In last year’s Oscar-winning film “Conclave,” as cardinals played by John Lithgow and Ralph Fiennes confront the body of a dead pope, the process of electing his successor is set in motion.
The actual conclave to elect a successor to Pope Francis will begin on Wednesday, but since his death on April 21, huge numbers of U.S. viewers have been streaming the film – around 15,000 the day before he died, 3 million since then.
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So, we decided to revisit the time we spent with Fiennes in Rome and then in New York City when the film came out last fall.
At Villa Medici, one of the filming locations for “Conclave,” Fiennes said, “To the person who knows, this is not the Vatican. But I think for a film, you could believe this was an aspect of the Vatican, and actually we shot just inside here.”
Fiennes played Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, who betrays his own suppressed ambition to be pope to another cardinal, played by Stanley Tucci. Both men are caught up in the claustrophobic pressure cooker of papal politics. The cardinals are locked in, imprisoned in magnificence and secrecy.
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Most of the film was shot at Rome’s famous Cinecitta Studios. Of the costumes, Fiennes said, “Clothes are hugely important, and if you put on a robe like that and it hangs on you in a certain way, suddenly it does something to you for sure. You move differently, and you’re in that Sistine Chapel set that we created at Cinecitta, immediately. I mean, it was amazing shooting those voting scenes. It felt like we were in the real place. The sense of silence and ritual was palpable.”
Sequestered, the College of Cardinals casts ballots for a papal successor. “It’s a context of wealth,” said Fiennes, “of worldly wealth, and these holy men …”
“Supposedly holy,” I said.
“Yeah, I was gonna do inverted comma signs! They are in a structure which massages their political instinct about the thing they’re in called the church.”
Robert Harris wrote the 2016 novel that inspired the film. “Well, I was a political journalist, and it is politics which fascinates me,” he said. “And conclave is just, for me, the ultimate election. It’s the oldest election, the most extraordinary.”
Since Pope Francis’ death, sales of Harris’ novel are up tenfold.
“It’s not that I’m a kind of, you know, seer in some way,” Harris said. “It’s just that the conclave always falls into roughly this pattern. There are traditionalists and there are reformers. There are geographical blocs. And out of this mix, a compromise candidate emerges.”
In the book and the film, the traditionalist is Tedesco; the reformer, Bellini; Tremblay is a moderate, but a schemer; there’s Adeyemi, the African contender. One by one, they’re eliminated, and a compromise candidate does emerge.
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Harris said, “The thing takes on a momentum of its own, as any group would. You know, like a jury that suddenly swings to a verdict, this is called within the spiritual world a movement of the holy ghost through the Sistine. In the political world, it would be called momentum.”
Although Harris is not a Catholic, his take on what happens during a conclave is generally regarded as pretty accurate.
I asked, “It seems as if the idea of the book is that somehow these flawed men, who are also holy men, do arrive at the right choice?”
“Yes, I think it’s a very good process,” Harris replied. “I think the Roman Catholic Church has immense wisdom of centuries built into it.”
Fiennes said, “The film leaves you with a question: Who should lead? Who should lead a structure like the Catholic Church? Who is the person worthy of it?”
“But it also asks the question, will the political process that determines the leader produce the right leader?” I asked. “The film seems to say yes.”
“Yeah, the film does, in this case, say, it can,” Fiennes said.
Fiennes, like the cardinal he plays, is a man of doubts. He said, “I was brought up a Catholic, and then I rebelled when I was 13. My mother was a committed Catholic. On my mother’s side, there are some theologians. So, God questions have been in my family since I was a child.”
I asked, “Did you come away with anything answered of your own questions?”
“No,” Fiennes replied. “I came away with more questions.”
As dramatized in the film by Cardinal Thomas Lawrence’s sermon: “If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.”
Harris said, “The way that he pronounces the word faith at the end is just extraordinary.”
Harris is a big fan of the movie. Now, he is watching his book come to life for real. “I’ve seen the early stages of the novel sort of unfold in front of me,” he said. “And that has been a rather strange sensation, frankly – to witness this machinery going into operation.”
No matter who ends up pope, Harris, the ex-newsman-turned-novelist, knows a good story when he sees one: “The whole imagery of it. The smoke coming out of the chimney. I mean, what an extraordinary, brilliant concept that is, that’s entered the language and the culture of the world. It’s a spectacle that plays very, very well.
“I’m amused, incidentally, that the conclave is going to start, I think it’s on a Wednesday,” he added. “There will be a real strong feeling among the cardinals that they’d quite like to get out of Rome the Friday afternoon. It’s quite an effective, shrewd deadline!”
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Story produced by Reid Orvedahl. Editor: Joseph Frandino.
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