Showing posts with label Maria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Maria. Show all posts

Monday, February 24, 2025

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Thursday, February 13, 2025







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Tuesday, February 11, 2025



Angelina Jolie: Beyond Technique

How the multifaceted artist found deeper truth by trusting instincts over expectations



By Vinnie Mancuso | Last Updated: February 11, 2025

Not too long ago, Angelina Jolie found herself reminiscing in a tattoo shop. The buzzing of needles brought her back to the beginning of her career, when she heard warning after warning that having inked skin would limit her opportunities as an actor.

But Jolie, who’s never been one to heed warnings, saw it differently. For her, tattoos have always been something personal—vital, even—to her life as an artist. “It was one of many things I did in my life that was separate from film and being on camera—that was me and not a character,” she says. “So I wasn’t just staying a blank slate, even literally.

“To have a self is very important when a lot of your job is to transform into other selves,” she continues.

Twenty-plus tattoos, two acting Oscar nominations (and one win, for 1999’s “Girl, Interrupted”), and nearly $6 billion at the box office later, that distinction between the personal and professional remains as important as ever. That’s especially true now as she embarks on a comeback tour for her leading turn in Pablo LarraĆ­n’s “Maria,” in which she plays culture-shifting opera singer Maria Callas at the very end of her life.

The Netflix drama—which earned Jolie an eight-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival, as well as Golden Globe and Critics’ Choice nominations—marks the actor’s first major role in three years. “Maria” is the first project since Clint Eastwood’s 2008 drama “Changeling” to put her under the bright lights of an awards season press run. (In December, she made her first late-night appearance in a decade on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”)

“I’m dipping in and out of it,” she says with a smile, referring to the recent whirlwind of red carpet appearances and interviews. “I’ve always approached it that way. You just do a few [events], then you go home and don’t let it become too central in your life. Focus on the art. It’s very important not to take it all too seriously and let it consume your days or your work.”

The work, for Jolie, is the most personal aspect of all. She apologizes, charmingly, several times throughout our conversation for not having the words to describe what she does before and after the director calls action. It’s instinct; it’s unplanned. Although she does have a formal background in Lee Strasberg’s Method, which calls on sense memory to create lived-in performances, Jolie prefers to take a more indefinable approach.

“For me, acting is not as much about requiring a skill to do a job than it is about becoming a more in-tune, sensitive human being—to study human behavior and work in community with other creative people,” she explains. “That creative life stems from real life, not so much a class that you can take.”

Jolie returns to that phrase often—“the creative life.” For her, what you’re drawn to as a person informs who you become onscreen. “A lot of artists are just very emotionally sensitive people who have a need to communicate with others,” she says. “You feel like you have to ask that question about life or death or grief or madness. You want to understand something about life or yourself or other people. Often, it’s a messier life than can be quantified. Acting is, I think, about staying a bit raw as a person and being able to let these things come through you.”

That’s why “Maria” presented such a challenge—and the reason her performance is so remarkable. “More than any role I’ve ever done, this required balancing the technical and the emotional,” Jolie says.

At the height of her fame in the 1940s and ’50s, Callas was a force of nature in the opera world. She was a larger-than-life soprano who almost single-handedly revitalized the public’s interest in the classic bel canto style through the sheer power of her voice and stage presence.

Nevertheless, hounded by the press for her reputedly volatile temper and accusations of a vocal decline beginning in the late 1950s, the one-time prima donna lived out her last days largely alone. Jolie related to the idea of an immensely talented woman who’s gradually worn down by relentless media scrutiny. She absolutely did not, however, relate to being a world-class opera singer.

To get to that place, Jolie spent seven months training with vocal coach Eric Vetro, the musical mastermind who also worked with TimothĆ©e Chalamet on “A Complete Unknown” and Ariana Grande on “Wicked.” “In my first singing class, I just started crying,” Jolie recalls. “Eric said, ‘Take a deep, deep breath, let everything relax, and let a full sound come out.’ ”

She soon discovered that the line between the technical and the emotional wasn’t as wide as she thought. “Emotions flooded forward, because I think we all hold so much in our bodies, in so many places,” she says. “I would start to sing, and for me, everything was new. When I discovered I was a soprano, I was shocked. When I first hit a high note, I was stunned and just staring at the coach.”

Jolie wasn’t just learning from Vetro, but from Callas herself. The singer left behind hundreds of recordings—full performances, arias, even a series of master classes she conducted at Juilliard between 1971 and 1972. Over dozens of listening sessions alone in the dark, Callas taught Jolie how to be Callas.

“This required something that I was completely unfamiliar with,” the actor says. “And I found I couldn’t have done it had I not taken [Callas’] advice to learn the basics, learn your Italian, and learn the music. Force yourself to not think about it emotionally or personalize it; just do the technical work so precisely that when you are there, you can do that part without thinking.”

“Maria” was Jolie’s introduction to playing a fellow artist, an experience that led her to explore her feelings about her own craft and everything that comes with it. “The film itself is the study of an artist, of somebody who lived and actually struggled in a very big way as an artist,” Jolie says. “She was a great artist, but she was absolutely not loved for who she was offstage, and she died feeling very attacked and very alone. She did something exceptional, but the process of doing it wasn’t always a pleasure.”

While filming “Maria,” the actor experienced one surreal episode after another. During one quiet moment, Jolie found herself sitting in the dressing room of Milan’s historic Teatro alla Scala dressed as the tragic heroine of Gaetano Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena.”

