‘Conclave’: A Fly on the Wall Inside the Secret Process to Elect a Pope

A new drama by Edward Berger draws the audience inside this largely hidden tradition. How accurate is it?

When a pope dies, cardinals younger than 80 gather at the Vatican to elect his successor in what is known as a conclave. Recent papal elections have offered glimpses of this highly secretive process by allowing television cameras to capture some of the pomp and prayers leading up to the voting.

But the world is left hanging the moment a Vatican official solemnly proclaims, “Extra omnes,” Latin for “all out,” and shoos everyone else from the Sistine Chapel before dramatically shutting its immense wooden doors so that the cardinals can begin selecting the next pope.

Edward Berger’s new drama, “Conclave,” which opens Friday, catapults audiences back inside the Sistine Chapel for a cinematically rare, if fictionalized, peek at the confidential electoral proceedings of the Roman Catholic Church.

“Ancient rituals clashing with modernity,” Berger said, describing the film in a video interview.

The film stars Ralph Fiennes as Lawrence, dean of the College of Cardinals, who in the film is responsible for leading the papal election, and Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Lucian Msamati and Sergio Castellitto as papal contenders. They are not based on real people but are instead amalgams of contrasting blocs within the church, traditionalist and progressive, that loosely define existing currents. “It’s all politics in the end,” said Robert Harris, who wrote the 2016 novel on which Peter Straughan based his screenplay.

“Conclave” is hardly the first film to involve a papal election, and church-based mystery-thrillers, like Dan Brown’s “Angels & Demons” or Raymond Khoury’s “The Last Templar,” have regularly made best-seller lists.

But “Conclave" may be the first where so much care has been taken to get the liturgical details right.

Both Harris and Straughan could crib from the precise rules Pope John Paul II established in 1996 for electing a pope. They set out the basics about what to do when a pope dies (the process of destroying his ring and sealing his room) as well as the election itself (the need to sweep the Sistine Chapel for electronic listening devices, the Latin oaths the cardinals swear before and during voting, the tradition of threading the paper ballots after they have been counted so they can be preserved) and so on, details rigorously reflected in the film.

The production team also took painstaking care when it came to recreating the Sistine Chapel and the more mundane Domus Sanctae Marthae, the Vatican guesthouse built to house cardinals during conclaves. It’s where Pope Francis currently lives.

Harris said he did have Francis in mind when defining the personality of the pope who dies in the book, adding that he began his research when Francis was elected in 2013.

“I thought he was an interesting figure to take and to look at the risks and rivalries and problems that were under the surface,” Harris said. “And I liked the idea of that sort of political tension under the surface.”

The production designer Suzie Davies said she approached the film “more like a ’70s thriller than a religious film,” blending tradition, history and real-life mundanity like “cardinals on cellphones or vaping or going through security machines” often set against the architecture of 20th-century Rome.

“Conclave” was partly shot in the city at Cinecittà studios, a filmmaker’s dream, Davies said, where artisans recreated a version of the Sistine Chapel, including the wall with Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment.” The real Domus Sanctae Marthae “was a little dull,” she added, “so this is where we took a little bit of cinematic, dramatic license” to give a sense of the cardinals being closed in, as if in a prison, “which adds to the intrigue as well.”

The costume designer Lisy Christl said one of her stops in Rome was Gammarelli, papal tailors since the 18th century, “the Dior for the church,” to get fabric swatches. She also went to Tirelli Costumi, a costume house, where she found a pre-Second Vatican Council cardinal’s robe. That became an inspiration, alongside dozens of depictions of Catholic clerics in the collections of Rome’s many museums.

She found that the traditional red hue in cardinals’ garb had changed over the centuries, “and not in a good direction.” So the red of the film’s cardinals is fixed in the 1600s, “far more beautiful and far easier for our eyes” during a two-hour movie, she said. Were one to put the film’s cardinals’ robes alongside a real one, “you would tell the difference,” she said.

The Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a Jesuit expert on the church’s inner workings, gave the film a B-plus for “accuracy in terms of the procedures of a conclave,” quibbling only about minor details, like the misuse of some terms and the layout of the tables in the Sistine Chapel that he said “wasn’t quite accurate.”

Another minor detail: In the movie, the carpet laid on the Sistine Chapel floor is red, not beige, a deliberate choice “to heighten that whole sequence and again to bring that red-on-red of those beautiful costumes,” Davies said.

Berger, whose credits include the Oscar-winning “All Quiet on the Western Front,” described “Conclave” as a “chess game of political intrigue” that could have taken place at a multinational company or in Washington. A top job is open, and people are vying for it. “It just happens to be within the Vatican,” he said.

So far, the film has played the festival circuit, so it’s unclear how Vatican watchers, not to mention clerics themselves, will react to Berger’s interpretation of “an event surrounded by legend, one that uniquely blends theater with mystery, politics with prayer,” as John Allen described it in his book “Conclave: The Politics, Personalities, and Process of the Next Papal Election.”

Early ecclesiastical reviews have been mixed. Father Reese saw the film last month in New York and found it highly imaginative, if improbable. “It’s got everything an Italian opera would have,” he said in telephone interview from Rome, laughing.

Some Catholic outlets were more critical, calling the plot twists “half-baked” or accusing the film of being “a mockery of our faith.” But real life often outdoes art, and there has been no shortage of scandals in the Vatican’s long history, even before clerical sexual abuse became public.

While he was working on the screenplay, Straughan said, he met with a “friendly cardinal,” who was open about conclave logistics but tight-lipped when it came to the wheeling and dealing that the film depicts. “This is the most secretive election in the world, it’s quite hard to get the inside scoop,” he said. He took a private tour of the Vatican, and “I didn’t feel like there was hostility,” he said, pointing out that Harris’s novel had already been published. “They were quite open and that was very useful,” he added.

Berger spoke with several cardinals for the film and said “they told me, ‘We’re all going to watch the movie.’” He added, “They’re not necessarily going to comment on it, but they’re going to be interested in how their world is portrayed.”

Harris himself turned to the former archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, as a consultant for his book, he said. When it was published, he recalled, the prelate wrote him “a very nice letter saying it was just like a conclave and that the research was very good.” (The cardinal died in 2017.) As for the plot, the cardinal noted that “it was only a novel,” Harris recalled.

For Berger, verisimilitude is not the bottom line.

“In the end, not everything is known, but that gives you license to interpret and invent, and that’s what I always love in filmmaking,” Berger said. “It’s not necessarily the truth, but it resembles your interpretation of the truth, and ideally I can take you on that journey and have you be engaged,” Berger said.