Some of the best films of the year are finally arriving in theaters. This week’s entry is “Conclave,” a sly thriller from Edward Berger that has been generating strong reviews and audience enthusiasm since its debut at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival. And while the movie’s trailers have been selling the movie’s twists and pack of scheming cardinals, it is also a decidedly modern depiction of a papal selection.
READ MORE: ‘Conclave’ Review: Ralph Fiennes smolders in slow burn Vatican thriller [Telluride]
Adapted from Robert Harris‘ 2016 novel, the Focus Features release finds Ralph Fiennes portraying Cardinal Lawrence, a member of the Vatican who is put in charge of managing the Papal conclave after the unexpected passing of the Pope. Over the days that follow, different candidates attempt to convince their peers to support them as the conclave attempts to find consensus on a new head of the Catholic Church. With the political scheming underway, Lawrence finds himself investigating Cardinal Benitez (Cardinal Benitez), an archbishop appointed to Baghdad under a shroud of secretly by the now deceased pope, as well as shocking scandals that start to knock other candidates off the chess board. He’s eventually assisted in this endeavor by Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini), who knows much more about the lives of the cardinals than Lawrence could ever dream of.
Berger, who won the International Feature Film Oscar for “All Quiet on the Western Front,” was captivated by the contrast of modernity and the archaic institution of the church. He notes, “There’s so much ritual and history and tradition. And then to contradict that or to juxtapose that with vapes, cigarettes, cell phones, the plastic body bag that the Pope ends up in. All these things, but also on a deeper level, I guess the political conflicts, the discourse, the different parties we are in are so disjointed, it very much feels like North versus South. West against East, left, right up, down, race, gender, all these things. So, everyone’s sort of pitted against each other, and that climate, I hope, found its way into the film. And we didn’t have that 10 years ago in the last Papal election.”
Throughout our conversation last week, Berger discusses how he navigated “All Quiet’s” busy award season commitments while filming “Conclave,” how he convinced Rossellini to take on what is almost a non-verbal role, his unexpected inspiration to cast Fiennes, and much more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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The Playlist: I feel like any filmmaker would look at this script and go, “Wow, this could potentially not be cinematic.” The events all take place in basically the same location. If handled incorrectly, it could feel compact and constrained. Did that scare you at all as a filmmaker going into it, or is that the sort of challenge you like?
Edward Berger: Well, both. A hundred percent. It scared me because it scared me. I wanted to do it. It is a real challenge. It feels very different from the movie I did before, [especially] the confinement [of the story]. You know what? I like the feeling of creating this claustrophobia and sort of giving us a feeling of making one of those paranoid political thrillers from the seventies, the [Alan J.] Pakula movies. That’s the kind of claustrophobia or confinement I was going after. And then I really wanted to feel that sense of liberation in the end when finally you can step out of that confinement. So, basically, the end was the entire reason I wanted to make a movie.
And when you mean the end, do you mean the last scene of the movie?
No. Two things. One was the creating, in a way, a political Pakula movie, a political conspiracy thriller. And the second was Ralph’s interior journey. I really like the journey of doubt that he goes through because I think a lot of people can identify with it, and I can identify with it. I certainly feel that all the time when I choose. “Should I make this movie? Should I make any movie at all? Where should I put the camera?” There are always questions that you belabor with questioning them. And then to go through this journey of questioning and doubting and trying to find your place in the world. When [Ralph] opens the window in the end and feels that sort of…here’s the female laughter coming in, light coming in, sound coming in, air coming in. Everything that’s been taken away from him. That felt like a great journey to visualize.
One of the things that I respect so much about the film is that it doesn’t feel like it’s a version of the conclave from when the last Pope was chosen in 2013. It doesn’t feel like it was 20 years ago. It feels very like 2023, 2024. This is what would happen now. Was that something that you were cognizant of in terms of making it, did it feel like it had to feel like today, or were you trying to make it more timeless?
No, I really liked the contrast of today’s modernity and the archaic institution of the church, the buildings, the costumes, and everything. There’s so much ritual and history and tradition. And then to contradict that or to juxtapose that with vapes, cigarettes, cell phones, the plastic body bag that the Pope ends up in. All these things, but also on a deeper level, I guess the political conflicts, the discourse, the different parties we are in are so disjointed, it very much feels like North versus South. West against East, left, right up, down, race, gender, all these things. So, everyone’s sort of pitted against each other, and that climate, I hope, found its way into the film. And we didn’t have that 10 years ago in the last Papal election.
No, not at all. I have not read the book, and I know you didn’t adapt it yourself, but did you have conversations with the cast about backstories for their characters?
Well, I think there are different schools of directors. I really like having conversations with the past, but I’m not great at backstory. I think I should be in the script, and you can kind of put it together. So, if an actor asked me When I was born and whether my parents were rich, it would be very hard to tell in this kind of story. And I’m actually not sure it’s that useful because I don’t see it. And I feel like you can always sort of free yourself from where you’re from and your backstory, but there’s a lot of sort of story in the movie, and a lot of all the characters have great arcs. And so I feel you can take it all from the script. And then, obviously, we have conversations. I had a lot of meetings with Ralph where we just leafed through the script. I like to be more practical. I like to take the script, and then we leaf through it and talk about the scene or do a rehearsal of scenes that I’m scared of, that I don’t quite know how to do, and just get everyone together. And, for example, sitting around the papal bed [at] the beginning when he’s dead. I rehearsed that because they had to speak Latin. I wanted them to familiarize themselves with the positions in the room so that I wouldn’t have to figure out everything on the day and so forth. These kinds of things because it’s a lot of shots, looks, dynamics. You have to introduce all of them. So, I just wanted to have a clear plan of how to do that. And for that, I rehearsed it. I go with Ralph, talk about each scene, talk about the emotional state of each scene, but I don’t go back so much about decades and try to uncover whatever happened in his childhood.
