Angelina Jolie detailed her preparations to play opera icon Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín’s “Maria” during a Venice Film Festival press conference. She said she had been training for “almost seven months.”
Angelina Jolie remembers being 'shaky' when she 'sang for the first time' to Maria
“Maria” reunites Larraín and writer Steven Knight — whose last project, “Spencer,” premiered in Venice in 2021 — to tell the “tumultuous, beautiful and tragic story of the life of the world’s greatest opera singer, relived and re-imagined during her final days in 1970s Paris.”
“Everyone here knows I was terribly nervous,” she said of learning to sing opera. “I trained for almost seven months, because when you work with Pablo, you can’t do anything halfway. He demands, in the most wonderful way, that you really try hard and really learn and train.”
Jolie said she had "never sung in public before", which added to the pressure of filming packed theatre scenes at Paris' La Scala theatre.
