.png)
21 hours ago
1 ARTICLE AD
It’s been a month since Peter Straughan won his first Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Conclave, and the screenwriter still can’t believe the reception the film has had.
“I had no idea Conclave was going to do what it did,” Straughan told an audience at Dublin’s screenwriting festival Storyhouse on Thursday. “To be honest, I thought it was going to be this nice, quiet little film that a few people would see.”
Straughan adapted the film, which is directed by Edward Berger and stars Ralph Fiennes and Isabella Rossellini, from the 2016 novel by Robert Harris. The political potboiler is set within the Vatican and follows Cardinal Lomeli (Fiennes) as he oversees a secretive papal election following the sudden death of the Pope. In addition to the Oscar, Straughan won a BAFTA and a Golden Globe earlier this year for his adaptation.
The prolific writer, whose credits include Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Wolf Hall, sat down at Storyhouse for a lengthy discussion with Irish writer and actor Mark O’Halloran in Dublin’s Light House Cinema, where he discussed his process of writing and adapting material for film and television.
Speaking further on Conclave, Straughan credited the source material. “We inherited a book with a narrative that really worked,” he said. “And it worked as a page turner and political thriller, and it felt like it was about something that was so elevated. With adaptation, 90% of the job is picking the right book.”
He continued: “With some of them, such as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, it’s like you’re taking a car apart and the bits are all over the floor and you’ve got to try and work out how to put it all back together. But with Conclave it was kind of like the first draft was in the book itself. We knew the film was in there, but the job was to fine tune and fine tune. So, it felt like miniaturist work in many ways, and we were balancing all of these opposing forces that was important for a good thriller.”
Straughan was also nominated for an Oscar for his 2011 adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. He co-wrote that gripping thriller about Cold War espionage, with his wife Bridget O’Connor.
When pressed on whether he felt daunted at the prospect of adapting le Carré’s beloved and quite complicated novel, Straughan said: “We should have been to be honest, but I don’t remember being frightened. I think we both had a connection with the book on an emotional level. There are moments in the book where you think, ‘Ok, that’s quite complicated’ but when you’re connecting with it in that way, it stops being scary. It remains complicated but you know what the emotional heart is.
“And that can guide you through all of the thousands of little decisions that you have to make, which is basically what adaptation is – thousands of small choices. If you don’t have that and you’re not connecting deeply, then I think you get lost. And that’s much scarier.”
O’Connor sadly passed away before the film was made and Straughan said that he didn’t work for a year-and-a-half after. He recalled being approached to adapt Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall into a series for the BBC, which he said “became a road out from the grief.”
“I thought I can do this,” he said. “I loved the book, and I think Hilary is one of our greatest novelists. Again, it was just something about connecting on a very emotional level, loving the characters and envisioning all of the set pieces.”
Storyhouse is a not-for-profit initiative spearheaded by Element Pictures, Screen Ireland and Fremantle. Its second edition runs April 3-4, 2025.
