How 'Maria', 'I'm Still Here' Blow Up the BiopicDirectors Pablo Larrain and Walter Salles reveal their creative approaches to telling true stories
When we talk about the Oscars becoming more international, we often mean it in the most obvious sense — a film in another language like Parasite can break through and win best picture, or a directors branch made up of directors from all around the world can give a boost to auteurs like Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car) or Justine Triet (Anatomy of a Fall). But the definition of what makes something “international” can feel very fuzzy when it comes to movies, which often require the participation of multiple governments, or filmmakers from dozens of countries, to come to life. Take, for example, the Maria Callas biopic Maria, now streaming on Netflix. It’s written and directed by Chilean Pablo Larrain, starring American Angelina Jolie, about a Greek opera singer and filmed in Budapest, Paris and Milan. Larrain, 48, has previously made films that are deeply rooted in his native Chile, including the international feature nominee No (2012) and last year’s nominee for best cinematography, El Conde, which reimagines part of Chilean history as a vampire story. When I spoke to Larrain, I asked him about the career that’s found him toggling between international stories like Maria or his Princess Diana film Spencer and those that hit very close to home. He told me that no matter how far around the world his films may take him, he’ll always be drawn to the world he comes from. Surely that’s a sentiment that Walter Salles can relate to as well. The Brazilian director had his international breakthrough with 1998’s Central Station, then tackled Hollywood projects like Dark Water and On the Road. He’s now returned home with his new film I’m Still Here. Based on the true story of Brazilian civil rights activist Eunice Paiva, the film stars both Fernanda Torres and, briefly, her real-life mother Fernanda Montenegro as Paiva; given that Montenegro was the star of Central Station, it’s one of many ways that I’m Still Here feels like a full-circle moment for Salles. In today’s newsletter I’ll share my interview with Larrain and then my conversation with Salles, Torres and I’m Still Here’s co-star Selton Mello, who plays Paiva’s husband Rubens. In this quiet period before the new year, when awards voters have a whole lot of screeners to catch up on, let this be your cue to put both Maria and I’m Still Here at the top of the queue. ‘We Want to Create Our Own Truth’
When Pablo Larrain has spoken with people in the industry who see his new film Maria, he’s found himself posing the same question over and over: Why aren’t there more movies about opera? It’s a question no one seems to have a good answer to, and what puts Maria in a very small pantheon of films about an art form centuries older than cinema. Maria is set primarily in the final week of Maria Callas’s life, when she has been away from the stage for years and spends almost all of her time in her lavish Paris apartment, with only a maid (Alba Rohrwacher) and a butler (Pierfrancesco Favino) for company. But through flashbacks and some flights of fancy, Maria incorporates some of the highlights from Callas’s storied career as well as the power of the art form itself. “The aim was to bring opera to cinema,” says Larrain. “To somehow film an opera with a moving camera, a moving proscenium. It is really a combination between the two art forms.” Maria roams elegantly between realism and a more heightened world, “inhabiting Maria’s perception of reality through music,” as Larrain puts it. It also leans on its setting in the 1970s — Callas died in Paris in 1977, at the age of 53 — for its visual style. Larrain reunited with cinematographer Ed Lachmann, who received an Oscar nomination for their work together on El Conde, to create a film that wasn’t just set in the 1970s, but looked as if it could have come from that period. “He’s a master in what he does, and someone who has somehow shaped what we understand of cinematography in the last 40-50 years,” Larrain says of 76-year-old Lachmann, whose credits range from Desperately Seeking Susan to Todd Haynes’s Carol. Larrain and Lachmann have developed such a close working relationship that Larrain operated the camera himself for, he estimates, 95 percent of the shots in the film. “Even though you could have wonderful camera operators, and there are many that are really good, there’s always someone between you and the camera— someone who has to interpret what you are feeling,” Larrain says. By operating the camera himself, he continues, “It’s always just me capturing what I think. I am close to the actors. I am the first audience. I am feeling what’s happening.” Staying close to his actors has, of course, been an essential element of Larrain’s recent run of acclaimed biopics, having earned best actress Oscar nominations for Natalie Portman (Jackie) and Kristen Stewart (Spencer) and helped redefine some of the most iconic women of the 20th century. Angelina Jolie’s performance in Maria is similarly revelatory, capturing Callas as a woman both larger than life and heartbreakingly human.  Maria digs deep into the forces that shaped Callas, from traumatic childhood moments during World War II in Greece to her famed romance with Aristotle Onassis (played by Turkish actor Haluk Bilginer). But Larrain insisted on maintaining the “mystery of enigma” about her, something he knew Jolie was uniquely suited to bringing to the screen. “She’s an actress who sometimes could let you in as an audience to see and to explore and feel what she’s going through—and sometimes she would close the door,” he says. “Even though you’re looking at her you don’t know where she’s at.” Though at this point he’s made several films that could be defined as biopics, Larrain insists there’s no such thing — that even after the extensive research he does to make his films, there’s no way to know a person entirely. “I don’t think the movie makes a statement of who Maria Callas was,” he says. “We want to create our own truth inside of the film that could let you find the spirit of the character more than anything else. I don’t think a biopic is realistic. I think it’s a cultural fantasy.” ‘It’s More Than a Film, It’s a Warning’
“Biopic” also wouldn’t be the right word for I’m Still Here, even though it’s based on a true story that’s extremely personal for writer and director Walter Salles. As a child in Rio de Janeiro, he loved spending time at the Paiva household, located near the beach and filled with the comings and goings of five children and the parents, Eunice and Rubens Paiva. Until one day, in 1971, the house went silent — Rubens had been taken in for interrogation by the dictatorial Brazilian government and never returned home. I’m Still Here follows Eunice as she holds the family together in the wake of his disappearance, but also spends valuable time with the family beforehand, recreating what Salles remembers as a “luminous place” before the family was shattered. To capture that lively family dynamic, Salles recreated the Paiva home — the real one has since been demolished — and allowed stars Fernanda Torres and Selton Mello to spend a month rehearsing in the space, alongside the young actors who played their five children. “It was magical for us,” says Mello, 52, who like Torres is a veteran in the Brazilian film industry. “This house was a character too, so it was a great experience to do before the shooting.”  The film is based on the autobiographical novel by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the youngest of the Paiva children and the only boy, who was already a successful novelist and screenwriter in Brazil before writing the book in 2015 that revealed much of his family history for the first time. Some estimates say that more than 400 people were killed or disappeared, as Rubens Paiva was, during the Brazilian military dictatorship, which ended in 1985. “It’s a film about memory in a country without memory,” says Mello, referring to Brazil’s still-complicated relationship with its recent past. Given the rightward turn of global democracies around the world in the past year, Mello adds, “It’s more than a film, it’s a warning.” Salles, who was 8 years old when the military dictatorship began, says he wanted to tell a political story through the lens of a family, “through the humane and the existential.” As he says, “Even if you take the political conditions of one specific country aside, you can see it as a narrative about loss and also how you can survive loss. Everybody can relate to that in one form or another.” Torres anchors the second half of the film as a mother who is not just determined but specifically, even politically joyful. Near the end of the film, Salles recreates a famous photograph of Eunice holding her husband’s long-delayed death certificate and grinning. “She did it on purpose,” says Torres, a Golden Globe nominee for her lead performance. She smiled, Torres says, “because if we play the sad family, they will win. So they didn’t break us. We are still here.” Follow us: X | Facebook | Instagram | Threads ICYMI
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