know that so perfectly well, and only then, do you add your personal feelings and emotion to it.”
There were countless classes with many different teachers who guided Jolie on vocal technique, her singing pitch, and “everything from Italian to opera to posture, to breathing, which was kind of the hardest for me,” she says pointing to her diaphragm.
The diaphragm muscle, located at the bottom of your ribcage, regulates the amount of air you have in your lungs enabling you to project a full, on-pitch sound from your vocal cords as you sing. Callas excelled at controlling her breathing for her dramatic portrayals.
“You realize in order to sing with your full voice and your full emotion, you can’t hold [your breath]… All these nerves. You can’t hold them so you have to release them; all your feelings, all your pain all your hope. And that is the most vulnerable I’ve ever felt. The most naked as a performer,” Jolie says.
At her first breathing class she cried because “you don’t realize how much you have to hold in. And there was no way I could get to the music and sing, with her, the way she did, if I didn’t let it go.”
Larraín is sitting with us, in the two-floor suite of a discreet Telluride hotel, and listens intently as Jolie describes how she approached portraying Callas.
He takes issue with my point that Callas was born with a great instrument. That’s true, he nods but she worked on it. “She shaped it over the years and had an immense discipline more than any other. And she was able to put an amount of emotion and truth in her singing that made the big difference and made her who she was.”
Larraín observes that the roles Callas chose to perform, such as those in Verdi’s La traviata, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, and others, made those operas popular. “So if you look at the repertoire today in the world as we speak, it’s 50 percent of the repertoire that she sang. She popularized it,” he says. noting that it’s the film’s task to “pay tribute to her music and get to her life through the music.”
Jolie agrees and says that Callas’s aim was to remove the elitism associated with the world of opera and to make it accessible to “the people” and that she knew that matched Larraín’s intent, which was “to bring her to the people.”
The film very much does that by presenting Callas, yes, as the artist as goddess, but brings her down to earth, as someone who feels and has known pain, just as others do.
Opera, says Jolie, is often seen as “this thing that’s so precious that you can’t touch it,” whereas Maria is “trying to make it where you connect to it, where everybody can connect to it.”
Watching audiences at two screenings during the Telluride Film Festival, those connections were made, if the sobs one heard as the credits rolled is anything to go by.
Portraying Callas, has in a way, helped Jolie find her voice. Not in the conventional way we assume with that term. “Not in that power way that people say, not in that finding my voice or finding my strength. It wasn’t that. It was, in a way, about sitting with my vulnerability and finding the humanity and being just open and trusting.”
During one moment in Maria, Callas’s physician tells her that if she performs again, the agony she would need to endure to pull off such a performance, could kill her.
How do artists confront the agony required to achieve the ecstasy of a high octave performance whether it be on stage or screen — and why do they do it?
“It’s life,” Jolie responds.
“We get to live it so fully. What a blessing it is to be an artist. You live and you study life and emotion and feeling and connection,” she says.
Larraín suggests that “expressing other people’s pain can make you deal with your own, can make you help to transcend, maybe to the music in this case.”
Jolie agrees with that thesis and makes the point of her being able to give such a performance “in a safe place,” adding that she says that about Larraín’s set “and this world and her music and to be completely vulnerable and open and human.”
She says that Larraín gave her freedom to investigate and prepare to portray Callas. “And I never felt embarrassed for what I didn’t know about opera with Pablo. I never felt, like if I got something wrong, or I wasn’t sure, or I was still learning. It was a sharing of something. And I think that really helped us all on set just to feel like it was just a wonderful thing to create and share.”
It pains Jolie that Callas’s critics were so harsh about her when her great vocal abilities began to falter. “They were so cruel to her. How lonely she must have felt. How much of a failure she felt her voice was at the end. Just so much pain and so much loneliness.”
She finds solace, however, that decades after Callas’s death, people are sad about how she was treated.
“And we’re still talking about her,” says Larraín.
Jolie’s face brightens. “Yes, we’re still talking about her. Makes me feel like we’ve done something out of kindness for her.”
December 2 will mark 101 years since Callas’s birth.
Jolie smiles then loses herself in thought. After a moment she wonders aloud: “I wonder where we’ll be?”
