“Book me a table at a café where the waiters know who I am. I am in the mood for adulation.” Pablo Larraín’s biopic about Maria Callas isn’t quite adulatory, but it is extremely sympathetic towards the controversial diva who burned up the operatic stage – and her voice with it – in a brief but incendiary career. Maria, starring Angelina Jolie, focuses on the final week of Callas’ life, September 1977, secluded in her Paris apartment where she still harbours hopes of a return to the stage and reminisces on past glories.
No opera singer has inspired as much literature and media as Callas: biographies, documentaries, a hologram tour (I’m not making this up) and Marina Abramović’s tedious vanity project 7 Deaths of Maria Callas. Her recordings – studio and live – are endlessly repackaged and reissued, a veritable cash cow for EMI (now Warner Classics). For someone who has been dead for nearly as long as she was alive, what is it, I ask the Chilean director, that makes Callas such a compelling and enduring figure in the public imagination?
“I would say that there are two elements at play,” Larraín begins. “Firstly, she was dying, burning herself out every time she was on stage. Think about the difference between her stage recordings and the studio recordings – it’s another world.”
Indeed, in the film Callas remonstrates with the Maître d’ of a café who puts on one of her LPs. “I never listen to my own records.” Why not? “Because they are perfect. A song should never be perfect.”
“This idea of perfection is exactly what she didn’t do. There’s something that’s unrepeatable about what she did. In that big box you have there,” Larraín points out, spying my doorstop of the complete Callas sitting on the table behind me, “are multiple recordings of the same operas. Each performance is very different. There’s something very human about the idea of something that cannot be repeated and is always unpredictable.
“The other thing – and I think the film plays with this idea – is that there’s this sort of cultural construction around Maria being herself in a private world and then ‘La Callas’ as the muse, the opera singer for the public. Beyond that, she’s pretty much the same person and there’s a tragic element to it. Of the operas she sang the most, the vast majority are tragedies where Maria’s character dies in the final scene. I think that she became the sum of the tragedies she played on stage. I could also say that about someone like Kurt Cobain – when you listen to Nirvana’s album MTV Unplugged, to me Kurt Cobain is dying for us. That is what this movie tries to do. It tries to become a celebration of a tragic soul who had no fear. It’s this energy that she carried that I value the most.”
Apart from Franco Zeffirelli’s Callas Forever (2002), Larraín has the fictionalised film field pretty much to himself. What was his aim? “I was trying to express my fascination towards the life and work of Maria Callas, trying to be fair as much as we can, assuming that we’re making a movie that is a fictionalised take and assuming that we’ll never really know who she was. I read eight or nine biographies, and watched pretty much every documentary and all the interviews you can find… and yet I don’t feel we can know her. It’s indescribable.”
Of the fictionalised elements in the film, Larraín admits to having a lot of fun putting the music into a different context – scenes like having the Anvil Chorus taking place in the Trocadero, or the Humming Chorus on the street or the orchestra appearing out of nowhere in her apartment playing “Vissi d’arte”. “I love that because it comes from her perception. We get inside her imagination.”
In an era today where almost every opera production is captured on tape or film – legitimately or otherwise – there’s an aura, a mystique about Callas given that there is so little visual evidence of her performing on stage, apart from an incredible Tosca – Act 2 only – from Covent Garden.
“All the conversations I had with Angelina led in the same direction – the impossibility of describing her, the impossibility to really know her. I will say that if there was more video available, I don’t think it would actually change anything!”
There are plenty of interviews, however, many of them included in Tom Volf’s 2017 documentary film Maria by Callas. In the early interviews, Callas was quite frank in her responses, whereas later on, the defence barriers came up to a certain extent.
“Those interviews were gold for everyone! You see her talking, this elegant posture. She would pick very well where to sit in her apartment for the best lighting. We studied how she controlled certain things. She was very sharp and smart. I think she became more defensive because she was tired. It’s like when someone is chased. Think of Princess Diana. She was chased and eventually decided to do a TV interview because she needed to deliver a message. The later interviews that Callas did were done because she needed to deliver a message, to set the record straight from her perspective.”
Maria is Larraín’s third biopic about iconic 20th-century women, following Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021), each focusing on pivotal moments of crisis. There’s a natural link between Jackie Kennedy and Callas, of course: Aristotle Onassis, the Greek magnate who left Maria for Jackie. “Maria’s connection to Jackie wasn’t only through Onassis, but also through Onassis’ boat, the Christina, which is the very boat we used in the film. Onassis would spend a lot of time on it, sailing across the Mediterranean. We were very lucky to locate it. If you think about the people and the political powers that were in Europe and the United States during the 60s and 70s, it was a generation that was very connected. There was glamour, art and power that all was very seductive – the first generation that had access to private jets, luxury yachts – a context I find very interesting.”
In the film, Callas gives imaginary interviews – conducted by the youthful reporter “Mandrax”, named after the powerful sedative she was hooked on – in which she recounts episodes from her life. Jolie, who studied Callas' interviews as well as the masterclasses she gave at Juilliard, truly captures the rhythms of Callas’ speaking voice. But Maria also has to sing. How did Jolie prepare for that aspect of the role?
“With opera, you cannot cheat in front of the camera. The only way to do it was for Angelina to sing! Out loud! Yes, she had an earpiece but she would sing in front of us and we would record not only her voice but every other sound that came from her – her breath, the rustle of her clothes, everything – and once we had that, we mixed it in a very old school way. There’s no crazy AI here or expensive software. This is real and she had to train.”
Larraín tells me how Jolie spent months with vocal coach Eric Vetro. “She trained for two months on posture and breathing, then another four to five months practising the six times she had to sing in the movie. During production, she trained another two hours a day leading up to where she sang the Anna Bolena scene at La Scala.”
Other recent films set in the world of classical music – Tár and Maestro spring to mind – received quite a prickly backlash from some classical music buffs, citing errors or pointing out things that were omitted. Is this, I ask Larraín, something he’s anticipating?
“I read that and I understand it. But I loved Tár. The classical music world needs to understand that whatever mistakes we may commit in making movies set in or about classical music, we are putting it out on television and cinema which is an especially good medium for a generation that may be completely disconnected from this world. If it’s a good movie but has mistakes in some technical aspects, please forgive us, but support us because we are trying to connect two art forms that have been disassociated for decades. We need to bring them together not only because we love them but also because it can create a great synergy and increase the cultural impact and relevance of classical music.
“Millions watch audio-visual content every day, whether through a streaming service or television or cinema. The classical music world is very small compared to cinema and any interaction, even if it’s fragile, is positive. I’m not asking for forgiveness – I like the criticism. Every recording belongs in the right place and is very specific to what Maria was doing, the period, the state of her voice. We talked to a lot of people who did huge research. That doesn’t make it perfect but it is an attempt to do it right. If a classical music specialist prefers that our movie would rather not exist, well I say you’re a snob, my friend, because you want to keep it for yourself. You don’t want anyone else to enjoy it. Just let it go and don’t watch it!”
How, I wonder, did Larraín’s relationship with the artistry of Maria Callas change during the process of making this film. “It only elevated it. I have an absurd amount of admiration for her. In all the stages of making a movie, you have to listen to the music that is on the film over and over again, especially in post-production. You can go home every day, especially after mixing, with your nerves shredded. It drives you crazy. But I never grew tired of listening to Callas. I could listen to the soundtrack on a loop for a week – it’s just so universal.”
Maria streams on Netflix (US) from 11th December 2024 and is released in cinemas across the UK on 10th January 2025. The soundtrack is available on Warner Classics.
