“I’ll sing when I’m ready to sing.”
That’s a line from Pablo Larrain’s “Maria,” now streaming on Netflix, based on the final days of opera superstar Maria Callas. The film is peppered with flashbacks of arias by Verdi and Puccini when Callas was at the height of her success.
And was Angelina Jolie, who portrays Callas, ready to sing them? Absolutely not.
She might be a trained actor — as a young teen, she took acting classes at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute — but she’s not a trained singer.
For Larrain to make the film, with Jolie as his leading lady, he knew one thing, he wanted this performance to be believable. Says Larrain, “This is opera, you can’t cheat.” Which meant Jolie was not going to lip-sync her way through her performance.
To play one of the most renowned sopranos in the world, Jolie went through rigorous prep, going through every step necessary to pull it off. Jolie walked into her first singing class with the disclaimer that she was “tone deaf.”
Larrain notes she trained for over a month on each aria she had to sing. But it required a lot more of the actor.
Breaking down her process, Jolie says, “We trained for seven months. We started with the breath work, the posture and really back to basics [of] sound.” She continues, “We did a few months of just Italian. A female opera singer came in, so I could sing with her and understand the difference.”
When it came time for the cameras to roll, “Ave Maria” was one of the first scenes they shot. Jolie recalls feeling “terrified. I was extremely nervous and extremely insecure.” It was a moment of reckoning for her. While Larrain had limited the number of onset crew members to those who needed to be there, Jolie was having doubts. “Did I do enough work? Am I prepared enough? Can I sing enough?” She continues, “Is John [Warhurst], the film’s sound editor, going to look over at Pablo and say, ‘This is a mess?’”
The vocals and performances were recorded live. “It’s not just going and doing a gig where you go and stand on stage and sing the song. You sing it 20 times,” Warhurst explains. “The reason we do that is that then gives us a heap of great recordings.”
In some scenes, Jolie’s Callas performs with a piano, and in others, when Callas is at the height of her success, there’s a full orchestra. Capturing those moments behind the scenes was a different story.
Jolie reveals, “In order to really mix us properly, I had to be the only sound in the room so there could be no piano, no Maria, no nothing.” She adds, “The only sound in the room was going to be my voice, which was just the most terrifying news.”
But the process meant every breath and sound was captured.
Jolie’s live singing also provided the team with an important piece of the puzzle. “We also get the visual performance as well which we need to work on with the picture editor to frame it accurately, so the picture makes musical sense,” Warhurst says.
Next, Callas’ vocals were extracted from the recordings. Even before that, the next step was to make Jolie’s performance to sound as close to Callas as possible. Warhurst explains, “We did that by using EQ changing and tonal qualities to match into Maria.”
The audio mixing revolved around percentages and considering every word and every line, where Callas’ voice, especially during moments from her prime, led the way.
There are, however, moments where the percentage of Jolie’s voice dominates. Warhurst says, “If we use a bit more of Angelina there, then that’s going to be really cool. And then we really believe it.”
During a performance of Anna Bolena at La Scala, Jolie’s Callas has a complete breakdown, and her housemaid Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) is recording the performance so she can hear how she sounds. “That’s almost all Angelina there,” Warhurst says. “That was how she performed it on the day, and it was just perfect. We were just like, ‘We’re just going to use that.’”
Jolie recalls shooting that scene. The stage was available for four hours. “They did it towards the end, so we’d been working towards it. It’s like the greatest memory I have. I was never more scared, never more unsure and never felt smaller.” She adds, “We were all equally very nervous on the day to pull it off.”
Jolie also learned she wouldn’t be able to see the conductor because Larrain and cinematographer Edward Lachman were going to shoot 360 degrees. “It was so beyond my comfort,” Jolie recalls. “I hadn’t felt shy rehearsing in the dressing room because I felt I didn’t deserve to be in the dressing room at La Scala. The whole thing was just overwhelming. But I say to Pablo, sometimes, ‘It’s great it was the mad scene because feelings were running so big on that day.”
The months of prep and vocal and breathing and posture training worked. Jolie is absolute perfection and delivers a performance Callas would be proud of. Larrain says, “That’s why you feel that she’s actually singing, because she is.” He adds with pride, “She did it. I was there.”
