VF: Angelina Jolie gives a ‘defining, crowning, staggering performance’ as Maria Callas

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Pablo Larrain’s Maria will premiere at the Venice Film Festival this week, reportedly on Thursday. This is Angelina Jolie’s first starring role in several years, and her first period drama in more than a decade. Maria also marks the third film in Larrain’s trilogy of “tragic and famous women,” following Jackie and Spencer. Angelina plays Maria Callas, the American opera singer who mostly worked and lived in Europe as an adult. Callas also famously had an affair with Aristotle Onassis and he treated her very badly. Well, Vanity Fair had a great “awards insider” exclusive with Larrain, and this is doing so much to get people hyped for the film. Some highlights:

How Larrain approached Angelina: Pablo Larraín had met Angelina Jolie a few times over the years, and hoped one day to make a movie with her. In 2021, just as he’d wrapped post-production on Spencer, his disorienting portrait of Princess Diana, the Chilean director had found just the project—his next English-language movie. “I talked to Angie and said, ‘Look, I’d like to make a movie with you. I won’t tell you what it is, but please go and see Spencer,’” he tells me. Larraín rented out a screening room on the Paramount lot for Jolie to see the movie, featuring Kristen Stewart in an Oscar-nominated turn, and awaited Jolie’s reaction. She watched, called him up, raved and raved, and told him she wanted to work together. Larraín did not hesitate in his reply: “Would you play Maria Callas?”

She took a few days to decided to do it: Jolie was taken aback. She took a few days to think about it. She had just been asked to portray one of the most renowned opera singers of the 20th century by a filmmaker known for creating emotionally intense, unrelenting, and dreamlike character studies. By the time she said yes, though, she’d fallen in love with the idea…. Larraín, who grew up going to the opera in Santiago with his mother, immersed himself in Callas’s voice and devised a “musical map” for the film, with her work providing the movie’s entire soundscape. And Jolie began her own training, which lasted over six months in total—and resulted in a defining, crowning, at times staggering performance.

The bulk of the movie is set in ’70s Paris near the end of Callas’s life: “She became the sum of the tragedies that she played on stage,” Larraín says. “The movie is about someone who, after dedicating her life to the audiences around the world that would listen to her, decides to find her own voice, her own identity, and finally do something just for herself.”

Jolie’s performance: Jolie’s approach to her character is simultaneously heartbreaking, erratic, and imposing, displaying a cellular kind of understanding of Callas’s desperation to reclaim herself before it’s too late. “This is the greatest diva of the 20th century, and who could play that?” Larraín says. “I didn’t want to work with someone that didn’t have that already. I needed an actress who would naturally and organically be that diva, carry that weight, be that presence. Angelina was there.” He describes her preparation as “very long, very particular, very difficult.” She worked on posture. She studied breathing. She developed an accent befitting a woman of both the world and another plane of fame. Then came the voice lessons.

Angelina’s voice is mixed with Callas’ voice: Yes, that really is Angelina Jolie singing, although not just her. Larraín and his star worked closely with Oscar winner John Warhurst (Bohemian Rhapsody, the upcoming Michael), who as Larraín puts it has “dedicated his life to actors who sing in movies,” to create innovative, synthesized recordings. Over months, Jolie learned her subject’s cadence and her signatures. Eventually, she got to the point where she’d hear the operas in an earpiece while singing them herself. Larraín and Warhurst would record Jolie’s performance, then mix it with Callas’s. “You always listen to Angelina and you always listen to Maria Callas,” as Larraín puts it. “When we listen to Maria Callas in her prime, most of the sound is Callas—90%, 95%—and when we listen to Callas older and in the present, almost all of it is Angelina.”

Larrain didn’t give Jolie many notes: A few weeks in, Larraín stopped giving Jolie instructions. The best direction was silence; the best note was no note. “It was so truthful, we just kept rolling and let her do her thing,” he says. “She can let you in when she wants, and she can create a distance where she wants. It’s a dance of vulnerability.”

[From Vanity Fair]

Larrain really has become something of a self-styled “women’s director.” Kristen Stewart and Natalie Portman raved about working with him and he is known for creating a lot of artistic intimacy with his leading ladies and giving them space and time to do their best work. All of which to say, I hope Maria is as good as VF makes it sound, and I hope Angelina gets a real awards campaign. It’s been a while since she’s been part of an awards-bait film. One cool thing is that if she does end up doing the whole awards season rigmarole, she’ll probably wear a lot of fashion from her sustainable Atelier Jolie line.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Instagram.

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