Maria: A labour of love

This article was originally published in our Winter 2025 issue. Click here to subscribe to our quarterly print magazine and be the first to read our Summer 2025 issue features.

The classical music world has found itself frequently warmed by the glow of the Hollywood spotlight in recent years. The sector no doubt offers a rich vein of stories to mine, with films like Tár and Maestro bringing the lives of conductors and musicians – both on and off the concert platform – to the screen to critical acclaim. But it seems odd that Hollywood’s first call was not at the door of the opera diva. The gravitational pull of public interest towards this female icon is enduring and well-documented, not least in last year’s blockbuster exhibition at the V&A. American-Greek soprano Maria Callas – perhaps the diva of all divas – is certainly one for whom the Hollywood treatment seems long overdue. But Callas’ brutal treatment by the media throughout her lifetime raises its own set of issues when bringing her life to the screen; how, when the details of her life were so contested and chronicled by unreliable sources, can one hope to offer an accurate portrayal?

Music in mind: Director Pablo Larraín places his love of Maria Callas and her music at the centre of his latest film © Juan Pablo Montalva

Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín responds to this challenge by placing his respect for Callas, and for the music she loved, at the centre of his new film Maria, starring Angelina Jolie in the eponymous role. ‘Music is my life,’ he tells me, between joint interviews with the film’s leading lady, ‘I think I know more about music than cinema.’ Larraín grew up attending operas with his mother in Santiago, in an opera house where, although subtitles were available, he was too mesmerised by the singers to read them. ‘My approach wasn’t very narrative focused, or even rational,’ he explains. ‘I just couldn’t take my eyes off the singers. That made me interested in the magnetism and spirit of the music; how I could just dive into the story through it.’ These formative experiences came to characterise his later projects: ‘Music in my work is essential. For me, music is the most complete, beautiful and profound form of art, and the most mysterious one too. For me, the way that I translate opera into cinema is to take it as a visual form of art, a way to perceive the story through an emotional aspect.’ Maria Callas also loomed large in Larraín’s musical upbringing. After each performance, he recalls, ‘we’d go back home and then my mum would say, “Alright son, so you saw that, this is the real thing.” She would play Maria Callas.’

With Callas’s legacy held in such high regard by the driving creative force behind Maria, the actor bringing this musical monolith to life had colossal shoes to fill. Jolie had long been keen to work with Larraín and, when he contacted her regarding his latest project, she was an ideal choice for the role. For Larraín the two women share a lot of common ground: ‘There’s something about people like Maria Callas, but also Angelina Jolie – these women have a physical presence on a stage, in front of a camera or even just in a room. You feel the enormous amount of humanity they carry. There was no struggle for Angie to be Maria Callas and carry that weight, as she already has it.’ But while Jolie and Callas shared many attributes, Jolie was not an opera singer and, for Larraín, developing an authentic understanding of Callas’ beloved craft was paramount to inhabiting her character. So Jolie dove into seven months of intensive preparation for the role with coaches who worked on her posture, breathing, movement and accent.

Jolie’s transformation from Hollywood A-lister to opera ingenue was an arduous – if rewarding – process, but it was nothing compared to the task of developing an understanding of the person behind the star. Alongside Larraín’s deep-seated respect for Callas sat – perhaps in a reflection of the gossip which plagued her – an abiding curiosity to explore her offstage life. Larraín, however, is not interested in affairs or scandal, for him Maria is ‘the story of a woman that is in a crisis with her voice. It’s about someone that cannot do what she’s been doing for so long and so successfully, that has also transformed her.’ The film also explores the intersection between Callas’ own life and the roles she played. ‘She is someone that, in my imagination, became the sum of the tragedies that she played onstage,’ he explains. ‘That is at the heart of this film. It’s not said, not mentioned in the film, but that is the way that we approach it.’

Dream team: Jolie was an ideal choice for the role © Image courtesy of StudioCanal

This theme of tragedy is perhaps most evident in Larraín’s choice to show the final days of Callas’s life through the lens of her butler Ferruccio (played by Pierfrancesco Favino) and maid Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher), the two people who, it is suggested throughout the film, are the only ones who loved the real her. Their affection for their mistress is made clear through worried conversations about which food might finally induce Callas to eat, and through the painstaking relocation, at their mistress’ ever-changing whim, of a grand piano from one side of the apartment to the other. Although Favino and Rohrwacher play fictionalised versions of Callas’s staff, their dedication to her is no fabrication. Neither sold stories about Callas to the press, and Ferruccio, who is still alive, ‘shared some thoughts and stories’ with the film’s team to help them offer an accurate portrayal. Their mistress’ Paris apartment was faithfully recreated for the film by production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas after an extensive period of research including travels to France, Greece, Italy and Hungary, where a disused building in the centre of Budapest finally offered ‘the right setting, with the right sun exposure’.

While Hendrix Dyas pored over photos of Callas’s home, as well as her letters, cigarette lighters, books, and records, Ed Lachman, the film’s director of photography, used Callas’s real home movies to reference her interaction with her surroundings, and costume designer Massimo Cantini Parrini made more than 60 reconstructions of dresses and costumes worn by Callas. However, every effort towards authenticity in the world of Maria would be entirely futile without the film’s central element, her voice. For Larraín, using actual recordings of Callas was non-negotiable. Early on in production he enlisted the help of Academy Award- winning sound editor John Warhurst, who became the supervising sound editor on the project. ‘The first thing I did was listen to the arias written into the script to hear the quality of the original recordings.’ explains Warhurst. ‘My primary concern was bringing these older recordings to a modern cinema audience who are accustomed to high- fidelity sound in an immersive environment. I decided the first step would be to isolate Maria’s vocals from the original recordings. This allowed us to do the cleaning and restoration work to remove artefacts from her vocal that have nothing to do with her original performance.’

