Interview: Pablo Larraín on Unlocking the Mystery of Maria Callas and the Commitment of Angelina Jolie in ‘Maria’

“I know this guy,” Pablo Larraín says when my face pops up on our video chat.

“How is your garden?” I ask (a topic he and I have talked about several times), “Beautiful,” he says. Larraín is in New York, far from his garden in Chile, but he’s here to tend to a different flower, his newest film, Maria, starring no less than Academy Award winner Angelina Jolie in the type of role and performance that will likely become one of those career definers, the perfect convergence of actor and character that transcends both.

The film follows Maria Callas, the world-famous American-Greek soprano as she retreats to Paris after a glamorous and tumultuous life in the spotlight. Just as in his previous films examining famous women under the microscope of the public eye, Larraín’s Maria reimagines the legendary performer in her final days as the diva reckons with her identity and life. Whether she’s hiding pills from her truth-telling butler Ferruccio (stoically played by Pierfrancesco Favino) or her supportive housemaid Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher, “magnificent,” she says after Callas offers a strained singing performance), or engaging in an imaginary in person interview with ‘Mandrax’ (a fantastic Kodi Smit-McPhee), Callas is orchestrating the world around her like conductor, not simply its lead actress. “What is real and what is not is my business,” she says.

In her review of the film, AwardsWatch Associate Editor Sophia Ciminello said, “Jolie is absolutely spellbinding as Maria Callas, imbuing her with grace and resolve. As she sings alongside a lone pianist on stage and tries to find La Divina again, Jolie doesn’t disappear into the role, she transcends.” A fitting statement as early in our conversation, Larraín asks me how much do I think I know about Angelina Jolie. It’s always a fascinating thing, when an interviewee turns the question to the interviewer, but I know Larraín well enough to know that his question is in kind; an avenue to discuss the mystery of both Callas and Jolie and trying to make the enigmatic accessible on an emotional level. “That is my job and I really love it,” he says.

Born in Santiago, Chile in 1976, Pablo Larraín Matte was fascinated with the arts a young age and it wasn’t long after studying at the University for the Arts, Sciences, and Communication in Santiago, that he began th film production company Fábula with his brother Juan d Dios. After a trio of first films he made the political drama No, starring Gael García Bernal playing an advertising company executive who runs the “No” campaign in the 1988 plebiscite that ultimately voted Augusto Pinochet out of power. The film was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 85th Academy Awards, becoming the first Chilean nomination in the category. Since then his films have earned five Oscar nominations, including two Best Actress nods, for Natalie Portman in Jackie, portraying First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and Kristen Stewart in Spencer, playing Princess Diana of Wales. It seemed then only fitting to close out his unofficial trilogy with another woman under the influence, the very public but very elusive opera legend Maria Callas.

In our conversation we talk about what drew his to Callas as a subject, the convergence of star and subject with Angelina Jolie on board, and what he wants to do after he stops directing.

EA: You’ve mentioned watching operas with your mother when you were young. What was the initial draw of them to you and was it a thread that you kept with you as you grew up?

PL: No, it was very simple. My parents would get the “l’abbonamento ascoli,” the subscription to the theater, so you get a ticket for all shows, ballet, concerts, and opera. So my mom, we are six siblings, and my mom would just say, “Who wants to come?” And I often was the one to raise my hand, and I just went, because my father was too busy, so there was one ticket available and I came with my mom to numerous operas and ballets and concerts. So that was my gate to this incredible form of art. And then I tried to become a musician because of it, and I just failed trying to play guitar, and the piano was terrible. But then I found a camera, an old camera that wasn’t really actually working well. The light meter didn’t work. So that’s how I started, and then I’m here.

But opera, Erik, it’s not just a beautiful art form. It’s not just something that should be more popular in my opinion. Opera was for me, the gate to the performing arts. And I realized that there was something in my sensibility that was very, very moved when I saw one production after the other over the years. Whether the production was better or worse, high quality, mid-quality, whatever the result of that, I fell in love with opera because it was just so moving and I understood that my emotions were affected, very, very affected by what was going on onstage. And I started wondering if I was able to affect others with my own idea. So that was something, is the origin story of my own approach to the form of art. And then I discovered cinema that, believe me, I directed one opera once, and it’s a very similar work. It’s incredible.

