Robert Harris had just accomplished a trilogy of novels about Cicero when he watched the election of Pope Benedict continue to exist television. As a chronicler of power and its mutations, the scene — the Sistine Chapel smoke signaling a call, after all, but additionally the entire, secretive tableaux — fascinated him.
“Just before the pope comes out onto the balcony and divulges himself, the windows on either side refill with the faces of the cardinal electors who had come to observe him,” Harris says. “And the camera pans along the faces — elderly, crafty, cunning, some benign, beatific. And I believed: My god, that’s the Roman senate. That’s the old men running the entire institution. I believed: There have to be stories here.”
That stoked Harris to write down “Conclave,” a 2016 novel that went contained in the Vatican to assume how “the final word election,” as he calls it — with the added intrigue that the contenders must pretend they don’t need to win — might unfold.
As page-turning as Harris made his novel, it won’t have seemed the stuff of Hollywood. A bunch of old men in robes sitting inside and picking a pontiff shouldn’t be your average elevator pitch. But director Edward Berger’s adaptation, starring Ralph Fiennes because the cardinal leading the conclave, manages to be that rare thing in today’s movie industry: a riveting, thoughtful, adult-oriented drama acted out through dialogue by a sterling ensemble.
“Yeah, we used to have ’em. Loads. We don’t really have ’em anymore,” says Stanley Tucci, who co-stars as Cardinal Bellini. “You have individuals who have been doing this for a very long time, so it’s a really mature film. If you are taking all of our ages and add them up, well, I don’t need to know what the number is.”
“Conclave,” which Focus Features releases in theaters Friday, has already been drafted right into a runoff of its own. The film, Berger’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning “All Quiet on the Western Front,” is taken into account a top Academy Awards contender, including Fiennes for what can be his third nomination. (He’s never won.) In a Hollywood that years ago lost belief within the mid-budget adult drama, can “Conclave” restore the religion?
“Conclave” wasn’t made with the Vatican’s involvement; it was shot on the legendary Rome studio Cinecittà. The film, made for about $20 million and scripted by Peter Straughan, is primarily a procedural, albeit one with a spiritual dimension.
“I desired to make it like ‘All the President’s Men,’” says Berger. “It was my opportunity to make a movie like a political thriller from the ’70s — for Ralph to feel claustrophobic, to take a seat in a dark room and all we hear is the hum of a fluorescent light and his breath.”
To a big degree, it’s a movie that resides on Fiennes’ face. His Cardinal Lawrence spends much of the film listening, strategizing and searching — himself as much as anyone else — as he weighs rapidly shifting allegiances and uncovered secrets. The smoke of “Conclave,” you would possibly say, is in close-ups of Fiennes, a master of the subtle shifts of expression.
“When you understand the camera is on you and it’s close, that’s when you understand your inner world has to talk,” Fiennes says.
It’s a talent that Fiennes has honed through real investigation. He recalls watching BBC’s “Face to Face” to review how faces shift when asked probing questions. For an acting workshop, he once told students to interview themselves, and watch the facial responses. “What does the human face do in real life that an actor can learn from?” Fiennes says.
Tucci and Fiennes have sporadically worked together (“Maid in America,” “The King’s Man”), but after plans fizzled for Tucci to direct Fiennes in a movie about George Bernard Shaw, they sought a more substantial collaboration. Tucci’s scenes are almost entirely with Fiennes. The remainder of the solid includes Isabella Rossellini, John Lithgow and Brían F. O’Byrne.
“It made me really love acting again,” Tucci says, speaking from home in London. “Not that I didn’t adore it, but you kind of begin to burn out after some time. After 42 years, you’re like, ‘Why am I still doing this?’ You have those times where you query. And then that is like, ‘Oh that’s it. There you go.’”
Doubt, itself, is a serious theme in “Conclave.” When Lawrence first speaks to the assembled cardinals, he makes the case that doubt, not certainty, should guide their seek for a latest pope. As the film continues, Lawrence’s predicament weighs increasingly heavily on his faith within the church. It’s the aspect of the character with which Fiennes most connected.
“As you become old, I actually have more doubts,” Fiennes says. “What does anything mean? I don’t know what anything means. What is the worth of what I do? I don’t know. I actually have an impulse to follow a scene, to decide on a project — what’s its meaning?”
“I just think: Things emerge and I prefer to let things come to me,” he continues. “Let accident be apt, you understand? There are people on this business who develop stuff. ‘I would like to play this part. I intend to make this film with this director.’ That’s superb. I’ve done that and I’ll do this a bit more. But I feel increasingly more: What’s not far away that I don’t find out about?”
But sliding into Lawrence proved a natural fit, even when it got here to the vestments. In preparation, Fiennes was allowed to try on an actual cardinal’s clothes. He liked the sensation.
“The truth is skirts are quite comfortable,” Fiennes says. “Our clothes within the film are fabricated from a heavier fabric and quite a number of skirtage to maneuver.”
“You feel quite strong in them,” he adds. “You feel quite powerful.”
The 61-year-old isn’t inclined to take pleasure in the Oscar talk, though. When asked, he gently demurred, agreeing as an alternative with Berger, who sat beside him during a recent interview in New York, that he’d let the film speak for itself. That is, after all, the best way Lawrence might reply to someone saying he ought to be pope.
“I don’t think many actors, movie stars, can convey intelligence and a type of suffering humility quite the best way he can,” says Harris.
The film can also be laced with quandary over the role of ladies in what Berger describes as “the oldest patriarchal institution on the earth.” The twists and turns of “Conclave” ultimately arrive at what can be an earthquake of a development for the Catholic Church.
“I might absolutely like to screen it for the Vatican. We’ve shown it to Catholic organizations and priests,” says Berger. “I do know from the cardinals we spoke to, all of them said, ‘We’re all going to be watching your movie.’”
As Harris neared publication, he received a letter from the then British cardinal, the late Cormac Murphy-O’Connor. Having recently rummaged through his office, Harris digs out the letter and reads it. (In the book, the essential character is named Cardinal Lomeli.)
“Before the reviews come flooding forth, I wanted to write down and say how much I enjoyed ‘Conclave,’” Harris reads. “You actually did your homework. I particularly admired your depiction of Cardinal Lomeli as a cardinal the likes of which all we cardinals would need to be: holy, subject to doubts, intelligent, humane and totally loyal to the church. Well done.”
He concluded: “As to the startling ending, I said to myself: After all, it’s only a novel.”
