Sofia Subercaseaux On the Challenges of Editing Angelina Jolie Film “Maria”

Watch Sofia Subercaseaux On the Challenges of Editing Angelina Jolie Film “Maria” - Variety on Dailymotion

Transcript

00:00Sofia, I'm going to come to you. Maria's screen's here this weekend, make sure you go and see it.

00:05Angelina Jolie is phenomenal. We can't do any spoilers, so talk a little bit about the opening

00:15sequence. I know you've said it's one of your most challenging scenes to edit in the film,

00:20why was that? Well, there was a few things. First, we needed to set up

00:30the character for whoever didn't know who Maria Callas was, because the movie is about this,

00:37you would find out right away, it's not a big spoiler, it's about her last days and kind of

00:41like revisits her past. But we really needed to like sell who she was and the greatness of her

00:49career for whoever wasn't familiar with her story, so you could understand where she was at the end

00:54of her life and why it was such a big kind of like, how meaningful it was, how like they just

01:06really captured the diva and like the scale of her career. That was one thing. And the other thing

01:12was that in these movies, especially when you're working with someone as famous as Angelina Jolie,

01:19it's kind of like you're expecting the moment where she's going to sing. And this opening,

01:26she sings straight into camera like first, like a very, very tight close up. So you're kind of

01:33like ripping the bandage right off. And we really needed to sell it because if that sequence didn't

01:39work, then you would like starting the movie on the wrong foot. And that was a tragedy. So

01:44we just had endless footage and it was like a very, very hard balance to just capture.

01:53But I think the process started with just using Angelina's performance first and just making sure

02:00that we had the most perfect version of that and that she felt earnest and it really felt like she

02:07was singing and that you kind of like by the end of it, you could forget that you were watching

02:12Angelina Jolie and you could like kind of like start the movie thinking that you were

02:17experiencing the Maria Callas like story, not Angelina Jolie playing Maria Callas.

02:22So yeah, that was it was just it was the one sequence that we kept on going back and back

02:27and back and back. And it was like an endless thing until we were like, I think, like the week

02:31we closed the movie, we tweaked it one more time. I was like, OK, that's it. But yeah, it was hard.

02:38Wait, how long was that then? Did you spend on that opening sequence in total?

02:42The edit was surprisingly fast. It total like with Paolo, we only worked for like six weeks together.

02:48But I arrived at him with a with an assembly because I live in New York and he lived in Chile

02:53and we were like either though I'm from Chile, I cut first in New York and then we met in Chile.

03:01And I think it was like on and off. We just kept on being like, oh, go back to it,

03:05we'll go back to it. And but it was like the one

03:07sequence that we kept on going back to constantly. We never felt like it was finished.