8-Minute Standing Ovation for ‘Maria’ at Venice Film Festival
Netflix has snapped up U.S. rights to Maria, the biopic of opera singer Maria Callas, teaming Spencer helmer Pablo Larraín and Angelina Jolie, which has premiered on the 29th of August at the Venice Film Festival.
A creative imagining and a psychological portrait of Maria Callas, Maria takes place in the ’70s near the end of opera legend Callas’ life. It’s a story about a woman who lived from the ’20s to ’70s — a woman who burned her voice, her life, by doing what she loved.
The Venice Film Festival crowd responded to the world premiere with an electric eight-minute standing ovation that saw its star in tears at one point. Jolie also made her first public statements on the project during a press conference held Thursday afternoon ahead of the screening. She apparently spent about seven months preparing for the challenging role, work that found her training with opera singers and coaches to master the posture, breathing and movement of a singer of Callas’ caliber. Diving deep into opera provided “therapy I didn’t realize I needed,” she told the press.
“I had no idea how much I was holding in and not letting out,” she continued. “So the challenge wasn’t the technical, it was an emotional experience to find my voice, to be in my body, to express. You have to give every single part of yourself.” Asked what part of Callas she most related to, Jolie said, perhaps surprisingly, it was “the part of her that’s extremely soft and doesn’t have room in the world to be as soft as she truly was — as emotionally open as she truly was. I share her vulnerability more than anything.”