“The craziest part wasn’t even being onstage, because onstage, you kind of leave your body when something is so beyond you,” Jolie says. “It was warming up in that dressing room, knowing I had to go downstairs and sing on that stage in front of the people that work at La Scala who are used to hearing the most wonderful sounds in the world.”

All of it—the preparation, the performances, the unreality—culminated in the film’s final scene; it was a fitting metaphor for that mixture of skill and pure feeling. On Sept. 16, 1977, the day of Callas’ death from a heart attack, she sang one final time: a roaring rendition of “Vissi d’arte” from Giacomo Puccini’s “Tosca” that was loud enough to be heard on the Paris streets below. “It’s funny—well, maybe not funny—but I realized that I couldn’t sing and cry at the same time,” Jolie remembers.

“The whole thing of singing opera is that you have to relax your throat and body, then push your muscles and get the sound through that way,” she continues. “And when you cry, all those same muscles tighten and shut down.”

As she pressed warm water bottles against her throat, Jolie realized that both the sentiment and the singing needed to come from somewhere deeper and less cerebral: “You know those times when you cry and the tears are streaming down your face, but you’re not tense?” The breakthrough came when she understood that the struggle was the point—that in this era of her life, Callas was trying to match an idealized version of herself. So Jolie feeling like her voice wasn’t enough was exactly what the scene needed.

“It was very strange,” she says. “It was just beyond my skill level, and something I was having to really catch up to—which felt right for Maria, because she is who she is. I was often in her shadow and just trying to catch up.”

Jolie left “Maria” with an immense sense of gratitude. “I’m very conscious of how fortunate I am,” she says. “I’ve always loved [acting]; I’ve always approached it the same way. But now I’m even more grateful to have a chance to live as an artist and work with other artists. What a privilege to be able to play with others, to share emotion. [When I was filming] ‘Maria,’ I was almost 50, and I was sitting with teachers teaching me a skill I never thought I’d learn. To find your voice and to sing—what a gift it is, and how beautiful to communicate that with an audience. When I meet somebody who’s connected with a film I’ve made, I feel less alone in this world.”

The pursuit of creating genuine connections is what keeps pushing Jolie into new creative territory. Last year, she earned her first Tony Award as a producer of best musical winner “The Outsiders.” She also returned to the director’s chair after seven years to film the 2024 war drama “Without Blood,” starring Salma Hayek. And she continued her decades of humanitarian work, taking a trip to Northeast Africa last September to meet refugees displaced by the ongoing civil war in Sudan.

Jolie believes that art—especially global art—is “such an amazing way to learn about each other. What is it to be human? It’s the beauty of what we do. The worst is when things are about being divided or different or competitive, or it’s just not about the sharing. It really ruins such a special thing.”

As for her next steps on camera, she’s currently filming Alice Winocour’s “Stitches,” a drama set in the Paris fashion world. And after that? “Maria” has given her a taste for trying new things. Recently, she told Deadline that she wanted to try a straight-up comedy role, a genre she’s gotten close to with projects like “Maleficent” but has never fully embraced.



“There’s a responsibility to the audience,” she says. “There’s a part of me as an artist, of course, that wants to explore every different type of storytelling medium for myself. But I’m also very conscious of where I seem to connect and where maybe somebody else would be better. For comedy, I’m not sure I could entertain an audience and make them laugh and be what they need me to be. It’s [about] the exchange—it’s less about what I want to do and more [about] where an audience feels you’re effective.”

These are perfectly valid points; but I posit that she likely felt the same about singing before undergoing seven months of intensive training to channel one of the most influential opera performers of all time. Jolie considers this for a second, then tells me, “You know, I’ve never done ‘Saturday Night Live.’ I’ve always been curious, but I’ve never been asked.”

That immediate pivot—that instant spark at the prospect of a new challenge—reveals more about who Jolie is as an artist than anything she could put into words. It’s a curiosity and a resistance to being told what’s possible that’s as permanent as the ink on her skin.

“Well,” she says as if she’s just decided something, “challenge accepted.”



This story originally appeared in the Feb. 13 issue of Backstage Magazine.





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Saturday, February 8, 2025







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Tuesday, February 4, 2025



Angelina was used as clickbait and also to underscore that her exceptional performance should have been nominated along with Lachman. And they both deserved to win.


Ask Ed Lachman about the use of color and the cinematographer provides a perfect layman’s primer in art education.

“Why are hospitals blue and green? Those are restful, peaceful colors. Why are fast food restaurants red and orange? Because those activate our passion and our appetite,” Lachman said in his laid-back, easygoing voice. “Theoreticians on painting, like Goethe in his book in 1810 or Josef Albers in the 1960s, have talked a lot about how color affects the viewer. It’s all very primitive and emotional and I love to play around with that.”

Lachman, for sure, plays with color, as well as four different film formats, in Pablo LarraĆ­n’ “Maria,” which depicts the final days of opera star Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie). The work has earned Lachman his fourth Oscar nomination, following nods for “Far From Heaven,” “Carol” and “El Conde.”

“I thought Pablo might want to work with a European, since this was shot in Budapest and Paris,” said the New York-based Lachman. “But he called and said he’d really like me to do it. I have to acknowledge Pablo’s vision. Thinking of this film’s aesthetics in the form of an opera really created what my images were. And in addition to the work of the production designer, the costume designer. And the other major aspect is Angelina Jolie and her exquisite, nuanced, heartbreaking performance. I was just very fortunate to fall into a very creative group of artists.”

