(Credit: Courtesy of Fabula)

In anticipation of the world premiere of the Maria Callas biopic “Maria,” Angelina Jolie revealed that she prepared for six months and learned how to sing for the role.

In a Vanity Fair article, the actress and director Pablo Larrain spoke about the process of creating the soundscape for the film and said that “Jolie began her own training, which lasted over six months in total—and resulted in a defining, crowning, at times staggering performance.”

According to Larraín, Jolie’s singing voice will be heard in parts of the movies and so will Callas’ iconic voice in parts of the film where the soprano was at her prime.

The director said, “You always listen to Angelina and you always listen to Maria Callas. When we listen to Maria Callas in her prime, most of the sound is Callas—90 percent, 95 percent—and when we listen to Callas older and in the present, almost all of it is Angelina.”

He added, “How can you make a movie about Maria Callas without using her voice? You can’t. You can’t make a movie like this with an actress that is not actually singing it. This is the real thing—it was very scary for her, but she did it.”

In addition to the singing voice, Jolie learned Callas’ cadence and her signatures and “got to the point where she’d hear the operas in an earpiece while singing them herself.”

“Maria” makes its world premiere its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival and follows the life story of the world’s greatest opera singer, Maria Callas, during her final days in 1970s Paris.

The film, which is still searching for U.S. distribution will also premiere at the Telluride Film Festival and New York Film Festival.