After Maria Callas’s death, Zeffirelli rejected the proposal to tell her biography in a film, as he did not want to fuel interest in her private life. However, he once again felt regret for not having been able to capture at least one of the greatest performances of the Divine: he had unsuccessfully tried to film "La Traviata", later "Tosca", and finally "Carmen". The latter was an opera that Callas had never performed on stage, but had only recorded in a magnificent discographic edition conducted by Georges Prêtre. Zeffirelli had proposed to her the idea of making the film using that recording as the soundtrack, but Callas had refused, explaining that the recording was ten years old: her voice and body no longer belonged together, so this pairing would be a falsehood, a fraud. But what if she had accepted?
The film made by Zeffirelli is based on this hypothesis, and by fictionalizing this attempt, it creates a portrait of the artist and her aspiration for perfection.