Imagine you’re strolling down a darkly-lit, marble-walled corridor in the blandest, grayest hotel hallway you’ve ever seen. You open one of the doors, step through, and enter the most iconic and recognizable room in Europe: the Sistine Chapel.
This dream scenario actually did occur on the set of Edward Berger’s Vatican potboiler “Conclave,” which was filmed entirely at Rome’s famed Cinecittà Studios and in locations around the Italian capital.
Based on a novel by Robert Harris, Berger’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning “All Quiet on the Western Front” is a stunning achievement in design, costumes and photography. “But there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors used to create these worlds,” said Oscar nominated production designer Suzie Davies (“Saltburn,” “Mr. Turner”).
Using the biggest available lot at Cinecittà, Davies explained how the film’s massive sets needed to be geometrically wedged like Tetris blocks. The long corridor, part of the residence for the Catholic cardinals who have gathered to elect a new pope, could only fit in one narrow slot of real estate.
“We said, ‘OK, let’s push the Sistine Chapel as far against the wall as possible,” said Davies. “Then we can squeeze the corridor in. These are the logistics that hopefully no one notices when they’re watching the film, but it was quite rewarding, utilizing the space. So, yeah, if you were to go through some of those doors in the corridor – and many of us did, just for fun – you’d end up not in a drab bedroom but in the Sistine Chapel.”
The centuries-old chapel measures 44 feet by 134 feet. Fortunately, deep in Cinecittà’s storage vaults was a full-scale template used for HBO’s 2016 series The Young Pope. “We had to push a lot of props of ancient Rome out of the way in order to dig out these 110 flat pieces,” said Davies, describing how the pop-up Sistine still required 10 weeks to put together.
“The team joined all the pieces, which were in eight foot by 50 foot sections,” she said. “We plastered them, painted them, filled the spots where the mice had eaten away.” The set could not reach the 68 foot height of the real room, so the ceiling, with its mural by Michelangelo, was added via blue screen.
Meanwhile, the cardinals’ bedrooms were also an example of maximizing space. During the course of the film, we see inside several dormitory-style rooms of the high priests, played by Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and others. The set was actually one bedroom that was rebuilt every couple of days to accommodate a different character.
“In designing the bedrooms, we thought about the cardinals’ backstories,” said Davies. “Ralph’s room is cold, on the ground floor or basement, with a hard mattress, and it doesn’t really bother him. But John Lithgow has an espresso machine and a plumper bed. Maybe he lucked out – or maybe he knows someone, we speculated, and he got a better room.”
Davies also pointed out that the year in which “Conclave” takes place is never established in the film, which allowed her team some freedom to stretch. “The story is set in the ambiguous near-future and we know that conclaves have changed quite a lot over the years,” she said. “So we decided that in our fictional timeline, they’ve changed how the cardinals sit in the chapel. We have them like choirs, seated opposite from each other. And also we put that bright red tablecloth and red carpet down on the floor. It just gave a little bit more drama and showbiz to all this. Red on red.”
That deep crimson of the cardinals’ frocks were the contribution of costume designer Lisy Christl, who recently worked with director Berger’s on his Oscar-winning “All Quiet on the Western Front.” “I find uniforms, in general, to be a fascinating thing,” she said.
Christl embarked on nearly a year of research into ecclesiastical fabrics, accouterments and colors, especially for the vestments worn by the men. “And then I said to Edward, ‘Here’s an original red robe from the church, but to be honest, I can’t stand this bright red, it hurts my eyes.’ I looked at liturgical wardrobe from the 15th and 16th century, in Renaissance paintings, where the red was darker. And we chose that color for the cardinals.”
The costume designer, whose most frequent collaborator is the great Austrian puppetmaster Michael Haneke (“Funny Games,” “Caché”), added with a grin, “You only can step away from the truth if you know the truth.” At one costume fitting, a misunderstanding led to Tucci’s character wearing an overcoat instead of a cassock, which thus gave the actor’s liberal cardinal an appropriately hip, modern vibe.
“I really love when little mistakes make the film even better,” she said, while noting that facts still do matter. “There are certain Catholic uniforms which have 33 buttons, because Jesus died when he was 33. For those things, you can’t cheat.”
