It happens every year during the summer & fall film festival seasons: suddenly, there are critical darlings and consensus picks for the upcoming award season. Last year, Emma Stone’s performance in Poor Things was suddenly the talk of the festival season and that buzz ended up getting her a second Best Actress Oscar. Something similar happened with Angelina Jolie in Pablo Larrain’s Maria. It helps that in Larrain’s last two films, his leading ladies got Oscar nominations (Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart). It feels like Jolie has an easy path to a nomination, but could she really win? I don’t know. Sources told People Mag that Angelina is “overwhelmed and so grateful for all the positive feedback about” the film and “she’s excited” about the buzz around such a “vulnerable project.” Meanwhile, Angelina and Pablo recently spoke to IndieWire about Maria Callas and more. Some highlights:

Angelina on her age: “I’m 49. I do feel like an older woman now and I embrace that. When I was younger, there were certain pieces of music and certain sounds that matched what I was feeling: I was falling in love, or I was curious about this, or whatever I was going through. There is nothing that meets what you’re feeling like opera. [Some pieces] are so beautiful, so full of hope and so full of yearning. Opera is bigger. It is bigger than we allow ourselves to feel in every moment.”

Whether she came into the project well-versed in opera: “I was not. I grew up in America. In other countries, they understand how essential and important it is, and it’s much more a part of the culture, but not where I was raised [Los Angeles]. I had been introduced to [Callas] but it was a complete discovery of this new art form, to come in and transform my life and teach me all of the different operas. I hope that most people however they relate to the film go into a discovery and they let themselves feel it and they try to sing it. If I can do it…

Larrain on whether Maria’s mother made her sleep with Nazis during WWII, in Nazi-occupied Greece: “Among all the biographies, 70 percent of things are in common, they agree. And there’s a fragment of the different visions, different documentations that lends to different facts. [Maria never spoke about it] directly. She was oblique in certain letters that she wrote, but there’s enough documentation to think that that was possible. What happened in Greece back then, we wanted to be in a place of ambiguity. You could feel that that actually happened. Or some people don’t.

Angelina on Maria’s WWII history: “We know she was under occupation. We know that she sang and her mother pushed her to sing for them [the Nazis].”

There’s a scene where Callas disses President Kennedy. “I love that scene too. It’s so good. You could tell I enjoyed performing it.

[From IndieWire]

I included the stuff about WWII because it’s an important part of Callas’ story. Callas was born in 1923 in New York, then the family moved to Greece when she was 13… so 1936. Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 (the start of the war), and the German occupation of Greece began in 1941. Maria was 17-18 years old when the Nazis came, and her overbearing mother forced her to sing for them and probably a lot worse. As for Americans not knowing much about opera… I can confirm, most Americans aren’t that familiar with opera or opera lore. I wonder if that will be a factor in how this film is received.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.