Showing posts with label Q&A. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Q&A. Show all posts

Monday, December 16, 2024

















Pablo Larraín’s opera biopic “Maria” is the latest and last of this year’s Netflix‘s Oscar top Best Picture and acting contender films to stream on the service. And like “The Piano Lesson” (six days in their domestic movie top 10, highest #5) and “Emilia Pérez” (never listed), “Maria” had a short shelf life among top-viewed titles. It debuted at #4, placed for two more days, then dropped off before this weekend. (The weekly foreign charts come out on Tuesdays, so it’s possible better results elsewhere).

The streamer continues to do very well in Oscar nominations and has won top prizes. But Netflix has so far failed to win Best Picture or either lead acting prizes. The company’s top contenders always get some theatrical play (more than they are given credit for due to their decision to hide the grosses, but less than if top circuits like AMC would agree to play them). But in that absence, how they do on the site remains a gauge of how popular they are, and public interest is always a nice arrow for any awards campaign to have in its quiver.

With a very crowded Best Actress field, the quick in-and-out for “Maria” won’t likely be a boost for Angelina Jolie’s chances, though based on past history perhaps not a negative either. Same with “Piano Lesson,” even more so with “Emilia Pérez” with its high-end acclaim and international appeal.

But following Netflix’s online promotion, compared to how theatrical distributors push visibility for their contenders, is eye-opening. Since “Emilia” debuted two weeks ago, the Netflix homepage has given it minimal advertising. Even its surprise record haul in Golden Globe nominations hasn’t managed to rise to the level of mentioning, at least from a daily check since their announcement.

Netflix originals not named “Maria” take up six of the slots on their current top 10, led by veteran action director Jaume Collet-Serra’s “Carry-On.” The Amblin Productions thriller actually got better reviews than “Maria,” though it is not among the 24 films listed on Netflix’s awards For Your Consideration webpage. That it’s more popular than “Maria” isn’t that big a surprise. What is though is that it knocked out Sony’s “It Ends with Us,” which, as expected, opened at #1, but by Saturday, was replaced by “Carry-On.”


Posted by at
Labels: , , ,

Sunday, November 17, 2024



Netflix's "Maria" Los Angeles Academy Museum Screening
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - NOVEMBER 15: (L-R) Massimo Cantini Parrini, Guy Hendrix Dyas, Angelina Jolie, Alba Rohrwacher, and Pablo Larraín attend Netflix's "Maria" Los Angeles Academy Museum Screening at Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Ted Mann Theater on November 15, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Presley Ann/Getty Images for Netflix)



LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - NOVEMBER 15: (L-R) Pete Hammond, Pablo Larraín, Angelina Jolie, Alba Rohrwacher, Guy Hendrix Dyas, and Massimo Cantini Parrini speak onstage during Netflix's "Maria" Los Angeles Academy Museum Screening at Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Ted Mann Theater on November 15, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Presley Ann/Getty Images for Netflix)










stories filmthusiast







stories




stories shreyakhanna_




stories marpozna




























Posted by at
Labels: , , , ,

Thursday, October 3, 2024


 Sept. 30 NYFF62 Maria Screening Q&A







“I honestly have been seeking the story for many, many years,” Larraín told IndieWire. “Unlike the other two movies, ‘Jackie’ and ‘Spencer,’ this is the story of an artist. It’s a story of a woman that ended up being very shaped by the opera that she sang on stage.”

“I always wanted to make a movie about opera,” he continued. “It’s not easy. It’s unusual for cinema, but those are two of my greatest loves in my heart, opera and cinema. I’m very happy to be able to put them together in a movie, about a singer that really changed the history of opera, not only with the life, but with her voice and with her with her acting capacities. Maria Callas was someone that obviously had a wonderful voice, but also had a very strong discipline to work her characters.”

Though Jolie was not very familiar with opera before the film, the actress and Larraín previously shared with IndieWire how she prepared for the through extensive training. On the red carpet, the director walked us through how much of Jolie’s voice we actually hear in the film, versus Callas’ own.

“She had to train for a long time. She trained for over seven months. There’s breathing, there’s posture, there’s accent,” he said. “She sang in Italian and French, but mostly Italian. There’s, you know, what in music is called the pitch, which is the capacity to reach each note and follow the melody, and that was very challenging for her.”

He continued, “Everyone that does not sing, [including] myself, would have a very hard time doing it. This is not pop music. It’s not like you get in a car and put on a David Bowie song and you’ll be able to sing it. That’s not what it is. It’s just you can’t really sing opera unless you really, really train. We also wanted to capture her voice through certain technical things that you do; capture her voice, her breathing her, her every sound.”

Much of the work was also completed in post-production. “Later, in post-production, we were able to mix it with Maria Callas’ voice. So sometimes you hear 1 percent of Angelina’s voice, sometimes it’s 5 percent, sometimes it’s forty percent, in a couple of times, not very often, but it does happen, you listen to sixty percent or seventy percent of Angelina’s voice. Obviously, this is a movie about Maria Callas, so you wanna have Maria’s voice, but in order to make it believable, Angelina had to sing out loud in front of her crew and and hundreds of extras in order to make it possible.”

He added, “I think she did beautiful, beautiful work and makes it believable and makes the movie possible. Without that, none of this could happen. Even if you have a great performance and everything is beautiful, if you don’t believe that she’s actually singing, there’s no movie, and I think she pulled it off. We had the help of a number of people that are experts are on it and so I’m happy that that it actually works.”




Posted by at
Labels: , ,

Sunday, September 8, 2024





"There is a time in our lives where we break. Something happens, something changes us, some relationships, some trauma, something happens. And we spend a lot of our lives trying to revisit that moment. It affects us for the rest of our life.

Sometimes we don't know how to sit at that table and address that issue or that person or have that conversation.

That is one of the most difficult things about the film, is a lot of the gray area of life. A lot of the asking 'why?', a lot of the listening -- which is maybe the most important thing."




"I suppose I wish that we'd all sit together and keep talking. Just start the conversation that I don't really have an end to or an answer.

One of the interesting things within it, now that you've seen it, you understand the idea: 'Who's the bad guy?','Who is wrong?','Who is right?' This idea that there's some absolute, and how important that is.

And the power -- how hard it is to sit at that table, the hardest table to sit at, and the most important table to sit at for us to get through this life, for us to understand each other. And so much that's happening in this world because we're not able to do that. So I just hope that there's more conversation."










TORONTO, ONTARIO - SEPTEMBER 08: (L-R) Rutger Hoedemaekers, Lorenzo De Maio, Salma Hayek, Jorge Antonio Guerrero, Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Patricio José, Demián Bichir, and Juan Gervasio Minujín attend the premiere of "Without Blood" during the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival at TIFF Lightbox on September 08, 2024 in Toronto, Ontario. (Photo by Monica Schipper/EveryStory2024/Getty Images

Posted by at
Labels: , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)