Angelina Jolie says Maria allowed her to be terrified, finds her voice

After a whirlwind tour of the Venice, Telluride and New York film festivals, Angelina Jolie and Pablo Larraín brought their film Maria to AFI Fest in Los Angeles on Saturday night.

the project — following Larraín’s previous looks at Jackie Kennedy in Jackie and Princess Diana in spencer — explores the final days of the legendary but troubled opera singer Maria Callas in the Paris of the 70s, while fighting to recover the iconic voice he has lost.

In a post-screening Q&A, moderated by Barry Jenkins, Larraín noted that “I don’t think there was any alternative, I don’t think this movie would have existed if Angelina had passed away,” and required a star who could capture both. . Callas’s “larger than life” diva presence and she has the discipline to learn to sing opera.

“I think when they asked me if I could sing, I thought, one, sing like an actor: I’ll sing as much as I can, I’ll do the best I can, without understanding what it’s like to sing opera,” Jolie said. he admitted, calling the training process “a really emotional and very special and terrifying journey.”

He told the crowd that there haven’t been “many moments in my career where I’ve been asked to give everything you’ve got, and it’s one of the greatest gifts, especially as an artist, for someone to ask and want.” “That you give everything you have, that you don’t know you have.” Jolie added that “she was afraid again as an artist, which is a great gift, because you get scared and you have to do something that you are not sure you can do and surprise yourself,” and with Larraín at the helm, “I knew that I had a safe place to fail, so I was allowed to be free.”

On the red carpet before the screening, Jolie said The Hollywood Reporter that despite becoming an opera legend, she still doesn’t “really consider myself a singer, but I got over it” and like her character, through the role “I think I found my voice again. I had never sung at the top of my lungs. “I had never had support to know how to do it, I had never tried.”

And after undergoing seven months of vocal training and immersing herself in Callas’s life, Jolie said she’s not sure she’s left the character behind yet.

“I’ve played some real people in my life and you carry them with you; “He is different from other characters,” the star said. “Like she’s my sister now, she’s someone that I know very intimately and that I really had to fall in love with in order to help other people understand her, and I had to understand her in order to hope that I was saying and doing the right thing. . So I will always listen to his music and maybe smile a little differently than others, because I feel close to him.”

Maria will arrive in select theaters on November 27 and begin streaming on Netflix on December 11.