C A N N O P Y
Art is True North
Pablo Larraín’s Maria meets Angelina Jolie’s Callas
Still from "Maria"
“Maria follows in the footpath of its thematic predecessors─but backwards, in heels, and with great music”
DECEMBER 1, 2024 | IN FOCUS
When it comes to telling the story of a powerful woman whose humanity has been overshadowed by her fame, Director Pablo Larraín is in a league of his own. In analyzing the calamitous experiences of notable women, the filmmaker repeatedly plays upon the idea that life is a stage, yet so much of what matters in life happens offstage. In his most recent work, Maria (2024), Larraín handles the complexities of a life in the spotlight by subverting the tropes of the tragic heroine and forcing audiences to find the superseding humanity.
Larraín—like other notable Hollywood filmmakers of South American heritage (Alejandro Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón)—is a Chilean filmmaker who got his start in the industry with internationally recognized Latin films such as Fuga (2008), Post Mortem (2010), and No (2012). Since then, Larraín has produced several English language films that have solidified his directorial and narrative styles─and his propensity for producing accidental trilogies. There’s a throughline, for example, running between his Jackie (2016), Spencer (2021), and Maria. Following the frenzied life of Jacqueline Kennedy after her husband’s assassination, Jackie’s success revealed the public’s desire for introspective biopics that centre the lives of hyper-scrutinized women. Next was Spencer, the story and the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, who was at once a figure of establishment opulence and the subversion of the British Royal Family’s decorum.
Maria follows in the footpath of its thematic predecessors─but backwards, in heels, and with great music. Backwards in the sense that the film is a retrospective on the life of renowned Greek opera singer Maria Callas who died from a heart attack at 54. Performing her first opera when she was only 17, and rewarded given a titular role the following year, Callas became a household name and a public figure with a whiplash-inducing rapidity. With a disjointedness that mirrors the sharp contrasts between Callas’s operatic characters, Maria follows the diva’s final week as she desperately tries to piece together the different stages of her life and make an unlikely comeback. Surprisingly, this biopic on a great musician is filled with music─rather than peppering in the music that made Callas great, Larraín lays it on thick with plenty of screen time for opera in all of its naked glory.
Maria is Larraín’s second adaptation of accomplished screenwriter Steven Knight’s work, having previously collaborated with him on Spencer, but the two films are not all that similar. As Jackie takes place during a tragedy, and Spencer follows the events preceding one, Maria takes a more distant perspective, not on a particular tragedy but on a life filled with equal parts triumph and letdowns. Larraín’s filmography comes full circle with Maria when Callas’s last chance at romance comes to an end as her lover, Aristotle Onassis, gets married to Jackie Kennedy. Despite the splashes of world-historical figures via on-screen portrayals of Jackie and John F. Kennedy, Larraín never gives up on making this a film about Maria.
The film’s glaring struggle is that Callas is depicted with compelling flair by Angelina Jolie. Jolie’s performance was perhaps a little too compelling, as the biopic becomes a visible three-way tug-o-war between Callas as a global phenomenon, Larraín’s mission to reveal the real Maria, and the gravity of Jolie’s own celebrity. Whether this struggle was intended—or the accidental result of what happens when the unstoppable force of opera’s biggest star meets the immovable object of a Hollywood icon—is something only the storytelling team can reveal. In the end, the real winner of this tug-o-war is Larraín who, somehow, made a coherent film with three main characters embodied in its titular role.
INTERVIEW WITH ANGELINA JOLIE
Why did you want to play Maria Callas?
AJ ─ I met Pablo Larraín many years ago and told him how much I respected him as a filmmaker and hoped to work with him one day. He reached out to me about Maria, and he took the process of casting very seriously, which I appreciate. He really wants to make sure the artist is up for it and understands the job. I’m also a huge fan of writer Steven Knight’s work; it’s a very unusual script and construction. There’s a lot of bravery in the choices they’ve made in their storytelling, which says a lot about how capable they both are. I was happy that I was with a very serious filmmaker coming to me to do real work and expecting a lot of me and challenging me. That’s not always the case. It wasn’t just an opportunity to tell the story of Maria Callas, a woman I find interesting and care for, but it’s really to have a director who’s going to take you on a journey and is so serious about the work and tough on you. I like that he was tough on me! He’s a dream director, and I would want to work with him again and again. Also, I learned such a lot as a director myself, from watching him work.
How much preparation did you have to do for the role?
AJ ─ Well, Pablo expected me to really work very, very hard, and he expected me to sing. I went into classes six or seven months before he expected me to really sing, to take Italian classes, to understand and study opera, to immerse myself completely and do the work, which for Maria, there was no other way. The funny thing as an actor, when you first start acting, somebody says, “Can you ride horses? Can you speak this language?” And as a young actor, you say, “yes” to everything. Then you go home, and you think, “Oh, I have to learn how to sing!” When Pablo said, “Can you sing?” I thought, “I mean, sure, a little,” but the truth is, as he said to me, “You have to learn how to sing opera, or I will be able to tell when we are close on your face, because it’s who she is.” But it was much more than that, it was to understand Maria Callas and be able to play the character. The music was her life. Her relationship to her voice and her body, her ability to sing, her presence on stage and her communication with the audience, it was her life. It was the key to her as well.
