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EXCLUSIVE: Filmmaker Edward Berger says that Ralph Fiennes’ sublime performance as the cardinal charged with overseeing the election of a new pope in awards-season contender Conclave has a “whisper” of the inscrutability Anthony Hopkins displayed in his portrait of a veteran butler in James Ivory’s 1993 film The Remains of the Day.
Prefacing his comments by jokingly suggesting that “Ralph will crucify me for saying this“ and “I don’t know if this is a bad comparison,” Berger thought that the way Fiennes plays the impenetrable Cardinal Lawrence “has something of, a whisper of, Anthony Hopkins” in the Merchant and Ivory movie “that has that sort of just keeping everything inside and keeping quiet and doing it just with his eyes.”
Even though Cardinal Lawrence, the Dean of Cardinals, is undergoing a crisis of doubt, he nonetheless “projects absolute competency before a word is uttered.”
That’s a peculiarly English trait, insists Berger, and points to the reason why he, along with screenwriter Peter Straughan and House Productions’ Tessa Ross, decided to make the Vatican power-broker a Brit instead of the Italian cardinal depicted in Robert Harris’ 2016 novel, upon which the movie is based.
In the first draft of the script, the Italian-born character was called Cardinal Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, and Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia, as he is in the source material.
“There was an openness in my head,” Berger relates, “that I thought this person could be from anywhere, or Italian as he is in the book and in the first draft.”
For a while, Berger was convinced that Cardinal Lomeli “has to be played by an Italian,” though “which Italian” exactly was the problem.
But then he had his own crisis: He didn’t know many Italian actors of the right age — between 60 and 70 — who could also speak English well. “And I thought I didn’t want to make an Italian movie. I wanted to make it feel international and accessible. And we simply couldn’t have made it in Italian,” Berger argues.
The director woke up one morning with the revelation that “it’s got to be Ralph.”
Puffs of white smoke signaled his decision to Ross and Straughan, who both agreed.
Straughan had the easy task of changing Lomeli to Lawrence, although there was initially concern that there isn’t a large radiance of cardinals in the UK. Berger did acknowledge that England recently gained its fourth cardinal, Father Timothy Radcliffe, who will be anointed by Pope Francis in December.
“It felt like there’s a few English cardinals — well, there was three, now four — and so it felt plausible to think: Why not have one of them be the Dean of the College of Cardinals, the sort of right-hand person to the Pope?
“What the change to an Englishman also brought is that sense of immediate authority. The English are very good at that,” notes Berger.
The part in the film requires certain qualities. “So if it’s minimalistic, keeping the emotions inside the modest quiet person, this managerial person who is in the background, this diplomat in a way, not ruffling any feathers, behaving quietly; like an observer and manager in the background, felt very English in a way,” says Berger, as he searches for the right words to describe the unusual but compelling hero of Conclave played so splendidly by Fiennes.
The English, says Berger gracefully, “are wonderfully polite” with an ability to stay in the background. “They listen to everybody and probably quietly make their moves rather than loudly.”
It’s something that Fiennes himself has brought up. “He seemed to be a man who felt very English to me, or full of the characteristics of a certain type of Englishman who keeps his thoughts close to his chest. Inscrutable if you like,” were thoughts the actor conveyed to us when Conclave received its European premiere at the London Film Festival.
Once Berger had Fiennes in place he began to assemble his other key actors. Stanley Tucci was the next actor they sought out for the role of Cardinal Bellini, Cardinal Lawrence’s closest ally.
Berger says that if Tucci, for whatever reason, had turned the part down “then you suddenly go for another actor to play Bellini, then maybe John Lithgow as Cardinal Trembly doesn’t fit. You don’t quite know,” he muses.
Ultimately, both American stars “fit” in very well indeed.
So does Lucian Msamati, the acclaimed, classically trained screen and stage actor known for roles in Black Earth Rising and Gangs of London on TV and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Amadeus and Master Harold and the Boys on the boards. Berger met the London-born British-Tanzanian actor here for lunch and was bowled over. He was after someone for the role of Cardinal Adeyemi who “felt properly from Africa and not an African-American” actor.
He also had to look and sound “with that great voice” as if he could make “John Lithgow’s character crumble just by looking at him,” and Lithgow’s “three heads taller than all of us,” Berger exclaims.
Casting female actors was slightly easier because there’s just the one major role for a woman, that of Vatican Mother Superior Sister Agnes. Isabella Rossellini’s marvelous in the part.
