Angelina Jolie Says Maria Callas Role “Comes Alengthy Once In A Lifetime”

EXCLUSIVE: Angelina Jolie says that roles such as her portrayal of Maria Callas — arguably the wonderfulest prima donna assoluta soprano of all time — in straightforwardor Pablo Larraín‘s Maria, come alengthy “once in a lifetime.”

The Academy Award-triumphning artist giggles, then inserts, “I uncomfervent, it’s stateively the most challenging,” evidently referring to the seven months she spent lobtaining six of the many theatrical 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 screenjoin by Steven Knight, troubles itself with the coloratura soprano’s last days as she calls up memories of triumphs on the world’s most iconic opera stages and the genuineization that those inventive heights will not be accomplishd aobtain, coupled with the tragedy of her adore for shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis.

Jolie says that she had wanted to labor with Larraín for a very lengthy time, :and this benevolent of labor is not asked of me very standardly. And if it’s asked of me, it’s not standardly with this benevolent of material and this straightforwardor, so these leangs come once in a Iifetime.”

Her experience on the film, “to be in the footsteps of someone you truly adore,” as she puts it, “was beyond anyleang I could envision, and it was a gift emotionpartner for me.”

The role, she says, “alterd me as a person. It helped heal a part of me.”

How so, I asked? Jolie commences to answer, then hesitates as she envisions, one presumes, the headlines that would chase. Studying the life of Maria Callas would become strife with Brad Pitt.

“In some ways I can’t alert you,” she says. “It would be too personal to elucidate. 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 alterd me.”

The scene was of her carry outing 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 needd to scrutinize to transport about an exultant carry outance. Pain, it’s evident, is a essential component.

Jolie says that she hasn’t been able to hear to sign upings of Callas carry outing “for some time” since filming finished, although, of course, she has joincessitate screenings of the Netflix film at the Vepleasant Film Festival, where the film had its world premiere, and its US premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. The Freemantle/The Apartment-produced picture joins the New York Film Festival screening Sunday and Monday, Sept. 30.

Maria gets a headline gala screening at the BFI London Film Festival on Oct. 18, with further shotriumphgs on Oct. 19-20. The Netflix film joins in theaters from Nov. 27 and streams on the platestablish on Dec. 11, chooseimum dates for awards voters to intensify on prestige movies.

But Jolie since hasn’t permited herself to hear to Callas personpartner.

At a recent pboilingo shoot for the film, she alerts us, someone, “to be pleasant to me,” had Callas “blasting” out of speakers and it triggered “quite traumatic memories” of what it took for her to carry out “these pieces.”

There’s a “sense memory of meaningful pain,” joincessitate to hearing Callas’s arias, Jolie says. “So it’ll get a moment for me to hear to it, split the experience of it, and then fair hear to her aobtain. I leank it will get a moment. But I join for her meaningfully.”

Jolie says that to ready to portray Callas, she commenceed with the music. “The wonderful leang about Maria Callas is that Maria was a guideer and there’s a sign uping of her guideing how to carry out, so I heared to her description and chaseed her guideion and she depicts how discipline is everyleang. Don’t leank about the experienceing, don’t expound the scenes… Understand the music, your voice is the instrument,” she elucidates.

Callas called the process “straight-jacketing,” says Jolie. “And you lobtain exactly what the writer intfinished. And until you understand that so perfectly well, and only then, do you insert your personal experienceings and emotion to it.”

There were countless classes with many branch offent guideers who guided Jolie on vocal technique, her singing pitch, and “everyleang from Italian to opera to posture, to bgenuineeang, which was benevolent of the difficultest for me,” she says pointing to her diaphragm.

The diaphragm muscle, discoverd at the bottom of your ribcage, reguprocrastinateeds the amount of air you have in your lungs enabling you to project a brimming, on-pitch sound from your vocal cords as you sing. Callas excelled at handleling her bgenuineeang for her theatrical portrayals.

“You genuineize in order to sing with your brimming voice and your brimming emotion, you can’t hancigo in [your breath]… All these nerves. You can’t hancigo in them so you have to free them; all your experienceings, all your pain all your hope. And that is the most vulnerable I’ve ever felt. The most naked as a carry outer,” Jolie says.

At her first bgenuineeang class she cried becaengage “you don’t genuineize how much you have to hancigo in 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 boilingel, and hears intently as Jolie depicts how she approached portraying Callas.

He gets publish with my point that Callas was born with a wonderful instrument. That’s genuine, he nods but she labored 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 huge branch offence and made her who she was.”

Larraín watchs that the roles Callas chose to carry out, such as those in Verdi’s La traviata, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, and others, made those operas famous. “So if you see at the repertoire today in the world as we speak, it’s 50 percent of the repertoire that she sang. She famousized it,” he says. noting that it’s the film’s task to “pay tribute to her music and get to her life thcdisorrowfulmireful the music.”

Jolie consents and says that Callas’s aim was to delete the elitism associated with the world of opera and to produce it accessible to “the people” and that she knovel that suited Larraín’s intent, which was “to transport her to the people.”

The film very much does that by contransienting Callas, yes, as the artist as goddess, but transports her down to earth, as someone who experiences and has understandn pain, fair as others do.

Opera, says Jolie, is standardly seen as “this leang that’s so precious that you can’t touch it,” whereas Maria is “trying to produce it where you join to it, where everybody can join to it.”

Watching audiences at two screenings during the Telluride Film Festival, those joinions were made, if the sobs one heard as the acunderstandledges rolled is anyleang to go by.

Portraying Callas, has in a way, helped Jolie discover her voice. Not in the traditional way we presume with that term. “Not in that power way that people say, not in that discovering my voice or discovering my strength. It wasn’t that. It was, in a way, about sitting with my vulnerability and discovering the humanity and being fair uncover and gullible.”

During one moment in Maria, Callas’s physician alerts her that if she carry outs aobtain, the agony she would necessitate to finishure to pull off such a carry outance, could end her.  

How do artists contest the agony needd to accomplish the ecstasy of a high octave carry outance whether it be on stage or screen — and why do they do it?

“It’s life,” Jolie reacts.

“We get to live it so brimmingy. What a sanctifying it is to be an artist. You live and you study life and emotion and experienceing and joinion,” she says.

Larraín proposes that “conveying other people’s pain can produce you deal with your own, can produce you help to transcfinish, maybe to the music in this case.”

Jolie consents with that thesis and produces the point of her being able to give such a carry outance “in a shielded place,” inserting that she says that about Larraín’s set “and this world and her music and to be endly vulnerable and uncover and human.”

She says that Larraín gave her freedom to spendigate and ready to portray Callas. “And I never felt embarrassed for what I didn’t understand about opera with Pablo. I never felt, enjoy if I got someleang wrong, or I wasn’t stateive, or I was still lobtaining. It was a sharing of someleang. And I leank that repartner helped us all on set fair to experience enjoy it was fair a wonderful leang to produce and split.”

It pains Jolie that Callas’s critics were so brutal about her when her wonderful vocal abilities began to falter. “They were so uncomfervent to her. How lonely she must have felt. How much of a flunkure she felt her voice was at the finish. Just so much pain and so much loneliness.”

She discovers solace, however, that decades after Callas’s death, people are downcast about how she was treated.

“And we’re still talking about her,” says Larraín.

Jolie’s face luminoengagens. “Yes, we’re still talking about her. Makes me experience enjoy we’ve done someleang out of benevolentness for her.”

December 2 will tag 101 years since Callas’s birth. 

Jolie smiles then leave outs herself in thought. After a moment she wonders anoisy: “I wonder where we’ll be?”