Conclave

By Elisabetta Povoledo

When a pope dies, cardinals younger than 80 gather at the Vatican to elect his successor in what is known as a conclave. Recent papal elections have offered glimpses of this highly secretive process by allowing television cameras to capture some of the pomp and prayers leading up to the voting.

But the world is left hanging the moment a Vatican official solemnly proclaims, “Extra omnes,” Latin for “all out,” and shoos everyone else from the Sistine Chapel before dramatically shutting its immense wooden doors so that the cardinals can begin selecting the next pope.

Edward Berger’s new drama, “Conclave,” which opens on Friday, catapults audiences back inside the Sistine Chapel for a cinematically rare, if fictionalised, peek at the confidential electoral proceedings of the Roman Catholic Church.

The film stars Ralph Fiennes as Lawrence, dean of the College of Cardinals, who in the film is responsible for leading the papal election, and Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Lucian Msamati and Sergio Castellitto as papal contenders. They are not based on real people but are instead amalgams of contrasting blocs within the church, traditionalist and progressive, that loosely define existing currents. “It’s all politics in the end,” said Robert Harris, who wrote the 2016 novel on which Peter Straughan based his screenplay.

“Conclave” is hardly the first film to involve a papal election, and church-based mystery-thrillers, like Dan Brown’s “Angels & Demons” or Raymond Khoury’s “The Last Templar,” have regularly made best-seller lists.

In a movie scene set in an Italian plaza ringed by columns, Fiennes and Stanley Tucci look to be in conversation. Each is wearing a red cap, or zucchetto, and a black coat. Another man stands in the background.

But “Conclave" may be the first where so much care has been taken to get the liturgical details right.

Both Harris and Straughan could crib from the precise rules Pope John Paul II established in 1996 for electing a pope. They set out the basics about what to do when a pope dies (the process of destroying his ring and sealing his room) as well as the election itself (the need to sweep the Sistine Chapel for electronic listening devices, the Latin oaths the cardinals swear before and during voting, the tradition of threading the paper ballots after they have been counted so they can be preserved) and so on, details rigorously reflected in the film.

The production team also took painstaking care when it came to recreating the Sistine Chapel and the more mundane Domus Sanctae Marthae, the Vatican guesthouse built to house cardinals during conclaves. It’s where Pope Francis currently lives.

Harris said he did have Francis in mind when defining the personality of the pope who dies in the book, adding that he began his research when Francis was elected in 2013.

“Conclave” was partly shot in the city at Cinecittà studios, a film-maker’s dream, Davies said, where artisans recreated a version of the Sistine Chapel, including the wall with Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment.” The real Domus Sanctae Marthae “was a little dull,” she added, “so this is where we took a little bit of cinematic, dramatic license” to give a sense of the cardinals being closed in, as if in a prison, “which adds to the intrigue as well.”

Another minor detail: In the movie, the carpet laid on the Sistine Chapel floor is red, not beige, a deliberate choice “to heighten that whole sequence and again to bring that red-on-red of those beautiful costumes,” Davies said.

Berger, whose credits include the Oscar-winning “All Quiet on the Western Front,” described “Conclave” as a “chess game of political intrigue” that could have taken place at a multinational company or in Washington. A top job is open, and people are vying for it. “It just happens to be within the Vatican,” he said.

While he was working on the screenplay, Straughan said, he met with a “friendly cardinal,” who was open about conclave logistics but tight-lipped when it came to the wheeling and dealing that the film depicts. “This is the most secretive election in the world, it’s quite hard to get the inside scoop,” he said. He took a private tour of the Vatican, and “I didn’t feel like there was hostility,” he said, pointing out that Harris’s novel had already been published. “They were quite open and that was very useful,” he added.

Berger spoke with several cardinals for the film and said “they told me, ‘We’re all going to watch the movie.’” He added, “They’re not necessarily going to comment on it, but they’re going to be interested in how their world is portrayed.”

For Berger, verisimilitude is not the bottom line. “In the end, not everything is known, but that gives you license to interpret and invent, and that’s what I always love in filmmaking,” Berger said. “It’s not necessarily the truth, but it resembles your interpretation of the truth, and ideally I can take you on that journey and have you be engaged,” Berger said.