How was the experience of learning how to sing that way?
AJ ─ To be very candid, it was the therapy I didn’t realize I needed. I had no idea how much I was holding in and not letting out. So, the challenge wasn’t the technical, it was an emotional experience to find my voice, to be in my body, to express. You have to give every single part of yourself. When opera singers express pain, it’s not like a little bit, it’s the biggest depth. It requires everything that you’ve got. It requires your full body, and it requires you to be full emotionally, as open and as loud, in as big a voice as you can possibly do.
Has your relationship with opera changed? Do you enjoy it?
AJ ─ I have such a love of opera now, a real true love of opera, and I have it in my life now in a different way. I go now and I sit through it and let it overtake me and affect me. There’s something about opera that I hadn’t understood before. I think we do sometimes see it as an elitist thing that’s separate from us. It’s so huge. But maybe you have to go through certain things in life that have the depth of that pain or the depth of that love, where you now understand and need the size and feeling of opera.
It must have been quite an experience to perform these scenes, often alongside a full orchestra. What was that like for you?
AJ ─ It was transformative as an artist and a human being, as I’ve not been involved with music for so much of my life. I didn’t play music, in part because like a lot of parents, I’m often listening to what other people want to listen to. I don’t think I’d ever given myself music and had let it slide away from my life. So, to be reintroduced to music in such a complete way, and then to be surrounded by musicians, to be on set with other pianists, singers, the entire orchestra, I think I fell in love with it and became very small. I felt just grateful to be awakened to it again. I really believe in the benefits of music therapy these days. And to be standing in some of these locations, I just felt like I was the luckiest artist in the world. There’s one thing having scenes where you’re expressing emotion and pain as an artist—there’s quite another thing when you’re surrounded by the musicians playing that pain.
Through the miracle of technology, your voice was combined with the voice of Maria Callas in Maria. How did that influence your performance?
AJ ─ Well, the good news about playing Maria Callas is nobody expects you to sing Maria Callas because nobody in the world can sing Maria Callas, right? Nobody at her time could match her, and it would be a crime to not have her voice through this, because in many ways, she is very present in this film. Her voice and her art are very present. She’s the partner in this film with me; she and I are doing this together. It was an honor and sometimes a bit of a head trip to be me playing her and us playing a third person on stage. As an actor, I wasn’t doing my performance of say, Anna Bolena, but Maria’s. It was me trying to understand why she made those performance choices. I’ve never played a performer before. As I would learn of her choices, I just became more of a fan of her work. She was also a brilliant actor.
You mention it was both you and Maria Callas on stage. How do you feel about her now, having spent so much time with this character?
AJ ─ I care for her deeply. I’m very moved by her, and I’m so happy we had the opportunity to show her as a human being. There’s something I learned about her, that she couldn’t see. When someone looked at the prescription glasses that she wore later in her life, they said to Pablo, “That lens, that prescription, this person’s almost legally blind.” Wow. When she was young, she couldn’t wear those glasses and be on stage. It wasn’t accepted, so she had to memorize everything very differently. When you understand that, you see this person’s survival instinct. It wasn’t that she just wanted to be this; she had to survive and hide it and find a way around it and work twice as hard. Maria was pushed into singing as a young person by her mother, and when she was able to give it everything she had and be her best, she communicated something to people that was transformative. But as she got older and made choices in her life and different things happened, that same audience punished her for not being able to do that for them anymore. She had an enormous amount of pressure on her. And I think she was a very sensitive person. You can’t express the emotion she expressed without great sensitivity.
Although it’s a different era, is this another example of women in the spotlight suffering harsher criticism than men?
AJ ─ That’s just what happens when you have that level of success, and I think Maria understood that. She worked very, very hard to do her job. She understood that if she stood in front of people and they came out to see her, she had to be as close to perfect as she could be. She wanted to give everything she had, and she really did give everything she had fighting through different things. It couldn’t have been easy to have a relationship with a mother who calls you names and tells you you’re not good enough. I just can’t imagine it because so much of what helped me be okay in life was having the kindness of my own mother. The film is about her relationship to her voice and her pain and her deep love. Her true love is her music.
The film’s supporting actors include Pierfrancesco Favino, Valeria Golino, Alba Rohrwacher, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Haluk Bilginer. What did you enjoy about working with them?
AJ ─ The interesting thing is, we were all playing real people, and these were real relationships. Ferruccio the butler, who Pierfrancesco plays, he’s still alive, and he’s never sold stories about Maria to the press. He shared some thoughts and stories with us but didn’t want to come to set. It’s beautiful to know that she had a few people at the end of her life who really loved her, and I’m so happy the film honors them because of what wonderful people they were who understood her. And in a funny way, I think without saying it, the other actors took care of me. I could feel their support. I could feel the support, the care, the nurture when I had to do very emotional things. Their genuine kindness and compassion were real.
This interview is published in collaboration with MUBI