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Monday, February 3, 2025



MOST OPERA SINGERS begin training at a young age. Lise Davidsen, one of the greatest sopranos of her generation, never even saw an opera until her 20s.

“This is when I should say, ‘I loved it from the first moment,’ ” says Davidsen, 37. “It’s something that I have learned to love, or to understand. [Back then,] I saw it from a singer’s perspective, thinking, Can I do that? Of course I can’t.”

It was only a few years before Davidsen proved herself wrong, winning prizes at opera competitions around the world. She has since performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Royal Opera House in London and La Scala in Milan. In March, she returns to the Met to star in Beethoven’s Fidelio, set in an 18th-century Spanish prison.

“The music has sort of taken me, year by year and song by song,” she says. “Then eventually, it was my entire life. I wish everyone could experience [opera] two or three times in the room, because that’s where I believe the magic is.”

Davidsen lives in London and her native Norway with her fiancƩ. Here she talks about preparing for the stage, buying her first coffee maker and where to start if you want to get into opera this year.

What time do you get up on Mondays, and what’s the first thing you do after waking up?

I’m up around 7:30 or 8, then I get ready, have breakfast or go to the gym.

How do you like your breakfast?

I like a breakfast bowl: yogurt and cottage cheese and oats and berries.

What do you do for exercise?

I go for a run or do some weights or intervals. I’m not really good at any of it. I do it three to four times a week. It’s important to know my body works onstage.

Are there things you do daily or weekly to take care of your voice?

I practice almost every day, with one day off each week. I do my technique, which consists of exercise for the voice, for 15 to 30 minutes, then practice, which is a way to stay vocally healthy. [How long I practice] depends on what I’m doing. If I’m in rehearsal, it’s three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon.

What do you listen to when you want to relax?

Podcasts, news updates, news chit-chat and slightly famous people talking about very uninteresting things. My head is so filled with music already.

Next month, you’re starring in Fidelio, about a woman who frees her husband from political imprisonment. What’s your favorite thing about that opera, or the part of Leonore?

The story is slightly tricky because [my character] is a woman dressing up as a man, and I’m not sure anyone would really buy into that today. A woman could [rescue] a man just being a woman. She doesn’t have to dress up. But if we go back to that time where she had to do that, I think she’s incredibly brave. [That bravery] isn’t necessarily just for love, but for your political beliefs or your friends or your family, when you manage to stand up for someone or something you believe in.

For someone new to opera, what’s the best gateway show?

If you’re in New York or America, some of these old traditional shows are really cool. You have to go with the mindset of seeing a historic piece. You can’t go and think, Oh, I’m going to see something that I’ll immediately understand. It’s a different world, a different time. It’s like watching Downton Abbey or reading Jane Austen. Try not to go to the longest one. It’s good to start on the short side. Tosca would probably be a good place to start.

What role that you haven’t yet played is on your bucket list?

Isolde in Tristan and Isolde. BrĆ¼nnhilde in Wagner’s Der Ring. It’s planned that I’ll do [both] at the Met, but it’s still in the future. And after Covid, I’ve got this [mentality] that life can change, things can change. I don’t believe it until I’m there.

Is there a modern-day work of fiction, whether movie or television or novel, that you think would make for a perfect opera adaptation?

I read A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara, and then I saw it as a play. As dark as it is, it worked really well as a play, and I thought maybe it would work well as an opera. I also still haven’t seen a criminal novel on the opera stage. That would be fun.

What was it like meeting Angelina Jolie ahead of Maria, in which she plays Maria Callas?

It was quite surreal. I said to her that it’s people like her who can bring opera to a new audience. I can try to reach as many people as I want, but she’s proper world-famous. I admire her for doing that. It’s not just a role—it’s a whole craft that she had to learn.

What’s a skill you’ve developed through performing that’s helped you in other parts of your life?

Dealing with nerves and being scared. I know that things will pass. It’s OK to be nervous, it’s OK to get it out. Often I just cry. Then, two minutes later, I’m fine again.

What are your most prized possessions?

Things from my grandmother, like her old watch and her ring, which doesn’t have any value but has value to me. Also some silverware, things that I use during Christmas. You sort of have your family with you, even if they’re not there anymore.
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Sunday, January 26, 2025
















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Friday, January 17, 2025







Netflix Tudum

Mastering Maria

Angelina Jolie transforms into the mythical opera legend Maria Callas in Pablo LarraĆ­n’s ethereal film Maria.

By Krista Smith
Jan. 17, 2025

Few icons are as mythic as Maria Callas, the most storied opera singer of the twentieth century.

The same could be said of Angelina Jolie. The Academy Award-winning actor and director of five narrative feature films is known not only for her stellar turns onscreen and behind the camera, but also for her 20 years championing a number of humanitarian causes, including human rights, environmental conservation, and access to education and healthcare worldwide. Both women, widely admired for their grace and glamour, pursued creative passions that put them at the center of public life, catapulting them to international celebrity.

So when it came to portraying Callas in Pablo LarraĆ­n’s deeply affecting cinematic portrait Maria, Jolie had plenty of entry points. “People had a lot of opinions about her,” the actor says. “I don't know of anybody who worked harder or tried [harder] to take responsibility to do the best job she could do. Playing Maria, I took it upon myself to protect the work.”

