Q&A with Actresses Angelina Jolie, Alba Rohrwacher, Production Designer Guy Hendrix Dyas, Cinematographer Edward Lachman, Director Pablo Larraín. 

 

 

Q : Pablo, when introducing the film, you spoke of your history with opera, but not specifically Maria Callas, so it seems like we should start there. And if you could talk a little bit about how that love of opera led to wanting to do some work about Maria Callas.

Pablo Larraín: First of all, I’m sure there’s a lot of moviegoers and cinephiles here. I don’t know why there aren’t many movies about Opera. It’s so unusual, and I was always very curious. So it felt like an interesting challenge. As I said before, I grew up going to the theatre. I didn’t tell you what happened afterwards, we would go back home and my mother would grab our cassette and put it on it and say, “This is Callas, this is the real thing,” I grew up looking up to her as the major singer that she was. Then I realized that she somehow changed the course of opera. Not only by her singing, but by her capacities as a performer. She was a wonderful performer and actress, too.

So there was a very interesting character. And then got to know more about her life. It was very interesting too. But the question was, who’s going to play her? We’ve met with Angelina before for other reasons, other ideas that never existed. Then, when we were about to finish “Spencer”, we showed her the movie(facing Angelina) and I said to her, would you play Maria Callas? And she said, “Hold on, let me think about that.” And we talked a couple days after, we said, “Let’s do it!” So we talked to Steven Knight(screenwriter), then the movie happened. it’s the kind of project you just can’t think about a movie about Maria Callas if you don’t have the right actress, it would never happen. So here you go. (Facing Angelina)

Q : Can you say a little bit about what happened in that moment between “Hold on and Yes”, I’d be interested in taking this one…

Angelina Jolie: I’ve always wanted to work with Pablo. I was immediately  intimidated by the thought of it, because I didn’t know her. I certainly know more of her, I realize I didn’t know her at all, only her music, only many knew about her and the power of her art. I listened to her music. You know you study, when you play a real person, take it so seriously, it’s their life.

You are going to have this privilege to breathe into that life and align with that life. And you, I need to love someone to play them properly, it was easy to fall in love with her and be moved by her music. It was hard to believe I could do it. But I believed he(Pablo) wouldn’t allow me to not do my best, if that makes sense. Pablo was a very strong director who would make sure I had the right training and he would push me, and so I was willing to jump if he believed I could, but I was terrified.

Q : Pablo, your films have such a very magical, mercurial mixture of real fact, based in research, but mixed in with this lovely, expansive, interior imagination. And I’m wondering how you, I don’t know if you articulate what you’re doing, but how do you think of the project in terms of that balance when you’re approaching it?

Pablo Larraín: That’s the whole therapy. This is what it is, for example, in the case of Maria Callas, there are, I don’t know, let’s say 15~20 of her biographies, and I read eight of them. And among those eight, let’s say that 50~60 percent of the content that it’s similar and this is an agreement of what happened. And then the remaining 30 % is really improvising enormously among them and that’s how you get in, so there’s a part of it that you cannot prove. And I’ve read a lot of biographies that you can imagine in my life, and it’s incredible how some just put quotes like, how do you know that?

But they’re saying that it’s a proper biography, so that liberty, somehow, is the one that we took because we work in the arbitrary form of fiction. And I think that cinema is not only the only time machine that humans have created besides literature. But it’s also a place where you have a very specific point of view.

When you have the camera so close to the person you’re seeing, you could start to create the illusion that we’re seeing what she’s seeing and that we’re feeling what she’s feeling. And that’s where cinema can be really magical. It can elevate to a level of abstraction that can be very intimate. Especially if you’re dealing with a movie where the main character is a singer, who basically became the son of the tragedies that she played on stage.

