— Maria Film Official (@MariaFilm_) December 19, 2024
Times Square N.Y.
Sunset Blvd., L.A.
Pablo Larraín and Kristen Stewart Reunite to Talk ‘Maria’: ‘As She Was Singing, She Was Dying Every Time’ https://t.co/JvlNTAxMdf
— IndieWire (@IndieWire) December 19, 2024
Death is not something Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín is afraid of. From “Jackie” to “El Conde” and now with his latest feature, “Maria,” Larraín has often explored the effect mortality has on individuals, especially on those with the ability to make an impact on others, never shying away from the mysteries the subject offers, but instead creating heart-rending, often celebratory studies of how certain figures, against all odds, find meaning in their lives. In reference to his loose “Important Women” trilogy, consisting of “Jackie,” “Spencer,” and “Maria,” Larraín sets his lens on three iconoclasts who became icons in their own right, each forced to face death as a result of the structures they inhabited.
“I think Maria Caras was someone that as she was singing she was dying every time. Life was taken from her while she sang and I wondered if that was filmable. Can we shoot that? Can we film that and put it in a movie?” said Larraín. “Can we not only feel her perception through music, but really try to understand that Maria Callas sang eight operas more than 50 times in her life and seven of them were tragedies, so she, the main character, was death. Death was dead in the last scene. So I think she became the sum of the tragedies that she played on stage. So it was someone that circulated tragedy and and we didn’t want to avoid that. We wanted to get into that tragedy and that tragic figure and make a celebration out of it and deal with that and not hide from it.”
“There is ambiguity in the sound of music and in the performance of opera that can cut sharper and quicker than dialogue and plot, I mean it just like permeates,” Stewart said. “There’s something about voiceless articulation that can drop you and you could speak any language, you could speak Spanish, Italian. This movie feels like it endeavors to be an opera and I don’t speak Italian and I’m not an opera aficionado by any means and so like I think that that doesn’t mean that you’re alienated by the form of it and it’s really cool to make a movie for like a normal audience that still endeavors to touch you in that particular way.”
Comparing this effect to “Spencer,” Larraín explained that it had everything to do with how he approaches narrative as something that should be perceived and not necessarily spoon-fed to audiences.
“I think there’s a big limitation in the more rational approach to movies,” he said, “where there’s like a shot and there’s like a shot and there’s like a two shot and there’s like a shot from here, so we know that you’re here, and like a logical narrative of the situation, but I feel that reality is way more complicated.”
In a way, Stewart felt the strongest impact “Maria” makes and how it stands apart from “Jackie” and “Spencer” is in how it captures artistry and particularly Larrain’s sensibilities as an artist.
“‘Maria’ is your first film about an artist in a literal sense, even though I find artistry in Jackie and Diana, the way they inhabited the world,” said Stewart. “Maria literally dies when the art goes and you literally told me yourself no creativity is death and I fully cried watching this movie when she takes her last breaths, not because I know Maria Callas, but because I know you.”