EA: I love that. In thinking about Maria Callas, I think of how Jackie Kennedy and Princess Diana had such collective visibility worldwide, just being photographed so much and their speaking voices being so recognizable. But there’s almost a mystery about Maria Callas in the United States despite her worldwide success. Did that help give you more ways to interpret her life?

PL: Can I ask you something, Erik?

EA: Yes.

PL: I know you’re here to do the questions, but tell me, honestly, do you think you know a lot about Angelina Jolie?

EA: No, I definitely don’t. That’s something I can’t wait to talk to you about because I feel like, obviously we know as regular people, we know bits and pieces of what we’re told by [points to self] journalists, by media, by anything. So, we don’t really ever know anyone.

PL: That’s the same with Maria Callas, and I’ll tell you about Jackie, and Diana is very similar. But going back to Callas, I’ll tell you, I read nine biographies, read so many documentaries, read every single interview, made a movie, and I don’t really know who she was. And I think Angelina, whether you know more or less about her throughout her work, throughout what media says, even when she says things about herself, in reality, I don’t think you really know much about her. And that is where both Maria and Angelina come together and can do a movie that is not Angelina. It’s not Maria necessarily, it’s our Maria. And that is made through a very mysterious character and a very mysterious actress that created a very enigmatic and mysterious main character. And I am fascinated by that.

I think that I’m a filmmaker that really, really, really cares about the audience. I respect the intelligence and the sensibility of the audience, and I want them to complete what we’re not showing in the film. And that is a lot, and that’s how cinema works. It should be like you’re active, you’re trying to read, you are trying to complete things that are not given, and that is my job and I really love it.

EA: I was thinking of the very same thing and how it can be, whether it’s with Angelina, Kristen Stewart, the way that you play with public persona a little bit, so that as a viewer you are filling in those little bits of blanks and you are allowing you to color outside the lines a little bit to give us something different.

PL: Also, Angie is very conscious of when she wants to let you in and when she doesn’t want to let you in. So I’m filming, I’m operating the camera, because I operate the camera. I’m close to her, and then she goes and does a take where she’s visibly more accessible, and then she does another one where there’s no way you could actually enter. And that is the game, the mechanics of what it becomes. Then when you put the movie together, that is the same thing. There are moments where you can enter a moment where you cannot. So what she’s telling about herself, that the movie is telling about herself is incomplete and undefined, and that is what we have to work out and complete as an audience.

EA: Absolutely. I love that. Can you talk a little bit about preparing Angelina to sing opera on screen? Because there’s a wonderful mix of her voice and Callas’s voice, but Angelina’s singing live at all times.

PL: Yeah, you can’t cheat in opera. That is just as simple as that. I think in general, you can’t cheat in movies when people is singing, but in pop or rock, you could probably get away a little bit easier with certain things. Like I myself, if I would just put a record of, I don’t know, David Bowie, someone that I love, a song that I really like, it could be pathetic, but if I played here in front of you, I could do a decent job in front of you. Say, “Yeah that’s not that bad.” Besides the quality of my voice, I could follow the melody.

In opera, you can’t do that. You have to really follow the pitch and the structure of the melody in every fragment, it’s very delicate. So she went through a very long training process that was based on posture and breathing and then accent in Italian, and then on a number of other things, and then very into every melody that she sang with a group of trainers and teachers and singers to really get it right. She had to sing in front of us. She had an earpiece. Then the only sound that was coming out in the set was her voice, which was very frightening for her because she was singing in front of a lot of people. The crew can be very large, especially when there are many, many extras.

And she did it really well at a point that we were able to mix it. But that’s the technicality. I think what is very interesting in the process that that was the best path for Angie to really play Maria Callas, the music. Once she got into the process of singing really well and got in and was able to put everything that she could out of her body on that voice, that transfiguration made her to be properly prepared for the role, I think.

EA: I think so, absolutely. I know this unofficial trilogy of Jackie, Spencer, Maria wasn’t intended to be one, but I love that Anne Boleyn was a crucial role for Callas on stage that she factors into Spencer. And we have the conversations with Kennedy and Onassis here. Maria is the culmination in connective tissue of everything, of all three.