That is the part of this film. Someone that she played many operas that almost all of them were tragedies. Maria Callas was dead on stage, playing dead on stage for decades when she got the applause. So she was a very disciplined singer and really took it very seriously and she would really embody that tragedy. So we thought on the whole process that we needed to have a movie where she would somehow get to her own death with peace.

And I think that Angelina bought something that I did not think of before. Which was the fact that she always played it well. We thought it was stoicism. Sometimes I would say, Angie, why don’t we go a bit down here? And she was like, “I don’t think so.”  So I was like “What do you mean?” I thought she would  be stronger here, and I thought she was right. So she made it a more stronger character that was not so vulnerable. So that made it somehow you know it’s sad but it’s also a celebration of her life. And the fact that she was willing to play all tragedies until she became one.

Q : I want to ask a  similar question to Ed Lachman, and you just about how you came to determine the look of the film and whether there were real life photographic references that you used and how you chose the palette based on reality versus this operatic vision. 

Edward Lachman: Pablo does the research, and guides, and I just plugged into that. There were so many visual references. In the film there’s these different textures. The past in black and white the super eight from the people that were closest to us where she let her you know front down, because she was always beautifully composed and gloomed and 35 millimeter color which is more or less the present upper life that we reveal.

Pablo just immerse me in the his whole office was just every wall had there references to every scene and so we just develop it to me what started to happen is here was a film about Maria Callas that becomes its own opera and so then I tried to be true to what I understood about opera that there was a certain theatrical quality to the reality and what Pablo said to me was there’s no difference between opera and cinema, so it’s the illusion of reality, so that’s what I tried to plug into with the color with moving camera that Pablo operated, so he was the first audience, he was responding to the performance of the brilliance and the you know the embodiment of what Angelina did, so I was there as an observer.

Pablo Larraín: Year, this very nice man that you would see what he senses.

Q : Guy, I have a question about research versus imagination and how you combine them to create this beautiful production design.

Guy Hendrix Dyas: Thank you, we always, when I say we always I’ve done a couple projects with Pablo, we’ve sort of fallen into this really nice method which is the film sort of gets designed as you imagine it would be the first time. So we go through all of the research, you know Pablo is giving me emphasis and what he wants to show and where the character needs to go. So we built the production design based on that, and the color palette

to a certain extent comes from that as well. But then comes the exciting bit and that’s when Pablo’s ideas come and his inner thoughts sort of gets mesmerized, he comes out with these crazy ideas, and that really is the magical texture that you’re talking about, so when that happens we sort of get to design the film again. And add to these sorts of tighter realties at various points where Pablo needs them to be and that can be a very colorful experience. Because there are lots of things over the years that have happened that are very difficult to pull off, but we always manage to do it.

There are a lot of things in the film which I think you take for granted, and that’s a good thing, because if you’re not noticing it, then it means it works. For example, the piano being pushed through doorways. It’s a very narrow piano that we made specially because the real grand piano couldn’t fit through the doors, we had to move it around overnight, everyone would come ion the next day, we’d be there exhausted, having set up the piano.

So to overcome that we sort of had a trick piano that was this very long narrow piano and I was always petrified that these guys were going to shoot it from the wrong angle and the jig was going to be up, so they always managed to find the right angle. There were lots of things like those little hidden tricks which were ever so fun to do really and if you didn’t see them, that’s good.

Q : Alba, a similar question for you because you have the text to work with. Bruna (Lupoli played by Alba Rohrwacher)  and Ferruccio (Mezzadri played by Pierfrancesco Favino) are based on real people. Just like Maria Callas, they are not a figment of the creation of the film,so I’m wondering how you melded those texts to come up with that performance that you did. 

Alba Rohrwacher: Yeah. I didn’t know Bruna, I discovered Bruna thanks to the script, because I already knew very well the story of Maria Callas, but Bruna, nobody knows about Bruna and Ferruccio, so I discovered them thanks to the script. And then, when I started to do little research, but at the end I arrived at the point that Bruna is sort of shadow of Maria that tried all her life to erase herself from every picture from you know and there are some stories about her for example, she changed her hairdresser because this woman keep telling her too many question about Maria, so she was really someone very discreet, so I started from the research, and then I understand that I have just to find the soul of this character that is very interested me a lot because someone that stays always steps behind, and I found the truth of my character, thanks to Angelina.