Maria sees Jolie disappear into the role of a 53-year-old Maria Callas in the final week of the singer’s life. The film opens in 1977 Paris, with the American-born Greek soprano reflecting on and reimagining the experiences that shaped her, including an adolescence spent living in distressing circumstances in Nazi-occupied Athens, a difficult relationship with her mother, discovering the sheer power of her voice, and taking the world by storm with her commanding and emotional performances. Throughout her life, she faced scrutiny for a perceived reputation as a demanding diva as well as her much-publicized love affair with shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) years before he married former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. “When you get close and discover why somebody might say she was acting ‘difficult,’ [you find] a woman who was dealing with health issues and went through a difficult time in her childhood,” says Jolie. “Maybe it just will always be that when a man demands something and a woman demands something, society receives them differently.”

Through it all, Jolie’s performance is riveting — she carries herself with the bearing of a grande dame of the arts, a must for the role. “This movie wouldn’t exist without Angelina,” says LarraĆ­n, who directed two earlier films about iconic twentieth-century women with Jackie and Spencer, both of which earned their leading actors Oscar nominations. “You can’t even attempt to make a movie like this without having [an actor] who could properly play her.”

Arguably one of her most stunning achievements is the way in which Jolie, who previously had no formal singing training, belts out some of Callas’s most famous arias. “It’s not [just] singing in Italian [that’s required]; it’s also playing a character [who herself is really an actor when she’s] performing a piece onstage,” Jolie says. “It was so beyond anything I was comfortable with that I think it shook me out of my fear.”

Ignoring any misgivings, Jolie got to work, training for months to be able to sing like the artist dubbed La Divina, as LarraĆ­n and his sound team, led by executive music producer John Warhurst, devised a clever method for merging the star’s voice with Callas’s: Jolie’s voice is dominant in scenes that take place during the later years of Callas’s life, while Callas’s is more prominent during the sequences in which the star performs at the height of her fame.

“Angelina really had to go for it — not only because it made the movie more possible in terms of the illusion, but to also create the right process for her as an actress,” says LarraĆ­n. “Angelina was absolutely exposed [while] singing, sometimes in front of two to five hundred extras, and she had to sing out loud by herself [on set]. All that the people would hear was Angie’s voice alone. She was metaphorically naked, voice-wise, in front of hundreds of people. Everyone loved her because she was not only doing well, but she was also so brave.”

Bravery, commitment, and passion? The perfect approach for a cinematic tribute to an enduring artist like La Divina.

An edited version of the conversation follows.

Krista Smith: Pablo reached out to you about playing Maria Callas before the script was even written. What do you remember about that first conversation and what interested you in taking on this part?

Angelina Jolie: Pablo and I had met many years ago, and I loved his work. We talked about one day finding something [to work on together]. I was very happy to know that he was calling and that there was something to discuss. [But] anytime you’re asked to play a real person, you pause because you have to feel ready to do your best to bring justice to this person’s life and take that on. I was taken aback because I don’t sing, or I didn’t sing. I knew of her and her music, but I didn’t fully know her. So, as I thought about it and read up on her and heard how Pablo saw her, I understood more who this woman was. And then I started to find our connection.

And then the script comes in. What was it like to see it on the page and realize what would be required?

AJ: It took me a minute. I think I would’ve been even more scared if I really understood all that I would later come to understand about what was expected. But in the beginning, I thought, Well, you’re acting as a singer, you’re going to have to make sure you can sing along with her. I didn’t understand that they needed me to actually sing and learn to sing opera. Pablo and I agreed, O.K., I have to learn the arias. I have to get an Italian coach. I have to do a singing class. I did that for a long time until we all realized I [would] need [to learn from] an opera singer because singing and singing opera are not the same class. Pablo and I were then both informed that to really do the [sound] mix right, I would have to perform with no musical accompaniment, with none of her voice being heard, only my voice in the room or on the stage in front of the audience and in front of the crew. That’s when the reality hit home.

How did you get yourself there to be able to do that on set?

AJ: Well, the funny thing is, for it to be convincing, you have to be very loud when you sing opera, as loud as you can be. Whether you feel confident or not, you still have to be very loud. When Maria is in her full glory and it’s her onstage in the film, the absolute majority [of what you’re hearing is] Maria’s voice, even though I still had to sing [on set], alone, by myself. Pablo did a wonderful thing in that he cast a group [of extras] that stayed in the audience [throughout filming]. They were with me through a few performances, and these wonderful people would become so essential to the piece. I think the first day I met them I said, “I apologize for what’s about to happen in case I hit the wrong notes loudly.” It helped me [that] I was performing to a real audience. They were really kind people who knew that I was trying my best, and [that] I wasn’t an opera singer, but I was learning. We were connected in the attempt and in the storytelling. Their understanding and support were everything.

The production design, the hair and makeup, and the wardrobe drop you into her world. Apart from her physicality, her singing, how did you build her internal life? How did you and Pablo work through that together?

AJ: He’s a wonderful director. He has such a vision, so creative, so strong, but also very curious and open about how actors are feeling and what’s personal to them. Sometimes directors [excel at understanding] what is very good visually, but [they’re] not necessarily good with humanity. He’s a rare person who understands both. I always felt a part of the process. I felt like he was wanting me to connect to her more than tell me what he wanted from her. He wanted to guide me and give me space, and we would learn together from the situation. The music was key to everything. He grew up listening to opera. His mom would take him to the opera all the time. Of the [films] he’s done, certainly about women that we know, this is the one he probably feels that he knows the most — her world. I learned a lot from him about the music. And he gave me space to understand the woman.