But Christl was able to imbue personality and status with one essential piece of the cardinals’ kit. “The cross that a man wears is like a language, telling us where he comes from,” she said. “The wardrobe is all the same but the crosses are different – some are wooden, some are gold, some are larger than others. They give us clues about whether the cardinal is conservative or liberal, or if he’s a follower of one of the former popes or the current pope.”
Speaking of the current pope, Francis is not discussed in the fictional “Conclave” universe, but his modest, anti-bling attire is the talk of the town among clothiers in Rome. “I had the craziest conversations with people,” said Christl with a laugh. “One tailor told me, ‘Oh, the fit is a disaster.’ I’m very pro-Francesco and after all the studying I did, I love the elegance of his liturgical wardrobe. He’s an idol for so many people and I would just love to go there and pin his outfit a little bit.”
To head the movie’s camera department, Berger chose French cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine, known for capturing dramatic closeups in the films of Jacques Audiard (“Rust and Bone”), Pablo Larraín (“Jackie”) and Paul Verhoeven (“Elle”). “I have done a lot of handheld camera work in the past and quite close to the actors’ faces,” said Fontaine. “And something you can tell about Edward from ‘All Quiet’ is a sense of the unstoppable – moving forward in the physical space and a feeling that there is no way you can escape. So it was rather tempting to blend those styles together.”
In pre-production, Berger and Fontaine discussed 1970s paranoia thrillers such as “The Parallax View” as well as the evocative opening scene of “The Godfather.” Both were photographed by the legendary shadow maestro Gordon Willis. “The first time you see Don Corleone in his den, that’s not too far from what Ralph Fiennes is going to experience as he makes his way through the Vatican. There’s a sense of secrecy and phobia in the lighting.”
Sunlight, in fact, is absent from much of “Conclave” by the plot’s design. When the cardinals meet to elect the new pope, all the windows in the Vatican are sealed with blackout grates. And though the men are hermetically sealed in, with no access to the outside world, Fontaine still made subtle changes in the lighting to give audiences a sense of day or night. A touch of blue fluorescent, like the color from a lamp used to zap mosquitos, suggested evening in the cardinals’ bedrooms.
Closeups, of course, were also a critical element in Fontaine’s camerawork. “During prep, we did several tests with Ralph, using different lenses just to see physically how close we could get to him,” he said. “Edward was very interested in shooting closeups with wide-angle lenses. And the interesting thing is that when you do that you still have a sense of the background. So when we see Ralph in closeup in the Sistine Chapel, you can sense the presence of the other cardinals in the frame. There was a thematic reason to go that route.”
The camera in “Conclave” is more of a stealth animal, with static compositions, glacial dolly shots, minute-long takes and slow zooms favored over a frenetic approach. “Sometimes, if you’re watching a movie and you’re mesmerized by the camera moves, you stop looking at and listening to the actors,” said Fontaine. “Edward is brilliant with the camera but he’s not trying to show off. He’s focused on the storytelling.”
That said, one robust overheard shot of all the cardinals marching under white umbrellas has become a symbol of the film’s high-drama aesthetic. Fontaine placed the camera in a window, looking down at the yard in Rome’s Villa Medici. “But we didn’t have enough cardinals,” he said. “So we shot a few different plates and then stitched them together to make them look like that sea of cardinals that you see, all in forward movement together.”
Another shot, much simpler to compose, nonetheless provoked an intense reaction for the cinematographer. In an early scene, we see the hands and face of Isabella Rossellini, who plays a Vatican nun in the film, and whose parents Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini made movies at Cinecittà in the 1950s.
“Suddenly, I remembered her mom and her dad and just her, of course,” he said. “I mean, Cinecittà is where she was born, in a way. She was born in Rome but she’s a child from Cinecittà. And for me it was quite emotional when we did those shots with her.”
Women, for sure, do not hold positions of official power within the Vatican hierarchy, but the final twists in “Conclave” suggest a world where such gender lines could be blurred. And touchingly, Catholic nuns had a presence in the production even beyond Rossellini’s sharp performance.
Costume designer Christl recalled visiting with the sisters to show them examples from her wardrobe work. “And then they said, ‘Come on in, we’ll show you our workshop.’ So we sat and had coffee together and we talked about clothes and little ways to fix problems and how to find good solutions. To have their contribution, it was wonderful.”
This story first appeared in the Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the Below-the-Line issue here.
