Diksha Sundriyal
In Netflix’s ‘Maria,’ Angelina Jolie takes on the mammoth task of bringing to life the final days of Maria Callas. The role demands a lot from the actor, especially considering the difficult time that Maria was going through with respect to her physical as well as mental health. Jolie digs deep into her emotions to reflect Maria’s and delivers a compelling performance, but the role demands more of her. Making a movie about an opera singer’s life couldn’t be complete without the music, which meant that Jolie would have to sing for the role.
Angelina Jolie Trained for Months as an Opera Singer
When Pablo Larrain brought the role of Maria to Angelina Jolie, he asked her if she could sing. At the time, even though she gave a skeptical “yes,” Jolie didn’t know the full extent of the training she would have to go through actually to sing for the film. Once she dove into it, she realized that lip-syncing could never have worked for it because opera singing requires a lot more than just singing. Without any second thoughts, she dedicated herself to the preparation, and it took six to seven months for her to be able to face the camera and sing in front of an audience.
Talking about the process, Jolie revealed that the first day of the training session was very emotional for her. She was convinced that she couldn’t sing very well, but when she started to do it, she realized how much of herself she had been holding back. By the end of the journey, Jolie was so changed by opera singing that she now recommends people go for it as a form of therapy. The journey, emotional as it may have been, was only just beginning. Jolie discovered that there is a lot more to opera singing, and to learn the full extent of it, she needed different trainers. One training focused on her technical skills, which included but was not limited to breathing, posture, accent, and movement. The fact that she had to sing all of it in Italian added another layer of challenge to the job. The other training focused on getting her to the right pitch. She was taught to recognize what the song wanted from her and to deliver it that way.
Jolie also took Maria Callas’ advice, in which the opera singer advised young learners to do away with the emotion in the beginning, to first focus on technique and then bring the emotion as a layer when they knew exactly what the writer intended with the song. Sure enough, emotion ended up playing an important role in Jolie’s learning curve. She realized that opera singing required a person to tap into the depth of their emotions and confront the hidden things within them to reach the full scale of their singing. This is why, perhaps, she found it better than therapy.
The Singing in the Movie is a Mix of Angelina Jolie and Maria Callas’ Voice
While shooting the movie, Angelina Jolie had to sing every single song that we hear Maria sing. She had to perform live in front of hundreds of extras, which was quite a daunting task. However, Larrain eased her into it by slowly increasing the number of her audience. So, she went from a closed set to performing in front of a whole crowd rather than jumping into it all at once, which helped take the pressure off her shoulders, considering that this was the first time she was singing in public. For help, she would have Callas’ voice ringing in her ear through an earpiece, but to everyone on the set, the only voice that would be heard was of Jolie. The actress sang everything from Verdi’s ‘Ave Maria’ to Puccini’s ‘O Mio Babbino Caro’ for the film.
Larrain revealed that in post-production, Jolie’s voice was mixed with Callas’ to different degrees. So when we hear Callas in her heyday, we are actually listening to her sound from archival footage. But when we hear Callas trying to find her voice, we mostly hear Jolie. Still, there is no point in which there is only Callas or Jolie. The string of one’s sound is always entangled with the other. This shows the faith that Larrain showed in Jolie and how she came through by completely giving herself to her training. The actress revealed that apart from the technical parts of the training, what made it more difficult was the deep connection that it demanded from one’s emotions. She said that opera singing led her to places inside of her that she didn’t know she was ready to confront. It helped her find her voice back, and all of her hard work shows in the phenomenal performance she delivers as Maria.
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