Another truly moving aspect of this film is the way it showcases Maria’s relationships with her housemaid Bruna, played by Alba Rohrwacher, and her butler Ferruccio, played by Pierfrancesco Favino. The three of you have this poignant, beautiful chemistry.

AJ: They’re extraordinary actors. We became a real team through the piece. And I think we all collectively care for these real people, and we thought often about how extraordinary these relationships were. Ferruccio is still alive, but he’s not on talk shows saying bad things about Maria. He protected her — they maintained a real connection outside the world of gossip and people hurting or using people. They were her real friends. They had real love for her, and she loved them. We all felt that, and we all felt connected to that.

What is your favorite part of the day when you’re going to work?

AJ: I like the moment when you’re deeply in the trenches trying to fix something or fight for something or push yourself to a limit to see if you can. I like those moments. I like it when work is hard, and I like being a part of a team of artists. [That’s] a special thing about making films that maybe Maria didn’t have as much. So much of her life was her alone standing on that stage. When you’re an actor, director, anybody that’s in a film crew, you’re a part of a team and that’s a wonderful feeling to be a part of a collective, making something together. And my sons worked on this one, so that was also nice. They were doing [assistant directors’] work and some of the photography.

Are they future filmmakers?

AJ: I don’t know. A.D. work’s not easy work, so it’s good that they do that to cut their teeth. Pax does some still [photography] and some video, but I think being a useful part of the crew and just being of service is what’s important. We’ve worked together on quite a few projects, mostly ones I’ve directed. But I realized after the first big scene that I never cry in front of my children; not like [I did in Maria]. They can see you weep a little, but anyone who’s a parent knows that you do not show your children that level of pain. You don’t want them to know you feel that or carry that. So, when I saw their faces after one of the first big [emotional scenes], we talked. I think the important thing is they knew that they are the reason I don’t feel like that [in real life]. But then it also was good for them to see their mom try for something she’s not necessarily good at, to experience their mom try and fail at some things and work really hard and be really nervous and struggle — to see that we all get through it together.

Maria has a great line in the film talking about opera, saying you must give absolutely everything to it — records are perfect, but a performance has to be alive. It gave me chills because there is something that happens when you experience opera in a live setting.

AJ: Yes. There’s something alive and dangerous to it when anybody’s trying something so big — you can just feel you’re in the presence of somebody expressing that much onstage. And for [the performer], there’s a real connection to the audience. That was something that helped me a lot as well — I love performing. I don’t perform for myself; I perform for an audience. It was nice to come back to that, just that work and trying to do something and make it as good as I could for the audience.


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Thursday, January 16, 2025







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Monday, January 13, 2025















"There's this kind of study of being human that we do when we create, and we communicate with an audience because our work is not in isolation - it's a connection.

"I think when I was younger, I had different questions about being human and different feelings and now as I've gotten older, I understand some things and now I have different questions.

"It's a matter of life, right? And so maybe that's interesting that this now is a character really contemplating death and really contemplating the toll of certain things in life that I, of course, couldn't have understood in my 20s".

Two of Jolie's children, Maddox and Pax, took on production assistant roles during the filming of Maria and witnessed their mother perform opera for the first time in public.

She says the film allowed them to create new experiences together and for her children to see her approach to playing a difficult role.

"Everyone in my home, we all give each other space to be who we are and we're all different.

"I'm the mom, but I'm also an artist and a person and so my family has been very kind and gives me their understanding. They make fun of me, and they support me and just as you'd hope it would be."

She adds: "When you play somebody who is dealing with so much pain, it's very important to come home to some kindness."












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Tuesday, January 7, 2025























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Saturday, January 4, 2025

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Monday, December 23, 2024



Angelina Jolie and Pablo LarraĆ­n Discuss the World of MARIA | Netflix



Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas in MARIA | Netflix





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Sunday, December 22, 2024





For Jolie, who would be given the assignment of bringing Callas to life, the role had a similar attraction. “I’ve never played a performer before,” Jolie said. “It was an honor and sometimes a bit of a head trip to be me playing her and us playing a third person onstage. 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.”

The actor came away with an even greater respect for Callas’ perseverance as an artist. “She couldn’t see,” Jolie said, pointing to the enormous prescription glasses Callas wore late in her life. “When she was young, she couldn’t wear those glasses and be onstage. 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.”

Can I listen to the Maria soundtrack?

Yes. The full original motion picture soundtrack is available from Warner Classics. Although the film blends Jolie’s voice with the opera singer’s to heighten the sense of audiovisual immersion, the new album features restored audio from Callas performing the extracts of nine operas that appear in Maria. The arias include “Casta Diva” from Norma, “Vissi D’arte” from Tosca, “Sempre Libera” from La Traviata, “O Mio Babbino Caro” from Gianni Schicchi, and “Ebben? Ne Andrò Lontana” from La Wally. In addition, there are also numbers from Medea, I Puritani, Anna Bolena, and Otello.

“The music was her life,” Jolie said of Callas. “Her relationship to her voice and her body, her ability to sing, her presence onstage, and her communication with the audience — it was her life. It was the key to her as well.”


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Friday, December 20, 2024



Angelina Jolie and the Extraordinary Ensemble Cast of MARIA | Netflix

Director Pablo LarraĆ­n in discussion with the extraordinary cast led by the brilliant Angelina Jolie (Maria Callas), Pierfrancesco Favino (Ferruccio) and Alba Rohrwacher (Bruna).





