How Angelina Jolie moved Maria director to tears by 'burning herself' raw with emotion (exclusive)

Angelina Jolie's biographical drama about the final act of opera singer Maria Callas' tragic life isn't a ghost story in the traditional sense. Still, the performance of Maria's leading lady, and director Pablo Larraín's beautifully unorthodox structure, conjures a haunting impression that brings phantoms of the icon's past into clearer focus.

Now, on the final project of his trilogy of features that reframe the lives of well-known women (Jackie Kennedy in 2016's Jackie, Princess Diana in 2021's Spencer), it clearly takes a lot to surprise Larraín these days. But, after poring over 10 biographies about Callas, all of which hit many of the same notes surrounding her career decline and life-ending heart attack in 1977 Paris, Larraín was struck not by what he absorbed from the page, but what he felt between the lines of her life's layers that others had yet to peel back.

He then built an inquisitive film around the downfall of an icon whose work defined a musical moment, whose otherworldly voice earned her the title of "La Divina" (translation: "The Divine One"), because her talent simply couldn't be explained by (or contained to) the earthly realm. Maria paints an impressionistic portrait of its subject, and leans into what Larraín calls the "many contradictions" in documents of her life. Instead of worrying himself with black-and-white details, the filmmaker says he crafted his film "with fiction, love, and care" to make audiences feel her plight through dramatized fantasy versus boring them with a textbook education. The story maps a path toward giving the late-career recluse a voice she thought she'd lost once again — even if it's not the voice her fans came to love.

For example, the film's more whimsical elements include The Power of the Dog actor Kodi Smit-McPhee, co-starring as a human embodiment of Callas' choice pharmaceutical, with the pair jaunting around Paris conducting a mock TV interview. Clips from operatic tragedies Callas performed on stage flash on screen between other dramatic bits, while visits to local restaurants and casual get-togethers with other famous figures are left ambiguous enough to prompt viewers to question reality. It's that kind of element that separates Maria from standard biopics — and Jolie's central performance ties it all together with raw emotion, and real-life vocal prowess in a key scene toward the end of the film, that even shook Larraín to his core.

He praises Jolie, already an Oscar-winning industry staple, for her "long and demanding" concentration on carrying the character through her final days along a "roller coaster of joy and sadness." Larraín points to two specific moments that surpassed even his expectations for such a difficult part. One is a scene in which Jolie doesn't even appear on screen. The actress came to set to watch the director and his other actors recreate a moment from Callas' childhood that saw she and her sister sing for a Nazi officer. Even off camera, Jolie seemed possessed with the spirit of the woman she channeled.

“Angelina was there [for shooting]. We were both off camera, but it was very moving. I think that determined a lot of what we did afterward,” Larraín recalls of the scene. He believes that Jolie's compulsion to shepherd the character's feelings in this way completely “transformed our process” of making the movie. It also allowed Jolie to channel the entire being of Callas' essence into a titanic scene near Maria's conclusion that involved a lot of actual singing on the star's part.

“We did that on the last day of shooting. We kept it for the very, very end. We had six-to-eight hours to do that. I operated the camera, so I was close to her, always. Angelina had to sing it out loud, with all of her power and humanity," he remembers. "By doing so, I asked her to feel the emotion and feel how broken she was in this moment of joy."

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

Larraín admits that "sort of mix of demands and emotions was something very hard to do," and that he "couldn’t believe how beautiful what was happening in front of the camera" was to behold.

"I was in shock," Larraín says. "I was moved to tears as I saw her burning herself to the point that I think it concludes the movie in an operatic way; it becomes a beautiful canvas of Maria’s life, someone that has found an operatic act in performance."

From the sounds of it, Callas' unsung pain might've transferred to Jolie during the scene. And between the film's renditions of numbers from operas like Anna Bolena and beyond, Maria stages La Divina's reverent final act more as a new beginning than a definitive end, a spiritual curtain call, and a chance for her newfound voice to live on — with a nudge from Larraín and Jolie's hands back on earth.

Maria enters limited theatrical release on Nov. 27, followed by a Netflix streaming debut on Dec. 11. See EW's exclusive images from the film above.