With the jewel of Callas’s voice cleaned, polished and screen-ready, its setting needed to be made equally brilliant, with reproductions of the original orchestral recordings supplied by music supervisor Csaba Faltay and the Budapest Scoring Orchestra. The final piece of the puzzle came not from the film’s subject, but from its star. Jolie’s voice was layered alongside Callas in every track, with her painstaking vocal training allowing her not only to understand the experiences of her character, but to perform as Callas. ‘We recorded her voice, her breathing, everything,’ explains Larraín. ‘There are moments in the film when you hear Maria Callas in her prime, when most of what you hear is Callas, but there’s always a fragment of Angelina.’ Jolie was recorded live on set, performing for an audience of crew and extras. ‘I would have my headphones on and would listen to the orchestration,’ Larraín recalls, ‘a little bit of Callas, and a little bit of Angie, so I was sort of mixing live. But she was metaphorically naked, voice wise, in front of hundreds of people.’

The central importance of Callas’ music influences every decision within Maria. The film’s structure takes an unquestionably operatic form, with opening overture followed by drama arranged in acts. Using his own deep understanding of opera, Larraín constructs within the film a ‘secret map’, undetectable to the untrained ear. ‘There is an interaction between what she’s singing on stage and what she’s going through in the movie in that specific moment,’ Larraín tells me. ‘It’s not just a random piece of music played because it’s beautiful.’ The ‘Anvil Chorus’ (Il Trovatore), which is performed by a crowd of everyday Parisians in Callas’ fantasies as she walks through the city’s Place du Trocadéro and initially delights Callas before her joy turns to fear perhaps reflects the character’s dual need for – and fear of – adulation. Later, Callas dreams up a full orchestra and throng of geishas joining her in the rain on the streets of Paris for Madama Butterfly’s ‘Humming Chorus’, drawing parallels between the silence she endures as a performer who has lost her voice, and that of Butterfly, who waits for her unfaithful husband.

That theme of silence pervades Maria, in parallel to the vitality of the reinvigorated recordings throughout the film. ‘The sound design of this film is very particular,’ muses Larraín, ‘and I think it’s related to two elements. Obviously, it’s music first. But then the question is, how do the rest of the sounds that come from reality sound for Maria? When portraying her memories we play with the ambience; sometimes we take the ambience off, sometimes the music will be mono and only in one speaker, sometimes in all of them. I was trying to go through her eyes, her ears, her humanity and, through her perception, see the world.’

© Image courtesy of StudioCanal

Callas’ perception of reality is constantly called into question in Maria as, in the final days of her life, Callas grimly clings to control of her own medication. Embracing the sedative and hallucinogenic results of her self-medication with methaqualone-antihistamine pill Mandrax, she tells her staff: ‘What is real and what is not real is my business’.

Seeing the world through the eyes of an increasingly unreliable narrator, the various languages Larraín uses throughout the film – of ambience and silence, of hazy film and sharp focus, and of opera itself – become a roadmap for an audience constantly questioning whether they what they are seeing is reality or fantasy. This duality comes to a head at the film’s climax where Callas seems to finally find her full voice, delivering a flawless performance in her open-windowed apartment (complete with living room orchestra) to an awestruck audience of Parisians in the street below. When I ask Larraín which side of the film’s fantasy-reality divide this final swan song falls on, he is elated. ‘I think the whole movie lies in that answer,’ he enthuses, ‘but I would never answer the question because I really want the audience to have their own opinion.’

Whether tackling reality or fantasy, every scene in Maria is a reflection of the film as a piece of drama. The audience is faced with constant reminders that what they are watching is not a documentary; each act is introduced by a clapperboard bearing its title, and the Mandrax pills Callas intermittently swallows give life to a hallucinated character of the same name (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee), a documentary filmmaker whose questions intrude on high points of emotion and whose choppy, contrived camerawork (filmed on an authentic French Aaton camera) constantly remind the audience that what they are watching is a work of fiction. This is how Larraín circumvents the many issues associated with tackling a legacy so marred by lies. ‘There is, of course, a lot of research. There are between fifteen and twenty biographies of Maria Callas,’ he tells me, ‘I read nine. Around fifty or sixty percent of the information that is there is agreed upon among the biographers.’ The director is not interested in taking on the herculean task of sorting fact from fiction. ‘I am a filmmaker, and I work with the tool of fiction,’ he insists. ‘I’m not a documentary filmmaker. I’m not trying to make a statement of truth. My responsibility is to do something respectful, something that has artistic meaning, and something that I consider to be beautiful.’

Although Maria depicts Callas in a physically weakened state, in the last days of her life, it is not Larraín’s intention to show the soprano as a pathetic figure. ‘We’re not looking at her with pity, and I don’t think the audience should feel sorry for her’, he insists, and indeed Jolie’s physical portrayal is characterised by the straight spine and lifted chin of one long used to presenting herself gracefully on stage. It is Callas’ strength Larrain admires, both in the recordings he learned to love with his mother, and offstage, as someone who faced decades-long scrutiny by the media. It is no mystery then, that Larrain’s image of his heroine stands on the foundation of his own great respect for this world-renowned star, and the director is wholly unapologetic. ‘This is a movie that some people have called “reverential”, and they say that in a negative way,’ he tells me defiantly. ‘But I don’t have any problems with that: I have reverence for her and her life.’