Pablo Larraín practically sings when he talks about music. He was listening to John Coltrane on his walk to the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills to chat with The Sobre (he loves Coltrane) and lately he's also been enjoying the French progressive rock band Magma, opera singer Jessye Norman and some new performances of several classical masterpieces.
He picks up his AirPods case and says, “This is the most important weapon I have.”
The Chilean director of “Maria,” starring Angelina Jolie as opera singer María Callas, is clearly a film lover, but says he wouldn't actually consider himself a true cinephile.
“I think I know more about music than movies,” he says. “It's my life. Music, for me, is the most beautiful and poetic expression that human beings have created. I feel this fascination with the exercise of music as a supreme poetic act.”
This was, in part, what led him to conduct a prismatic study of Callas. Her two previous English-language films, “Jackie” and “Spencer,” similarly explored 20th-century female icons, and both also meditations on the pain and isolation of fame. Those films were also animated by music, in the idiosyncratic and remarkable scores by Mica Levi and Jonny Greenwood, respectively.
But Larraín made music (specifically opera) both the text and subtext of his third portrait of a caged bird. With a script by Steven Knight (who also wrote “Spencer”), “Maria” focuses attention on the final “cycle” of the singer's turbulent life: her last week before she died in 1977. Flashbacks and montages of her childhood and celebrity. Prime reveals fragments of her biography, but the film mainly examines the singer's sleepless and sometimes hallucinogenic hours wandering through her palatial apartment and the streets of Paris to investigate the mystery of Callas.
The film tries to get us as close as possible to the diva (Larraín literally filmed much of it, operating the camera himself, a foot or two from Jolie's face) and inside her mind.
“One of the things I love about movies and that I think we can do,” he says, “is show someone's relationship to reality.” At any given moment in our day, Larraín explains, we may be in the middle of a conversation with someone, but any stimulus around us can trigger an emotional memory of our mother, our children, or an event from our past.
“Our perception of reality is fabulous,” says the director, 48, who still lives in Chile with his two teenage children.
Larraín read nine books about Callas, watched all the documentaries and interviews he could find, and after all that “I had no idea who she was,” he admits. “It's a huge amount of mystery, and that appeals to me a lot.”
Choosing his last week, “just one brick of that enormous wall of life,” was an attempt to “experience his work,” he says, “and look at his ghost and try to understand certain things. But above all it is not a rational experience. This is something that is about to disappear. It is an exercise in human poetry.”
That's where music became extremely important. As Callas moves from a conversation with her butler to an interview with an imaginary journalist and tense rehearsals with a patient pianist, music from her past invades the narrative, sometimes in visually fantastic ways.
In one scene, Callas passes by a theater and an orchestra materializes in the rain and suddenly finds herself in a scene from the second act of Puccini's “Madama Butterfly.” Passersby become the humming chorus of that opera's scene where the protagonist, Cio-Cio-San, anxiously awaits the return of her American captain to Japan.
In the opera, “She is trying to sleep,” Larraín explains. “So the people, the choir, get together to sing this very quiet music so she can sleep, but she can't.”
Each aria or opera selection was made with dramatic intent; Larraín says that the soundtrack is “the hidden map” of the film.
At another point in the film, Callas attempts to sing “O Mio Babbino Caro” (translated as “Oh, My Dear Father,” from Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi”) during a rehearsal. Callas “had a very particular relationship with her father, who was an absent figure in her life,” says Larraín. “And in that moment, when he tries to see the state of his voice, he chooses to think about his father.”
Originally, the director planned to include subtitles so the audience could understand this illuminating map, “but then it became a very rational exercise,” he says. “It was very distracting to read the subtitles, it just took away all the emotion. And the opera is about an emotional transition.”
He expects the public to have a “more subliminal perception, that perhaps the music transmits that without words.”
While making the film, I often thought about the advice that director Tullio Serafín gave Callas in case she ever lost track of where her character was in the story, emotionally or dramatically, while on set: “Just follow the music.”
“I took it as a mantra,” says Larraín, “for the film and for her.”
