VANITY FAIR First Look At Conclave: The Pope Dies - Then the Twisty Search for His Successor Begins

At the beginning of last year, All Quiet on the Western Front director Edward Berger embarked upon the first significant Oscar campaign of his career—but only on the weekends. This was the best he could manage. “Sometimes I thought, I wish I just had more time to enjoy the release of All Quiet and go to all the festivals—and I couldn’t really do any of that,” he says. “But then the next second, I thought, You know what, it’s really great that I don’t have to figure out what’s next. There’s no pressure on it. It’s already made.”

 The two projects couldn’t have been more different in scope. All Quiet was adapted from a seminal novel, a war epic propelled by virtuosic action sequences.  Conclave  was based on Harris’s chamber piece, which unfolds over just a few days and focuses on intricate electoral machinations in the wake of a fictional pope’s abrupt death.

This, it turns out, is Berger’s way.

“I want to do things that challenge me in different ways, and I am usually drawn to movies that are the opposite of what I’ve done before,”

he tells me over Zoom from Macau, China, where he is, yes, shooting his next movie. “I wanted to escape the vastness and chaos of the battlefield and go into something very concentrated.”

Conclave centers on the conflicted Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) as he collides with his ambitious, cunning, and in some cases secretive peers as they search for their next leader. Lawrence’s own goal, as Dean of the Conclave, is to make space for the right candidate to receive the most votes, whether it be the rigidly conservative Tedesco (Sergio Castellito), the potentially corrupt Tremblay (John Lithgow), the modest (and liberal) Bellini (Stanley Tucci), or perhaps most intriguingly, the newest addition to the group, Benitez (Carlos Diehz). The story’s many twists and turns do not make that job easy.

The mysterious circumstances of the pope’s death—and intrigue surrounding the seismic impending election—lend Conclave the shape of a thriller, which Berger leans into with precision. But every frame of the film is told from Lawrence’s perspective. Our hero cannot hide from the camera—and the same goes for Fiennes, a marvel in this exacting, complex showcase. “He finds himself in a crisis of faith—it’s really about a quiet man surrounded by men who vie for power as he tries to rediscover his faith,” Berger says. “[Ralph’s] diligence in terms of learning Italian and Latin—he wanted to be super accurate. He took a lot of pride in that, and a lot of pride in his craft. He wanted to get to the truth.”

Conclave’s intimate focus on Lawrence demanded a symmetry in vision between actor and director. Fiennes had met Berger while starring in the play Straight Line Crazy, shortly after which he was cast, and saw (and loved) All Quiet just before filming, boosting his excitement for the shoot.

“Edward is very enthusiastic. He’s a real listener. He’s a real collaborator,” Fiennes says. “His preparation is formidable—he immediately has the respect of everyone, actors and crew, because not only is he listening and human and inclusive, but also he knows what film he wants to make.”

Berger is no stranger to adaptations. While he’s a firm believer in giving his films a distinct identity from their source material, Conclave hews closely to the original novel’s structure. Peter Straughan’s script tightens Harris’s expansive narrative to the essentials, honing core character dynamics and racing the plot engine just a tad more aggressively.

On this film, Berger had a starrier cast at his disposal than ever before, and he didn’t take it for granted.

“The most interesting part is seeing the actors’ faces, and hearing what they have to say,” Berger says. “These actors have the ability to take the audience on a journey.”

Sister Agnes, for instance, is a minor character on the page who becomes a kind of ally to Lawrence. But Berger knew what he had in her portrayer, Isabella Rossellini, and emphasized her steely turn in careful, revealing camerawork. “The difficult thing about this role is that she embodies staying in the background, staying invisible, serving the men—the oldest patriarch in the world is still ruling, and she’s at the core of its crumbling foundations,” Berger says. “For the most part in the movie, she’s quietly sitting in the background, and yet we keep looking at her—because it’s Isabella.” When she finally gets her moment to speak up? Watch out.

These subtler choices informed a larger conundrum for Berger, who needed to keep the film both simple and exciting. He watched The Godfather several times during the making of the movie, while also holding up Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer as a key inspiration: “It films things very simply, yet also still feels very different.” Conclave is hardly as off the wall as that film. Yet the guiding principle makes sense for a director who’s capable of massive set pieces, but required here to prove his dramatic finesse and sense of control. “We are very much in tight rooms, we’re very much in the Sistine Chapel, we are very much behind closed doors—but at the right time, there’s always the opportunity for a breath of fresh air to open up the image,” he says.

 “With the script and the actors, there’s a lot of backbone, and to not lose trust in that is actually quite a difficult thing. If you film it week after week after week, you can lose sight of that,” Berger continues.

“You’ll suddenly think, like, Oh, I’ve got to be more fancy with my camera and start panning up to the sky and flying through the room. But if you resist the temptation and just concentrate on the story and the scene and how this particular moment is supposed to be filmed, I think that goes a long way.”

Concentration is a big theme, both within Conclave and for the man behind it. Berger realizes that his profile looks a bit different now than it did many years ago, when he first decided to make this movie. “I just dove into this next film, put my head down, and made it,” Berger says. “All the All Quiet noise, or anything around it, never had anything to do with this film, and I never even really heard it.” Still, it’s not the worst thing in the world if he’s got a few—okay, a lot—more people eager to see what he’s pulled off now that he has an Oscar under his belt, right? “Oh, that’s fine,” Berger says with a grin. “Yeah, absolutely.”