“Hi, my name is Edward Berger and I’m the director of the movie ‘Conclave.’ So we’re about 30 minutes into the movie. We have created the place as the Vatican and the Pope are dead. And now Cardinal Lawrence, the character played by Ralph Fiennes, is the Dean of the College of Cardinals, which means he has to organize the upcoming election of the new Pope. And now it’s his big day because it’s the first day of the conclave, which means all the doors are closing. Cardinals go to the Sistine Chapel to vote for this next Pope. And Ralph Fiennes gives the opening speech, a speech. And we chose that piece of music at the beginning. It is actually the only music that is not composed. Everything else is composed in the film. So it is the only type of source music that is sung by a choir. And it is the only piece of music that has been played in the Sistine Chapel for hundreds of years. And I found this fact on a morning tour at 6:00 am. We went to the Sistine Chapel on a guided tour and it was empty. It’s the only time it’s empty. If you go at 6:00 am and the guide told us that this was the music track. So I looked for it and found it and found it incredibly moving and beautiful. So I decided to put it in the movie. So Ralph starts speaking in Italian, and Ralph spent a long time practicing Italian, and he was really, really adamant. We always had a dialogue coach there or someone like an Italian girl who would listen to his line and everything. She was very pleased with the way he did it, because it was also extremely thorough that it felt believable that he had lived there for 25 years and had been doing Italian for 25 years. So we paid a lot of attention to that. But at some point, something takes over him, a feeling. And it stops. And then he switches to his natural language, which is English. “But you know all that.” “Let me speak from the heart for a moment.” And he gives a speech about his really true feelings, and that’s doubt. He expresses his doubt about his own faith, about his own purpose in the church, about the Church in general, about what the next Pope should be like, someone who accepts doubts and succumbs to doubt. And this intuitive reason, yielding to him raises many eyebrows. In this scene, you’ll notice, we’re usually pretty open to Ralph at the beginning when he’s speaking Italian. We are behind. We are from profiles. And then, once he speaks from the heart, once his speech changes, we go in for a close-up, a very frontal center close-up, and the camera starts to move. And then it’s really just a shot. “Certainty is the great enemy of unity.” “Certainty is the mortal enemy of tolerance.” It’s just one shot, incessant little thrust at Ralph as he talks and gets lost in his words and doesn’t notice anyone around him. And only then, once it’s over. We cut to the back of a wide shot of all the cardinals listening. “If there were only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery and therefore no need for faith.” “Let us pray that God will give us a doubting pope.” The scene establishes Ralph Fiennes as a character to be reckoned with. He gives the speech that comes from his heart and other Cardinals, especially those who aspire to be the next Pope, suddenly fear that there is a new candidate in the room. And this is the climax of the scene.
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