Angelina Jolie on the Gorgeous, and Tragic World of MARIA | Netflix









SBIFF Q&A Maria with Pablo LarraĆ­n & Guy Hendrix Dyas







With Angelina Jolie’s dramatic take on legendary opera diva Maria Callas, the actress portrayed the grand soprano from her aesthetic heights of the 1940s to the early 1950s, as well as the vulnerability of her vocal decline in the mid-50s.

For “Maria,” Vetro assembled, for the first time, a team of three opera singers behind him who, together, worked with Jolie for seven months. “I can sing, but I can’t sing like Maria Callas,” he says, laughing. “Plus, my Italian pronunciation isn’t up to snuff.”

Vetro is in awe of how compelling Jolie is throughout “Maria,” how the actor embodies every nuance and every note of the opera legend.

“Jolie is indeed singing operatically as Callas, the caveat being you’re hearing a mix of Maria Callas’ voice with Jolie’s blended together,” he says of a mash-up vocal process that also took place on “Elvis” between Austin Butler and Elvis Presley.

“Sometimes there’s less Angelina, maybe 10%, other times there’s more Angelina. It changes depending on the aria and on the period as much of the movie focuses on the time when Callas couldn’t sing any longer, or sing in the same way. No matter what or when, Angelina captured every single note and every single emotion. She was astonishing.”

One thing most impressive about having Jolie blend her voice with that of Maria Callas is that the actress had to emulate what the diva did on stage, originally, for the sake of splicing together their performances. In opera, however – unlike, say, pop – there is no steady beat or click track. “Opera has its own ebb and flow, its rubato,” says Vetro. “How in the world would Angelina be able to do that? But watching her sing… Jolie nailed it.”


Vocal coach Eric Vetro (right) with ‘Maria’ director Pablo LarraĆ­n and Angelina Jolie Courtesy Eric Vetro



When Angelina Jolie sought out Vetro, she was on the opposite end of the spectrum. Jolie needed his help to transform into arguably the preeminent opera diva of all time, Maria Callas. “Not only was she not a singer, she never sang,” Vetro says. “She didn’t even sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ She had a real block about singing.”

Taking someone from “Happy Birthday” to “Piangete Voi?” from Anna Bolena may sound impossible, but Vetro was up for the challenge. In his early days of teaching, he “treated everybody,” Vetro says. “If someone had never sung before, they would send them to me.”

Though Jolie was in the right hands, it took some time to get her opera-ready. “The first lesson, she barely uttered a sound,” Vetro says. “I couldn’t get her to sing. She was very, very, very shy about it.” Vetro enlisted outside help—female opera singers to demonstrate high notes he couldn’t reach, and a fluent Italian speaker to help Jolie with the diction. Little by little, they helped Jolie discover her voice—a poetic parallel to Callas rediscovering her own voice in the twilight of her life in Maria.

“We made the big discovery that she was actually a soprano, which was really surprising to both of us,” he says. “There was one day into it, probably in the middle of the process, when she started singing one of the arias from the movie. And I knew that day it was going to work.”

Of course, in Pablo LarraĆ­n’s finished film, Jolie’s voice is heavily mixed with Callas’s own. Still, Vetro says Jolie’s work ethic and deep admiration for Callas were pivotal to her performance. “She loved Maria Callas,” he says. “She felt a lot of empathy for what Maria Callas had been through, how she had been treated in the press—when they would ask her really inappropriate questions about her ex, Aristotle Onassis.” And it all paid off. “By the end of it, she was singing every note, singing every lyric,” he says. “It was a really difficult task. And she rose to the occasion.”


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Thursday, December 19, 2024



Times Square N.Y.
"The best performance by any actress this year."



Sunset Blvd., L.A.






Death is not something Chilean filmmaker Pablo LarraĆ­n is afraid of. From “Jackie” to “El Conde” and now with his latest feature, “Maria,” LarraĆ­n 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,” LarraĆ­n 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 LarraĆ­n. “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,” LarraĆ­n 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.”
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Stepping Out of the Dark and “Starting to Come Alive Again”

The Academy Award winner digs deep on her Oscar contender Maria, its connection to her breakout in Girl, Interrupted, and finding herself as an artist again: “Some therapist should study these things and tell me what they mean.”

By David Canfield

These days, Angelina Jolie is embracing uncharted territory. She’s coming off her turn as opera icon Maria Callas in Pablo LarraĆ­n’s stylish biopic, for which she spent months in intensive singing lessons. Having been running around Los Angeles of late, getting the word out for the film — she was nominated for both a Golden Globe and a Critics Choice Award last week — she’s now already at work on her next film. She logs on to Zoom from Paris while on a break from production for Stitches, an independent drama written and directed by Alice Winocour. In this one, Jolie plays an American filmmaker, which may sound like relatively familiar territory. But again, she’s been tasked to do something she’s never done before: perform a role mostly in French.

“I’m not fluent—I speak a bit, but…to mean every word and give a performance takes a different kind of understanding about what it is I’m saying, to be emotional and not think about the language,” she says. “It’s a different challenge.”

Until Maria, Jolie had not shot an independent film since well before the pandemic. So it’s a surprise to see her go right back into another auteur-driven, dramatically complex film; it’s been well over a decade since she’s worked with that intensity and rigor as an actor. Jolie recognizes this—over the past year, she’s felt different, reenergized, willing and eager to once more take on the kinds of artistic risks that first defined her rise as a performer, in movies like Gia and Girl, Interrupted.

