by Gill Pringle at San Sebastian International Film Festival
The German director of All Quiet on the Western Front discusses his latest film, Conclave.
“It’s all in the eyes”, says director Edward Berger, explaining how he chose Ralph Fiennes to play one of the Vatican’s holiest cardinals in his new thriller, Conclave.
Fiennes plays Cardinal Lawrence, a man tasked with running the covert process of selecting a new Pope, following the unexpected death of the previous one.
Once the Catholic Church’s most powerful leaders have gathered from around the world and are locked together in the Vatican halls, Fiennes’ Lawrence uncovers a trail of deep secrets left in the dead Pope’s wake, secrets which could shake the foundations of the Church.
“It was important to find an actor who can express what’s going on behind his eyes,” explains Berger, whose film All Quiet on The Western Front took home the Oscar for Best International Feature Film last year.
“Ralph doesn’t have the most lines. He is actually quite silent. He observes a lot. He watches a lot. He doesn’t do very much. He thinks a lot. But how do I know, as an audience, what he’s thinking? Ralph is an actor who lets us into his soul in a way where I can see what’s going on behind his eyes. You can really see how he feels and what he thinks. And that is a real art.
“Whenever I sat across from him when we shot, I looked at him and thought: ‘I can’t believe I understand what he’s thinking’; it’s somehow telepathic. It’s magic what he does,” says the filmmaker.
Berger admit, though, that Voldemort continues to cast a long shadow. “I’m sure he wanted to play something different than Voldemort,” says the filmmaker, recalling how he met with Fiennes in a Rome restaurant to discuss the script. “It was very funny. We’re reading through the script and this entire family came up, three girls and the mother one by one, and the first one went: ‘Voldemort!’ And then the second one was: ‘Voldemort!’ They all came by individually to compliment him on this role.”
For Conclave, Berger was strongly influenced by the political and psychological movies of the late Alan Pakula. Berger says, “I was inspired by the ‘70s political and conspiracy thrillers by Pakula. When I watched those movies, I’m in awe of the precision that he had. Every edit is precise. Every shot is there to further the story,” he says of the All the President’s Men and The Parallax View director. “Pakula was very sparse in his editing. I also wanted to be very precise. The goal was to have as few edits as possible and still have it feel propulsive.”
Based on Robert Harris’ 2016 bestselling thriller of the same name, Berger assembled a truly international cast to portray these powerful cardinals, including Australia’s own Jacek Koman as Wozniak; Stanley Tucci as Bellini; John Lithgow as Trembley; Sergio Castellitto as Tedesco and Lucian Msamati as Adeyemi.
If the book – and consequently the film – imagines radical shifts in the church, then Berger smiles when you ask if he expects any response from the Vatican. “It’s a movie, and the Vatican is something else, so I’m not really counting on anything. But I know that they will all watch it. All the Cardinals that I met said ‘We’re gonna watch this’, but I think they will just discuss it within themselves, and I don’t think they will react.
“But this movie is not really about religion. I would say, for me, it’s much more about power games behind closed doors and vying for a top job. It could be within your newspaper or within a movie set or a company. And in this case, it’s religion. It;s just a setting. It could take place anywhere,” he says.
Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front brought great authenticity by using the German language, but he rarely uses Italian in Conclave. “They would traditionally speak all Italian and very little English, probably. But, for the sake of this movie, they’re all speaking English to unite this as a lingua franca, although I tried to put as much Italian and Spanish and Latin in it to make it feel as authentic as possible.”
In an almost entirely male cast, Isabella Rossellini stands out as Sister Agnes, the nun in charge of running the Casa Santa Marta, where all the cardinals must live during the conclave.
“She’s the only woman in the movie, and she needed to be someone who, despite her silence – because she’s not supposed to speak – still has a power and an enigma and a presence. And whenever you look at her, you see this woman who can stand her ground. You know she won’t disappear there,” he says.
With Conclave, Berger hopes to take audiences into a world very few people have ever seen firsthand. “The mechanism behind the election of a pope is among the most closely guarded secrets in the world,” he explains. “I was super curious to peek behind those locked doors and find out the details. We can’t know everything, but there are quite a few facts we were able to establish through our research. We feel we got as close to the truth as anyone ever has.”
At the same time as Fiennes’s Cardinal Lawrence undertakes his traditional duty of running the conclave, we discover he is experiencing a profound crisis of faith.
“It has nothing to do with the election of the new pope,” says Berger, “but it complicates it for him. He has stopped believing that he’s the right person to be a cardinal. He asked permission to leave Rome and go to a monastery to try to rediscover his faith, but the pope denied his request. He’s riddled with doubt that he must continually overcome. That is what interested me the most.”
What’s at stake for Lawrence, says the director, is not just who will be the next pope, but his own emotional truth. “Can he still believe in this institution? Can he believe in the future? How can he regain his sense of purpose? Those are questions that many people, and not just people of faith, face on an everyday basis.”
Although two very different films, Berger sees a throughline between both Conclave and All Quiet on the Western Front, in that both central characters are wrestling with something. “In this, Ralph wrestles with faith, wrestles with doubt, and that’s something that all of us wrestle with all the time. I wrestle with decisions every day. And so, in the end, Ralph’s Lawrence is sort of liberated from this curse, and he opens a window and lets in the fresh air and looks out towards the future.
“And All Quiet is a journey of liberation too, from this curse of obeying and war and destruction and killing and Felix Kammerer’s [who plays Paul Bäumer] death is actually an absolution, a liberation. He’s free now, he can be at peace.”
Conclave is in cinemas 9 January 2025
