After her self-imposed hiatus from filmmaking and a turbulent period in her own saga, the elusive actress sits down with THR to discuss her reemergence, her portrayal of tempestuous diva Maria Callas and her own movie about trauma and survival: “I’m a very deeply feeling person and kind of a raw nerve.”
The film projects are personal in ways that are almost uncomfortable to discuss, with Maria — for which Jolie spent more than six months learning to sing, breathe and walk like the mercurial soprano — a portrait of an icon imprisoned by her own image. The movie is set in Paris in 1977, in the final days of Callas’ life, when she is trying to sing again after years away from a stage, for a public that had booed her when they didn’t like the sound of her voice and branded her a “tigress” for her temperament. Larraín says that, like Callas, “Angelina has an enormous amount of mystery. I thought she could play this woman who is looking to find her own identity.”
Without Blood, which stars Salma Hayek Pinault and Demián Bichir as two people linked by a traumatic event in their youth, is a return to a subject Jolie repeatedly mines as a filmmaker: the impact of conflict (in this case, one that is never specified). It’s a subject of intense interest to her as a mother and an advocate who has traveled to refugee camps and war zones.
Jolie’s home is a lushly landscaped beaux arts mansion built for Cecil B. DeMille that she bought after her 2016 separation from Brad Pitt in a highly contentious, headline-fueling divorce that is still ongoing. A towering tree house in the yard is a sign of the family she has raised within its wrought-iron gates. She built the tree house too high, she says, because “I’ve never been afraid of heights.”
Having now made two films so intimate to her own experiences, Jolie is figuring out how she wants to talk about them. She declines to discuss Pitt, or talk about 20-year-old son Pax’s recent e-bike accident, other than to say he is recovering. Over the course of the long afternoon, while her dogs snore softly at her feet, the actress will open up with bracing candor around some subjects — like the quite literal rediscovery of her own voice — and draw firm boundaries around others. In the old Hollywood, Jolie says, “You could have this messy private process and the work spoke. Now, the audience’s relationship is different. I’m trying to get used to what to share.”
You have a packed schedule heading off to the festivals. Having finished these two films, are you able to take in the moment?
I am often not. I was an artist early to just help my mom pay bills. I’ve had times where I’ve loved being an artist, and I’ve had times where I felt very, very far away from being comfortable in the business. I’m hoping to be able to have a new relationship with it.
What brought you to Maria Callas’ story?
Just give me a moment, because this is my first time talking about her. I kind of stepped away. It was so intense and then I stepped away and I haven’t sung or talked about her since. Which doesn’t always happen to me, but this one really kind of took me. I’m sure there’s a lot that will be read into it of our overlaps as women, but the one that’s maybe not the most obvious is I’m not sure how comfortable we both are with being public. And there was a pressure behind the working that wasn’t just the joy of the work.
And yet I do love to create, she does love to sing, but sometimes there are all these other things that take that joy away and change the experience of that. It was quite hard, what she went through. People were quite aggressive when she wasn’t able to be what they wanted her to be. They were very unkind, and she carried a lot of trauma and she worked very, very hard. I just began to really care about her and wanted that aspect of the story to be told.
In the beginning, [singing] was just survival for her. “This is what you should do to keep [the family] safe or make us money. This is what we want of you and what we expect of you.” Her approach to her music is, she said, that you find the piece of work and you just study and study and study, and you do it exactly as the composer wrote it. You add nothing. You don’t feel in it. You do the work with precision as you’re told, and then you breathe life into it and find it.
How does that compare to how you prepare as an actor?
I don’t know what it is that I do. I used to joke that I started flying lessons when I felt like I needed a practical skill because my skill was just being emotional. That was before I directed, but it was kind of like, “What do I do?” For me, if somebody laughs or relates, then it feels like a way of communicating with other people. And I think she experienced that, too. I think that’s why it hurt her so much when she was shut out and attacked.
In the first scene where Maria is rehearsing with the piano player after not performing for so many years, you’re about to open your mouth to start singing and a remarkable, dark look crosses your face. What is it that you were thinking in that moment?
