By most accounts, indie cinema legend Ed Lachman is on track to land his second consecutive Oscar nomination for a collaboration with the great Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín. The cinematography legend was nominated last year for the arresting black-and-white photography of Larraín’s satirical gothic fable El Conde; and he is back in contention in the best cinematography category this season with his exquisitely painterly work on Maria, the Angelina Jolie-starring Netflix biographical film about the life and inner world of the great 20th-century opera diva, Maria Callas.
The Hollywood Reporter recently sat down with Lachman for a special session of THR Presents to discuss in detail how Maria was crafted — the complex array of camera, lighting and color choices that went into the film’s arresting but elegant imagery, the nature of Lachman’s collaboration with Jolie and Larraín, and the various principles that have come to inform his work after decades behind the camera (watch the full conversation above).
A true icon of international indie cinema, prior to his pairing with Larrain, Lachman had collaborated with over half a century’s worth of trailblazing auteurs, including Werner Herzog (La Soufrière), Wim Wenders (Tokyo-Ga), Robert Altman (A Prairie Home Companion), Paul Schrader (Light Sleeper), Sofia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides), Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich, The Limey), Larry Clark (Ken Park), Mira Nair (Mississippi Masala), Ulrich Seidl (Paradise trilogy), and most consistently, Todd Haynes (Far from Heaven, I’m Not There, Carol, The Velvet Underground and more).
For Maria, Lachman says he and his director benefitted from the fact that Maria Callas’ life was heavily documented — in home videos, professional recordings of her performances, and in portraits shot by the great magazine photographers of her day. The challenge for the film was to find a way into the character’s psychology to represent for the viewer Maria’s shifting perceptions of her alternatingly traumatic and highly rarified passage through the world. Lachman and Larraín’s solution was to develop a diverse collection of cinematic styles and camera formats with which to shoot Jolie, each representing different aspects of the diva’s memories, imaginings and experiences of reality.
As THR‘s lead critic put it his Venice Film Festival review: The movie is beautifully crafted, of course, graced with sumptuous visuals from the great Ed Lachman. The cinematographer captures the City of Light in 1977 in soft autumnal shades highly evocative of the period and shifts into black-and-white or grainy color stock for Callas’ many retreats into memory. Lachman, who was Oscar-nominated for his breathtaking chiaroscuro work on Larraín’s last feature, El Conde, shot Maria using a textured mix of 35mm, 16mm and Super 8mm, along with vintage lenses. The DP’s outstanding work enhances the refined contributions of production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas and costume designer Massimo Cantini Parrini.”
“I felt these different textures would allow us to enter how and what she was thinking — and how that thinking expresses her being, in a way,” Lachman explains. “She lived in a heightened reality — on the stage and off the stage. She even said herself, ‘The stage is my mind and the opera is my soul.’ So she lived in the opera. The problem Pablo and I worked on was how you could express for the viewer — in a film — the feeling that you were partaking in an opera of her life.”
Maria made its world premiere in Venice in August. It will be in select North American theaters on Nov. 27 and streams on Netflix on Dec. 11.
This edition of THR Presents is sponsored by Netflix.