Prep time was 10 weeks from green light and first location scout to shoot. Not much for a period movie in 4 countries. Especially the different countries were challenging: We didn’t have more than one prep day for each country during the shoot and every country had a decent amount of period extras, period boats, opera choreographies, cars etc. It was always shoot, travel one day, prep one day and then shoot again.
Shooting opera is complicated, shooting period opera pieces even more, shooting multiple period opera pieces with #1 really singing and performing opera-pieces on stage is very tough. We shot on film and used multiple formats and film stock: Super 8mm, 16mm black & white and color and 35mm b&w and color. Traveling so quickly through Europe, taking all the cameras and different film stock with us and planning out what we need where was like a flashback in time before digital.
Since we didn’t have the money to use stock material and do face replacements with Angelina Jolie’s face for Maria Callas, we created around 30 different flashback montages throughout the shoot from all her life and places she was before and squeezed them into the schedule.
I had a brilliant core AD team, especially with my two 2nd ADs I always work with and the very strong Hungarian ADs. Although the director tends to improvise, doesn’t like to take decisions and doesn’t really stick to plans, the shoot felt quite easy for me thanks to my team.
Costume and HMU for Angelina was complicated and time consuming and especially outfit changes happened nearly every day, because of the 25 years the script covers and montage-sequences we had to shoot. On some days we did 5 different looks for her and without a great AD-team, this would have been impossible.
As always with independent movies, we were very limited in money and time and had to take care of the requests of an A-Lister not used to shoot indi-movies. The most challenging scene was an outdoor scene with Angelina passing by a full orchestra and slipping into one of her day-dreams / visions: Rain is pouring down heavily on the 40 person orchestra that keeps on playing and she changes into a full Madame Butterfly outfit with Geisha-wig and -M/U. And then 50 other Asian women dressed as Geishas appear and hum together with her the ‘Coro a bocca chiusa’ with the Orchestra playing all in full artificial rain. We shot this early November in Budapest and even with heated water for the rain, it was still super cold.
Benedict Hoermann, 1st AD
