honestly the for me the the the bar in this that I would know if I did good enough are the Maria Callas fans you know and those who love Opera and my fear would be to disappoint them so of course all other things and and in my own business if there's if there's a response to the work I'm very grateful but but uh in my heart to disappoint the people who love her and she means a lot to and her Legacy and I really come to came to care for her so I felt I was uh I didn't want to do a disservice to this woman um I think when your life is full when you've felt a certain level of despair of pain um of Love at a certain point there is only certain sounds that can match that feeling and to me the immensity of the feeling encapsulated within the sounds of Opera um there is nothing there's nothing like it and that that feeling that would move all of us if we were to hear it would be the only sound that would explain that pain I I think the the approach to her I listened to her she actually taught and so there there are audio recordings of her teaching so I got very lucky because the best way in was I got to be taught by Maria who said when she approaches her work she said said the first thing you do and she calls it straight jacketing so the first thing you do is you you don't think about how you feel or what you want you just try to understand the music and the intention of the composer and you are disciplined and you just are you do the work exactly as intended and you and you practice and practice and so I did that and I think in approaching that way then she said and then the final thing you let your personal and your motion come in you know I'm an opera fan since um I grew up of course a big Maria kalis fan but always very intrigued by the fact that there's almost no movies about operas and opera singers the Opera world that is so interesting as a form of art has been largely ignored by Cinema um so thought about it thought about making a movie about probably the greatest voice of History who had um a very beautiful and difficult life um and by thinking about it we we had the luck to find Steve Knight who wrote The Beautiful script and of course uh this movie wouldn't exist without Angelina I think that if you meet somebody as Maria kalas is one of those encounters that that gives you the possibility of of getting a little beam of that light and to make it become yours my feeling is that their identity became what it is or what it was because they had the chance to meet her and she was a queen [Music] hello