In Maria, Angelina Jolie takes on the role of renowned soprano, Maria Callas.
Throughout the film, there are many closeups of Jolie-as-Maria performing, leading viewers to wonder: Is Angelina Jolie really singing in Maria, or is she lip syncing to Maria Callas recordings?
It's a mix of both. In preparation for the projectde, Jolie took intense singing and vocal lessons. “I walked into room with the piano, and somebody said, ‘Ok, let’s see where you’re at.’ And I got really emotional. I took a big deep breath, and I let out a sound, and I started crying,” she told Variety. “I think we all don’t realize how much we hold inside our bodies, and how much we carry and how much that affects our sound and our voice and our ability to make sound.”
Pax Jolie-Pitt/Netflix
Jolie and director Pablo Larraín on the set of Maria.
Pablo Larraín applauded Jolie's dedication to her vocal performance. “She had to train for a long time. She trained for over seven months. There’s breathing, there’s posture, there’s accent,” Larraín told IndieWire. “She sang in Italian and French, but mostly Italian. There’s, you know, what in music is called the pitch, which is the capacity to reach each note and follow the melody, and that was very challenging for her.”
He continued, “Later, in post-production, we were able to mix it with Maria Callas’ voice. So sometimes you hear 1 percent of Angelina’s voice, sometimes it’s 5 percent, sometimes it’s forty percent, in a couple of times, not very often, but it does happen, you listen to sixty percent or seventy percent of Angelina’s voice. Obviously, this is a movie about Maria Callas, so you wanna have Maria’s voice, but in order to make it believable, Angelina had to sing out loud in front of her crew and and hundreds of extras in order to make it possible.”
He added, “I think she did beautiful, beautiful work and makes it believable and makes the movie possible. Without that, none of this could happen. Even if you have a great performance and everything is beautiful, if you don’t believe that she’s actually singing, there’s no movie, and I think she pulled it off. We had the help of a number of people that are experts are on it and so I’m happy that that it actually works.”
