How the ‘Conclave' team recreated the top-secret Vatican ceremony to elect a new pope
The death of Pope Francis last month sparked renewed interest in the Oscar-winning movie Conclave. Now streaming on Amazon's Prime Video service and available to rent or buy at several other distribution platforms, viewership of Edward Berger's 2024 drama spiked over the past two weeks, with an increase of more than 3,200 percent in minutes viewed week over week, according to Luminate, which tracks online streaming data.
Based on the novel by Robert Harris, Conclave focuses on a fictional series of events following the death of the pope. Ralph Fiennes stars as Cardinal Lawrence, who leads the selection process and must navigate warring factions and agendas within the Church. The Focus Features release received eight Oscar nominations this year, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Fiennes, and Best Supporting Actress for Isabella Rossellini. It won Best Adapted Screenplay for Peter Straughan, its only Oscar victory at this year's ceremony.
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'I was never interested in coming at this from the outside with an axe to hack it down,' Straughan told Gold Derby about his process in an interview this year. 'The thing I found so interesting about the book was that it's a critique, amongst other things, of the Catholic Church, but from within the Church. The characters are believers who are members of the Church. I found that really interesting.'
Part of the allure of Conclave during awards season, and now again with the pope's death making international headlines, was its look behind the curtain of papal tradition. 'It's the most secretive process, the most secretive election in the world,' Berger said in press materials for the movie last year. 'I was super curious to peek behind those doors and find out all those details.'
While Conclave was shot in Italy, Berger and his department heads didn't have access to the Vatican or any of the real locations depicted in the movie. As a result, creative license and embellishment were employed. Production designer Suzie Davies, an Oscar nominee for the project, had to recreate many of the Vatican's locations, including the Sistine Chapel and the residences where cardinals reside during the conclave.
Philippe Antonello/Focus Features
'Very early on, we wanted to play the juxtaposition of the ornate, gorgeous, traditional historic architecture of Rome, and then this other side,' Davies told Gold Derby in an interview. 'We just wanted to play with the fact that these cardinals were going to be locked away. The script is also brilliantly descriptive, so we decided to take a bit of license with locking the cardinals away in the conclave and creating that posh prison guest house, which is when we could utilize this more brutal architecture. So there is no ornament, there are no flourishes, apart from the gorgeous marble, of course, which the Romans would have used. The idea was then to incorporate the other senses into the design. So, you could almost smell the lack of smell in those rooms. You could hear some of the fluorescent lights above, and the fact that there was no natural light in there. So we took license with the elements of the conclave that we know nothing about, and we ran with it to make it more cinematic, more of a thriller vibe.'
For costume designer Lisy Christl, another Oscar nominee for the film, the cardinals' wardrobe color also required adjustment. 'The very first thing on our first journey to Rome was that I told Edward, 'Look, we have to change the color, and we have to change the fabric, meaning we have to make everything from scratch. So this was the very beginning,' Christl said. In real life, the cardinals' robes are more orange in hue. However, Christl thought the robes should appear bright red onscreen.
'Lisy's costumes set the standard of the design,' Davies said. 'We vibed off her choices of red. We put a red carpet on the floor in the Vatican, which, again, is a slight anomaly. They usually put beige color on the floor. We painted the Room of Tears [a small antechamber inside the Sistine Chapel] rich blood red to accentuate all these wonderful costumes, and they become the characters. Those characters have to inhabit spaces that have no character.'
Philippe Antonello/Focus Features
Speaking to Gold Derby, Berger said the goal was to represent the stifling nature of the conclave. 'You want to represent that you're being locked away from the world," he said. "We wanted to design sterile worlds where they're sequestered, that feels almost like a jail.'
How the real-life conclave will turn out remains a mystery, but onscreen the twists and turns of Conclave were a hit with audiences. In the end, the most unlikely of candidates emerges victorious – an intersex cardinal who unifies the polarized factions of progressives and conservatives by delivering a message of hope and unity in the face of an increasingly chaotic world.
'We're all in a moment of crisis once in a while, we have our problems, we lose faith in ourselves, in the world," Berger told Gold Derby. 'And in the end, we come out with a resolve, with an understanding of ourselves and the world that hopefully brings a smile to our lips.'
Conclave is now streaming on Prime Video.
Originally published April 23, 2025
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