Sister Agnes says very little but when she speaks we know to listen to every utterance, and to study every nuance.
Berger says he and cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine (A Prophet, Ammonite) set up shots that featured her with great care. “If you know there’s six men in the room, all well known, and then there’s the woman who comes kind of last in the order of the Catholic Church. Are we going to shoot her? Is she just going to stand around in a wide shot? But I told Isabella that we must always know what Sister Agnes is thinking, meaning that I have to be close to you, just to get your commentary on things, to see you smile, to see you listen. And just the sheer fact we’re shooting her, we know that gives her some authority.”
Rossellini steals every scene she’s in, even the moment where Sister Agnes silently, with acute preciseness, measures place settings at the dinner tables, articulating, to me, at least, that Sister Agnes is a person beyond reproach.
It reminds me, I say, of watching a documentary way back in the day, of the late Queen Elizabeth II, carrying out her duties as supreme hostess, by moving cutlery just so. Berger leaps up from his chair and says he knows the very footage featuring the much beloved sovereign.
“Yeah, actually, we did take it from the Queen checking the tables. We didn’t see it on The Crown, we saw the actual Queen Elizabeth do it. Sister Agnes is the only woman in a sea of men and in a way, like the Queen, she has to stand out,” he adds.
“There’s a little crack in that bastion of masculinity,” Berger says,” when Sister Agnes says her piece in the movie.
The papacy is one of the oldest patriarchal societies, steeped in ancient and secret rituals. One of the important things Conclave does is to slowly peel back archaic layers to reveal what all the hocus-pocus represents in this day and age.
Really, it’s about a group of men dressed up in scarlet-drenched cossacks and red hats politicking. What the movie underpins for me is that really powerful people are, well, just people, no matter how exalted their stations in public life might be.
However, the long-standing liturgical celebrations invoked to pick a new pope are fascinating to behold.
Berger and his team studied in minute detail the sacred rituals in choosing the next Bishop of Rome.
The cardinals gather and then they’re sequestered in the Sistine Chapel to hold their election. Shutters clang, shut over the windows; the room’s swept for bugs; cell phones are confiscated for the duration; no media — electronic or otherwise — is allowed.
Berger was fixated about what happens when a pope dies. ”Who’s in the room with him? Only certain officials are allowed. They pray, so what’s the prayer? What happens to the pope’s ring? It gets sealed away and all that crazy stuff. I wanted all of that and more in the film. The details are vital.”
Allegri’s divine “Miserere” is performed only in the Sistine Chapel. Berger made sure it made its way into the movie. Thousands of tiny details are layered in as background and they, and the array of superb performances, give the film its backbone.
During one prep visit to the Vatican in late 2022, Benedict, the Pope Emeritus, died. “I went into St. Peter’s to go and see his body in the crypt.”
That got Berger thinking about how “we would handle our pope when he dies in the film.”
A body bag is evident and it seems such an indignity. “Yeah, I stretched that a bit,” Berger admits. “I just wanted to, in that moment, equate him with us, because I know that once you’re out of sight of the family, I’m sure they just toss you in the back of the hearse or ambulance.”
He adds: “I’m sure I should’ve been a little bit more careful with the pope!”
I was also struck by the austere quarters the fictional pope resided in, more like a two-star motel room than the Apostolic Palace, the pontiff’s official residence.
Berger explains that the modest accommodation shown in the film is modeled somewhat after Pope Francis’ decision to make his home in the Casa Santa Marta guesthouse located in the Vatican estate. “I just liked the contrast of the Sistine Chapel and all these ecclesiastical palaces of grandeur, and this barren stark architecture where the pope keeps his quarters,” Berger explains.
Casa Santa Marta is also the residence where Cardinal electors rest during the conclave. It’s where Fiennes is seen walking the corridors seeking out what truth is hidden behind the veil of pomp and circumstance.
The Focus Features picture is released October 25. My colleague Anthony D’Alessandro reported last month that the film will be going wide in 1,500 theaters.
As I leave, Berger prays that I will “shut down” all the “noise” about him being one of the contenders to direct the next James Bond movie.
“Who doesn’t want to do Bond?” he asks. “Bond is the most wonderful project. I grew up with it. I love it. It’s not a conversation though. I’m not meeting anyone. I’m sure Barbara Broccoli isn’t meeting anyone. She will know what to do at the right time with the movie and she’ll make a wonderful Bond no matter who makes it. It’s her decision.”
Laughing, he adds: “Repeat after me. I’m not doing Bond.”