Well, the context of that question was, I’m wondering how you convinced Isabella Rossellini to take this role. She’s fantastic, but It’s almost a nonverbal role. She does not have as many lines as you might expect her to.
She wanted to Zoom because, obviously, in the script, this character is mostly silent, and there’s a line in there in most of the scenes, like Sister Agnes stands in the background and watches, and you could shoot that in a wide shot and whatever she thinks, her opinion, her arc gets lost. But she kind of wanted to ask how I saw her and how I wanted to show her. And I said, listen, every time you’re in a scene, I really want to see what you think and what you feel and your slight comment about it so that you can sort of create your own narrative so that in the end, you can then intervene in these proceedings. Otherwise, it would come out of the blue. And she really appreciated that which means you have to shoot her. You can’t just put her in some shot. You’d really have to concentrate on her and give her basically whenever it wasn’t race, POV, I took her POV because I found her the most interesting character. And the smart actor knows that it’s not about lines, and actually fewer lines are better. Ralph doesn’t have the most lines. He listens mostly, but he knew that that means he can think, and that’s acting.
Very true. And I am assuming Ralph wasn’t attached before you came on board. Was he your first choice to play Cardinal Lawrence?
It wasn’t so hard to convince any of the actors because they really liked their arcs, their characters, and the script, and they felt they had something to play. Ralph was the first idea we had about [the role]. I joined the project maybe five or six years ago, and we continued to develop the script. And then, at some point, we didn’t quite know yet where this character should be from. He could have been from any country. So, we kept a really open mind, is he Italian? Is he American, English, Spanish, German, or whatever country? It didn’t matter as long as he was believably Catholic. And so we just kept an open mind and sort of played through in our head, what if he’s from, I don’t know, I think it was France or Italy. And then we couldn’t think of anyone in Italy who would carry the movie. And at some point, I woke up, and I thought, “You know who it should be? It should be Ralph.” Because this character is content, he wants to be in the second row. He wants to observe. He wants to manage. He doesn’t want to be a leader. He is the manager in the background. And he’s quite conflicted about that. But he definitely doesn’t want to be active in the front row, and therefore, he also doesn’t have the most lines. So, you need to have a guy who you can see. Ralph is someone who invites you into his thinking process. He invites you so that you can see what’s going on behind his eyes so that you understand what he’s thinking. And that somehow became clear to me, and I thought, “Yeah, it should be Ralph.” And then I sent it to him, and I think it was a thing of a couple of weeks of getting him to say yes.
You helped develop this project for a number of years. Before you even shot “All Quiet on the Western Front.” Did the success of “All Quiet” help get “Conclave” made?
Well, I started this project five years ago. It was definitely before “All Quiet.” It kind of started in parallel. And you know what, we financed the film before “All Quiet” was released. So, no one had seen “All Quiet” yet. We went to Cannes in May 2022 and financed a movie. And then, in fall 2022, “All Quiet” was released. I shot it in January and February. And I remember coming back from the BAFTA Awards and having won seven of them, and everyone was utterly surprised and really pleased. But it was towards the very end of the shoot.
And your producer probably was like, “If we’d known this was going to happen, we could have gotten more money.”
Absolutely. No, we made it for very little money.
You directed this movie in the middle of an intense award season run. Was it hard to focus? Was all that award stuff distracting while you were trying to shoot?
Not really. I mean, basically, on weekends, on the evenings, I did Zooms like this. On weekends, I flew to London or even LA to promote the movie from Rome and to have screenings and Q and A’s and so forth. And that was just something I knew I had to do. It wasn’t distracting at all. I just felt like, “O.K., let’s do both.” I mean, at some point, I thought while I did the promotion, I thought, I wish I hadn’t. I wish I had more time and only did this and not shoot the movie or shoot it a year later or something. And then I suddenly realized what’s the biggest blessing that you just make this movie? Because it’s already done. When everything is over, and the decision of what the next movie is is made, there’s no pressure on it. It’s kind of just done. And then, move on.
The movie has not hit theaters yet, so there’s still time, but were you worried at all about the reaction of the Catholic Church to the project?
No. I don’t feel like it’s a takedown of anyone. It tries to deal with this thing sensitively and tries to show all aspects of it. And [the scenario] could have taken place anywhere. It could have taken place in Washington, D.C., behind closed doors. It could have taken place in some corporation where a CEO post is empty, and people are vying for the gig for the top job. And I just feel it just happens to be in the Vatican, but it’s not anything that I would be seeing like, “Oh, this is overly critical.” This takes the thriller [genre] behind the doors of a conclave.
“Conclave” opens nationwide on Oct. 25.
