After a whirlwind tour of the Venice, Telluride and New York film festivals, Angelina Jolie and Pablo Larraín brought their film Maria to AFI Fest in Los Angeles on Saturday night.
The project — following Larraín’s previous looks at Jackie Kennedy in Jackie and Princess Diana in Spencer — explores the final days of legendary but troubled opera singer Maria Callas in 1970s Paris, as she fights to get back the iconic voice she has lost.
At a post-screening Q&A, moderated by Barry Jenkins, Larraín noted that “I don’t think there was another alternative, I don’t think this movie would exist if Angelina would have passed,” and required a star who could both capture Callas’ “larger than life” diva presence and have the discipline to learn to sing opera.
“I think when I was asked if I could sing, I thought, one, sing like an actor — I’ll sing as much as I can, I’ll do my best — not understanding what it is to sing opera,” Jolie admitted, calling the training process “a really emotional and very special and terrifying journey.”
She told the crowd that there haven’t been “a lot of moments in my career I’m asked to give everything you’ve got, and it’s one of the greatest gifts, especially as an artist, for somebody to ask for and want you to give everything you got, that you don’t know that you’ve got.” Jolie added she “got to be terrified again as an artist which is such a gift, because you get scared and have to do something you’re not sure you can do, and surprise yourself,” and with Larraín at the helm, “I knew I had a safe place to fail, so I was allowed to be free.”
On the red carpet ahead of the screening, Jolie told The Hollywood Reporter that despite transforming into an opera legend, she still doesn’t “really consider myself a singer, but I got through this one” and much like her character, through the role “I think I did find my voice again. I’d never sung at the top of my voice. I’d never had support to know how to do it, I’d never tried.”
And after undergoing seven months of vocal training and immersing herself in Callas’ life, Jolie said she isn’t sure she’s left the character behind yet.
“I’ve played a few real people in my life and you carry them with you; it’s different than other characters,” the star said. “Like she’s my sister now, she’s somebody who I know quite intimately and I really had to fall in love with to hope that I could help other people understand her, and I had to understand her to hope I was saying and doing the right thing. So I’ll always hear her music and maybe smile a little bit differently than someone else, because I feel close.”
Maria will arrive in select theaters on Nov. 27 and start streaming on Netflix Dec. 11.
