00:00Honestly, for me, the bar in this that I would know if I did good enough are the Maria Callas fans and those who love opera.
00:11And my fear would be to disappoint them.
00:15So, of course, all other things in my own business, if there's a response to the work, I'm very grateful.
00:24But in my heart to disappoint the people who love her and she means a lot to.
00:30It's her legacy and I really came to care for her.
00:34So I felt I didn't want to do a disservice to this woman.
00:39I think when your life is full, when you've felt a certain level of despair, of pain, of love,
00:49at a certain point there is only certain sounds that can match that feeling.
00:53And to me the immensity of the feeling encapsulated within the sounds of opera, there is nothing like it.
01:05And that feeling that would move all of us if we were to hear it would be the only sound that would explain that pain.
01:13I think the approach to her, I listened to her, she actually taught and so there are audio recordings of her teaching.
01:20So I got very lucky because the best way in was I got to be taught by Maria,
01:26who said when she approaches her work, she said the first thing you do and she calls it straightjacketing.
01:33So the first thing you do is you don't think about how you feel or what you want,
01:38you just try to understand the music and the intention of the composer and you are disciplined
01:42and you do the work exactly as intended and you practice and practice.
01:50And so I did that and I think in approaching that way, then she said,
01:57and then the final thing you let your personal and your emotion come in.
02:01I'm an opera fan since I grew up, of course a big Maria Callas fan,
02:07but always very intrigued by the fact that there's almost no movies about operas and opera singers.
02:16The opera world that is so interesting as a form of art has been largely ignored by cinema.
02:23So I thought about making a movie about probably the greatest voice of history
02:31who had a very beautiful and difficult life.
02:36And by thinking about it, we had the luck to find Steve Knight who wrote the beautiful script
02:46and of course this movie wouldn't exist without Angelina.
02:50I think that if you meet somebody as Maria Callas,
02:55it's one of those encounters that gives you the possibility of getting a little beam of that light
03:03and to make it become yours.
03:05My feeling is that their identity became what it is or what it was because they had the chance to meet her
03:13and she was a queen.
03:24Thank you very much.
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