PL: Yeah. They’re connected, but they’re mostly connected because they belong to a very similar generation and people that was connected to power, to certain families, to money, to media, to a number of things. And they’re very similar given, of course, Maria it’s an artist, unlike the other two characters or real people. But yeah, I think the traces of certain connections in between them, although I didn’t meant to do a multiverse or something around three characters, but they did have in common, they did met people in common. And some of them were very painful relationship for them, especially for Maria in the case of Jackie and Onassis. It is very true about Anne Boleyn and this ghostly presence that it’s in Spencer and then the role that she sings later in the story where she’s about to be beheaded in the mad scene in Anne Boleyn and the movie. It’s all connected, but at the same time that they’re very particular and different individuals. But I see your point, of course.

EA: It’s fun, for the audience, your Easter eggs and little treasures throughout.

PL: And then they’re also different… They asked me what relationship would I have if I would ever met them, and that’s a little bit of a strange question. But it’s interesting because over the years, my relationship with each character has somehow changed and be redefined, not only but what people think, but also how the movie has evolved inside of me. So incredible how cinema and movies and art, they do need time to see how they settle into culture.

EA: You also consistently choose incredible people to work with behind the camera. And you’ve got Ed [Lachman] here again and Guy [Hendrix Dyas] with the production design and Massimo [Cantini Parrini] with costumes. For you, are these choices dependent on project or relationship or both?

PL: Both. But at the same time, I do know one thing about my job is that the best directors are also the people that can have the best people. If I have a talent, it’s that one, is to be able to seduce and invite people that I admire. They’re great at what they do and they make the movie possible. Of course, I’m someone that I’m very obsessive and I like to control a lot of what I’m doing, but I work with people that I really hear them. It’s not that they just become someone that they’re there to do what I tell them to do.

I’m someone that wants to work with them because I want to absorb their knowledge, their intelligence, their creativity, and turn them into something that could make the movie better. That’s why I have relationships that are long-term, but we became friends and it’s something that stays over the movies. But yeah, you want to work with the best people because they’re not only the best choices for the role, but also people that way you could have a personal relationship, and that’s always very beautiful.

EA: And speaking of that, your longest working relationship is with your brother Juan as a producer. Can you talk about why you started working together and how it’s lasted so long?

PL: Well, I think we have our company for already 20 plus years, and it’s been a wonderful relationship. I wouldn’t know how to make a movie without him. I’ve never done it. He’s someone that takes care of things that I don’t take care and vice versa, and that is always a good thing. And I trust him and I don’t know, I don’t have a very rational answer. I just don’t think I can make a movie without him. He always joins the projects in any capacity and end up being one of the main producers because he really knows how to make the job done. He knows me. And once you work with someone that knows you so well, and I know him so well, there are a lot of things that are faster because we know what those things should be and how should be very quickly.

EA: Yeah, there’s a trust there.

PL: Yeah, absolutely.

EA: When we spoke in LA a few weeks ago, you said that you’re not a director that wants to make films every five years. You want to make something every year until you’re done. Do you always have something ready to start once you finish another or many things?

PL: Yes. There’s always different projects in different stages. Sometimes some of them take longer to exist. I’ve been lucky to be able to be busy most of the years. Weirdly enough, I don’t have something right now ready to go. I’m looking for it. I like to keep myself busy. I want to be an active filmmaker, but what I do know is that I don’t want to do this for a very long time. I think filmmaking is for young people or younger people. Of course, there’s people like, look at it, like Clint Eastwood or Ridley Scott. They’re more busy and they’re in their 90s, 80s, and they’re still doing a good job and it’s obviously amazing. But I’m not sure I want to do that, but maybe I’ll end up doing it. But right now, I think that I would like to stop at some point and just do something else and have another life in the last and third of my life. So we’ll see.

EA: We’ll see. Maybe an even bigger garden.

PL: Yeah, garden. Or maybe I could cook for others. That would be interesting.

EA: I’ll be the first there.

PL: I love cooking. There’s such an incredible crafting there. I admire chefs so much. So much. I would like to be a painter, but I think I can learn already at my almost 50s. But I think you can learn how to cook and do something reasonable, maybe.

EA: We’ll see. Pablo, thank you so much. We’ll see you soon.

PL: Ciao, amigo. Take care.

Maria will be released in select theaters on November 27 and on Netflix December 11.