It’s been almost exactly 25 years since the debut of that latter film, which won Jolie an Oscar and set her on the path of superstardom, something accompanied by what she calls her tendency to pull back from the industry’s—and the public’s—prying gaze. Maria follows Callas in the final, lonely days of her life, and in that melancholy frame, it gave Jolie the space to deliver a profoundly vulnerable performance. The role required her to look inward as few jobs of late have, and she’s still working her way through how the experience has impacted her—and what she wants to say about it. But she feels ready to forge ahead, and perhaps also consider why it’s taken her a few years “to come alive again.”

Angelina Jolie: I wasn’t myself for a while, so I wasn’t able to give as much to my work for a few years. To feel like I could work again and communicate and to be with nice people—so much of what I do is collaboration with other artists. When it goes well, you’re creating together. When you’re with nice people and creative people, you learn so much about yourself and about life. You’re in a safe place to play and stretch. I had that with Pablo, and I don’t think it’s an accident that I found another situation [in Stitches] that is very similar with very well-intended, thoughtful people. I was just talking to Louis Garrel, the wonderful French actor, about our scenes and our work. I talked to Alice this morning about life and women’s health, which is a bit of the film. Great art, as an audience or as a participant, can really be very healing and grow us. That’s what we’re all alive for—to discover and feel and create and connect. Without that, we’re just existing, hardly.

It’s been a big part of your life for such a long time. I would imagine it felt quite meaningful to feel that again.

It really does. Probably more than I can even express. If no one receives your piece, or if you don’t connect, then it’s like shouting in the dark. It means a lot that people have responded to Maria. I’ve always felt, ever since I was very young, that film has been a way to communicate with the world and not feel as alone.

We’re all going through this human condition and this life. So it’s very, very healing to be able to be a part of these films and to talk to you about this and to live that way. And I missed it. I realized I did really miss it. I missed being an artist.

When you say you missed it, what did that period look like, where you weren’t feeling that as much?

I went very dark for reasons I’d rather not explain, but I didn’t have a lot of light and life within me. Your light’s dim. I also just needed to be home more, so I couldn’t commit large periods of time to pieces. The choice of what to work on and when was not a creative choice, often, the last few years, but sometimes the practical choice. Really, I think Maria was the beginning of starting to come alive again. I needed a lot of kind people around me to hold my hand.

The emphasis on nice people—

I know I say it too often, but our business can be a lot of things. At the end of the day, we’re very fortunate to do what we do, and we are spending a lot of time with big, deep, emotional feelings. If you don’t do that with people who you’re safe with, it can affect you in very bad ways.

It sounds like something you’ve learned over time.

Oh, sure. We’ve all been with terrible people in our life, where it’s hard to do your work because you feel emotionally vulnerable and then you feel like it’s being used in the wrong way. With a lot of artists, we’re kind of raw. It’s why we sometimes seem a little crazy. Part of what we do is not to be settled. It’s to feel deeply and explore and go to strange places in our mind and our body. If you’re free to do that, these wonderful things can happen. And then sometimes you can be a very vulnerable person in a world that’s a bit dark—and we can break.

Maria is very vulnerable, obviously. What did that experience, on a practical level, feel like to go through on set from day to day?

It was heavy. Maria was a very full experience. I wasn’t able to leave her on set like you sometimes do. Part of that was because I was always doing training after [shooting] anyway; there was always a next aria. But it was all leading towards the death, and the death was the last thing we shot. I’m almost 50, and my mom had cancer when she was 48. You’re actually thinking about death, about things that cause you grief or that you have lost in your life.

I imagine you and maybe a lot of people you know have had moments where you feel so full of grief, but you’re alone. I’ve certainly had those moments of grief alone. To also share them now with not just the set but the world, and to meet other people and recognize that we both have that level of pain, can feel very cathartic—to express heavy things together. She was also funny, but the heavy side, she was…yeah. [Laughs] I think it made me want to try to live more fully. Anytime you do anything about death, you think often about life, naturally.

There’s a nice shape to this moment, given that it’s been 25 years since Girl, Interrupted came out, for which you won an Oscar. You played Lisa, a diagnosed sociopath in psychiatric care—another very heavy character. How do you compare where you are as an actor and an artist to back then?

I haven’t really figured out how I feel about it, but there’s something beautiful or comforting in that there’s something not dissimilar about these women and the person I was 25 years ago. Maybe I’ve come around to her in a different way. Maybe I haven’t lost her as much as I thought I did. Hopefully I’m better in ways: I’m a parent and I’m many other things.

Maybe I’m still trying to connect and maybe I’m still feeling deeply. I don’t know. I’m sure a therapist would have a field day with this one. You’re asking me, and I’m like, my God, some therapist should study these things and tell me what they mean.

Do you remember what it felt like to play Lisa at the time?

I do, which is interesting because I don’t have a lot of memory of my life. I remember that I didn’t think of her as crazy and that she was a real person. She needed to be loved, and she felt alone, and she wanted truth. I only saw it once—it’s hard for me to talk about it because I saw it once 25 years ago—but from my memory, she wanted someone to be honest with her and to connect, and somehow ended up feeling very, very alone in that way—not dissimilar to Maria. Not finding somebody who understood her enough, not finding a way forward where she was okay. Is this a theme? That I’m alone? What is this? [Laughs] There’s probably some very tragic thing that I don’t want to address right now, but—yeah.