Because she was so believable that she allowed me to be with her, always with the energy that she brings on set, so that was the process.

Pablo Larraín: She makes great omelets.

Alba Rohrwacher:  He is always funny, may I tell that story, because he’s an incredible director and he really cares about every detail. He really wants everything for real. So I have to make omelets and I know how to make an omelette but I don’t know how to flip an omelette. And he said, you should flip an omelette for real. So he(Pablo) sent me to a person in Milano. A big master chef, And for hours we just trained, and then the production set to my place in Budapest where I stayed at that time with many ex..

Pablo Larraín : And she ended up doing a double flip..lol

Q : I want to talk about singing. I know that acting in itself is a vulnerable thing, but to me, I feel like singing is the most directly emotionally vulnerable mode of performance. So I’m wondering if you can just talk a little bit about what it was like, if that was true for you, and what it was like to sing as part of this performance. 

Angelina Jolie: So I made the mistake of thinking in the beginning when he asked me, he was saying, and I thought I can really sing, I can sing a bit, and then very quickly realized, you can’t fake singing opera. And not that I wanted to fake singing anything, but I didn’t really think I was going to be asked to actually sing.

Somehow it didn’t cross my mind. I don’t know why. I didn’t completely understand until I was standing in this room and Pablo had met so many different teachers and they found one to begin with. And the first time he said ok plant your feet and so this, he took me seriously as a singer, just very moving to me already, and he said take a deep breath and then start to make sound, and I started crying.

Because I think we all hold so much in, we don’t really let our  full voice out,  we don’t let our full sound out, we just don’t…it’s a lot of where we hold, so just the beginning of that, just sound. And then to start to discover your own voice, which is such a special thing to do that I would encourage every single person and take a class. Because, once you sing a little bit and somebody says to you, which I don’t know if anybody’s ever said this to you, now sing as loud, give everything in your body as loud as you can possibly do it, with all the emotions that carry inside yourself.

And what that feels like as a person, to discover whatever that is it’s therapeutic, a gift. But apparently my therapy had bumps dealing with how to get those emotions out.  But the music’s beautiful and the bar was so high, I felt honored to have the chance and classes to learn something and good to be afraid.

Pablo Larraín: when any of us would get in the car, or in your house, you put on a David Bowie record or Beatles anything you like, we can all sing it along, right? And do a decent thing, but you can’t do that with opera with lyric singing because there’s no way any of us could actually follow the melody because you would never be in the right pitch, you might have a color as they say in opera, which makes your voice different. So she took seven month of classes, the first two (months) were posture and breathing, then she got into two languages so she was speaking and singing in Italian.

So gets the words right, and then following four (months), where she sings six times on camera in the movie, and they were like going through it, going through it, and the way we shoot, this is that she has some earpiece, so everyone in the crew that sometimes with extra could be up to 400 people are in front of her and the only thing that we listen is her voice, there’s nothing else.

Because we need to capture the voice and every sound that emerge with and then we mix it with sometime when you have 5% of  Anglie and 95% of Maria Callas, sometimes 1% and sometimes 30% and some points 50%, but of course you don’t want make a Maria Callas movie without Maria Callas’ voice. But the way to do it is that she has to sing it. She has to sing it by herself in front of everyone. So beginning was very hard for her and then she got used to it, we started in a very small set with no one else. We were like, get out! It was almost like a sexy scene. Everyone out. And then slowly more and more people and we end up, she ended up singing in Lascala in Milan, the biggest opera house in the world next to you know…lol(Metropolitan Opera). It’s very impressive.

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Here’s the trailer of the film.