SimplyAbuDhabi XLVII

What was your reaction when he approached you with the script? AJ : Well, there wasn’t a script. He approached me before, just with the idea. And I didn’t sing. But like all actors, we say we do! [laughs] We can horse-ride, we can do whatever you want. [laughs] So I said I could, but thinking to myself, ‘Well it’s like movie singing, I’ll learn this, I’ll figure this out.’ And then there was a very hard awakening of - you can’t fake opera. I had seven months of training and eventually worked up the nerve to sing opera out loud in front of Pablo before we started shooting so he could make sure he believed it and it was going to be OK. He made sure that my classes and teachers were great. He took me very seriously as a singer and even gave me breaks between performances and we had pianos everywhere I went. But that’s what scared me, the other sides of her didn’t scare me. I felt so deeply moved by her I wanted to get close to her – but the singing terrified me! The film focusses on a specific time: the end of her life. What surprised you about Stephen Knight’s approach to the script where Maria finds herself at this stage of her life? Did it speak to you on some level? AJ : Sure, probably in more ways than I’ll confess! It did, but both Stephen and Pablo gave me space to also add a little bit here and there where I felt that was who she was, so it was very collaborative. We all had the same intention, I think. But I thought it was a brilliant script because it had humour. Because this so easily could have been just self-pitying, even not welcoming. There’s something about opera; people think of it as this elitist art form, but it was really made originally for the masses. So the idea was to make a film about her and opera that says, ‘Welcome everybody.’ And let you enjoy opera and get up close - the personality and the humour and the colours were so important and so wonderful. And the dogs, just the dogs... [laughs] In the film, Maria says, ‘I don’t go to restaurants to eat. I go to restaurants to be admired’. That must have been so much fun to say! AJ : You know what it was? It was fun to be, like, this older, eccentric artist. You know? There was something so wonderful about just embracing the size of her, the eccentricity of her, the colours of her creativity. She had this private self, but she didn’t apologise for things. It took me a minute with, like, the fur and the Bolero hat and the dogs walking down the street to feel… I thought it was so crazy. And then I felt, ‘Okay!’ [laughs] ‘I like that’. I think it’s so important to be just original, creative, a lived life that earns all these unusual things about ourselves as we get older, and so I loved that. And those glasses? AJ :The glasses. Well, you know, what was so interesting is we had an optometrist look at them. And they said this woman was basically blind. Which means that when she was sent to the conservatory, she had to memorise differently. She had to pretend. She was working with that challenge, and there is one interview where she casually says, ‘I couldn’t see the conductor’, which is kind of amazing. I think that’s sometimes why her colours are a little different, and then they say something like, ‘She was so original’. And I think, ‘Was she? Or was it that she couldn’t see, and then she turned that into something magical?’ I realised what it must have taken for that very wounded, broken, often sick person to become what she did. The discipline, the nerve. To me, I fell in love with Maria. I was impressed with Callas always, but I have a big heart for Maria. Simply Abu Dhabi | 65