Yeah, I understand. Looking back at coverage of the film, Lisa was often talked about as crazy and without the kind of nuance that you’re talking about now. Do you remember encountering that?

I do remember hearing people saying that. Even if they thought they were complimenting me playing Lisa, they were complimenting me playing a crazy person. That did make me sad because I didn’t think of her that way, and I didn’t like hearing I was referred to that way. But it was also a time where I was still trying to understand myself, and maybe there was something about me that I was not understanding—about what people consider crazy. I mean, that’s the honest truth. The honest truth was during that time when you’re trying to figure yourself out and you’re young and you’re a bit wild and strong and curious and emotional—and people say, “No, that’s crazy. She’s crazy. You’re crazy.” It probably just isolated me more and made me think I must be different. Maybe I’m dark, or maybe I’m off, or maybe I’m not what people want me to be either.

Has it felt different with Maria? Just anecdotally, I’ve heard people expressing a lot more affection for her.

I don’t read things, but I have talked to people after screenings who’ve been really kind. But then I’ll also hear people refer to her as a little crazy. People can still watch her and miss the fact that she was this little girl that wasn’t loved.

Which is the text of the film.

Which is so much the text of the film, right. There’s nothing she does that hurts anybody or is against anybody. Somehow she’s seen as something’s wrong with her, something about her rubs people the wrong way. But yes, I think there’s a lot of love for her, and nothing makes me happier than that. If she was a diva at all, for her, it was [because] she was very tough on herself and very tough on anything having to do with her work because she was a perfectionist. She was also somebody who felt that she was perfect or she was nothing—because that’s what her mother told her. She was definitely harder on herself than anybody else could be.

Not to get too psychological, but how do you relate to that idea of perfection at all costs?

By the way, you’d be a very good therapist.

I considered it, I’ll say that. But I am genuinely curious how you connected to that part of her.

I think that’s why it took me a few days to say yes, because I knew that I was walking into the impossible. You can’t be as good as her—certainly can never be as good as her onstage, can never sing as good as her, and can only pray to not disappoint those who love her work. I was scared. I was scared to really fail this one.

Can you take me back to the moment that you took Maria to Venice and how you were feeling that day, both before the screening and after you felt the reaction in the room?

It was a funny thing bringing her to Venice because she was in Venice—we even say it in the film; Onassis talks about seeing her in the Venice Film Festival. I was trying to figure out what to wear, and there were pictures of her in Venice wearing little fur; that’s why I wore a little fake fur. It was strange. And I sing in Italian and I’m in Italy; how’s that going to go? These are people that really know these arias, and this is an art form that is very respected and understood here. I was very excited for those reasons to bring it to Venice and very nervous. When it was received well, when you felt the room appreciated it, it was a huge relief. Then when you’re with people you love, you look around at the faces of the artists that you worked with, and it’s a beautiful moment.

As you’re feeling reenergized creatively, are there filmmakers you have your eye on whom you’d like to work with, or types of work you’d like to do going forward?

What do you think I should do?

Well, as you mentioned, you get to be selectively very funny in Maria. I would love to see you get to do more comedy.

Thank you. I just wrote to a friend of mine today, Eunice, who’s in Liverpool, and she said, “Why aren’t you doing—you should do something funny.” I wrote back and I said, “I’d like to find something funny,” but I’m not sure. I’m never sure how funny I am. I would love to do something fun and light. I think I’d have to be the straight man. I feel like that’s what I am. I get that. In Maleficent, it was like, Okay, I’ll be the straight person.

There are so many wonderful directors I’d love to have a chance to work with. I’d like to just be allowed to play in this arena. I’d love for people to reach out and be willing to invite me to play with them and create with them. So we’ll see. Yeah, comedy, maybe.

Let’s put it into the universe.

If I do it, it’s on you.



This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.










"The character [Callas] has a lot of pain and they've of course seen me go through a lot of things, but they hadn't experienced me expressing a lot of the pain that usually a parent hides from a child," she said.

"So they were there to witness some of that, but then we would hug or they would bring me cups of tea."

Jolie added that it was "a new way" of finding out how to be honest with her children about her feelings, "in an even greater way".

"We started with regular singing classes and it was challenging in many ways, but when the opera classes began, what it requires with your breathwork and your body and just the force of what you push through yourself, it's just a very different physicality."

Jolie, whose previous film credits include Changeling, Maleficent, Salt, and Mr & Mrs Smith, said she hasn't sung before, and was "actually quite shy about singing".

"It was probably one of the areas in my life that I was hesitant," she said.

"One of the greatest privileges of being an actor is you often are supported by a crew to try something and explore something you've never done and this certainly was most challenging," she said.

On the set of the film, both Maddox and Pax were "very busy", director Pablo LarraĆ­n said. "They were good professionals," he added.

Jolie said that during filming, Pax recorded a lot of her singing practice "so he was with me in my early horrible days," she laughed.

"It's always good for your children to watch your mum not do something easily, but swear and fight and fail and have to try again," she said.

"So that's an important and beautiful thing."

LarraĆ­n said he hoped his film honoured Callas's desire to popularise the art form.

"If this movie bring attention to opera from one to hundred to a million, it will be a success," he said.

"I don't know if there is an art form as strong as opera," Jolie added.

"The way it connects to the soul and the body, so of course it's for everybody."

Maria will be released in cinemas in the UK on 10 January.




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