Léa – it’s the name of my first cinema heroine and my first ever real cinema experience. In fact I haven’t been casted to play this main character, when I did the casting I have been given the small role of the director. It’s one of these life hazards when you enjoy a small opportunity and end up playing something totally opposite. I have to admit I am used to play a text written in music, i.e. we opera singers are used to be guided by music, when we don’t have music we somehow feel “lost into space and silence” 🙂 So what did I learn from this amazing 2 week cinema experience? Well first I re-learned to work with a text, sounds obvious, but it’s not soo for a musician… A text has basically 1 million ways of interpretation possibilities – what’s the “right” one? I decided to test my text with my friends, coming around and say something from my role, like “I’m so sorry I totally messed up, so happy you’re around” and observing their reaction… it worked ;-), 9 times out of 10 no one noticed I was rehearsing my movie speech. On the opera stage we are used to this large, somehow unnatural movements like opening our arms at the end of an aria to embrace the audience… well that’s not something you’d do in cinema, right? So first day of shooting i heard like 10 times from the director “Larissa – the text is perfect, but less gestures!”. Couldn’t help it, or stop it… I realised at the opera we are full of these “bad”, stereotypical gestures habits. The cinema work is a finer, smaller, more detailed manner than theater, not even talking about opera stage one. As days where passing on I found new playing colours, new expressions, sometimes I felt “yes this is right”, sometimes not… I also felt I needed external directions in a greater way than at the opera. If life ever puts me on the cinema way again, I hope I’ll have the chance to work with a talented “actors” director who’ll be able to help me to find the right character’s intentions, I feel it’s a very important part of the whole filming process and at the end can make a big difference. I don’t know how the result will look like because it’s not in my hands, at the contrary of the stage work were basically almost everything is under your control. But I can definitively say I feel I grew up as an artist, as an actress and finally as an opera singer as well.
