Adapting the Twists and Turns of ‘Conclave’
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Hello, I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review Podcast.

Books and movies have always worked hand in hand, and some of the best films of all time have been based on bestsellers or works of high literature. I've personally always been interested in the process of adaptation, and today we have the third in our series of conversations with directors and screenwriters behind this year's Oscar-nominated films that started as books. And so today I'm here with Peter Straughan.

Peter has become a pro at adapting works for the big and small screens. He co-wrote the 2011 feature film adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the classic John Le Carre spy novel, a screenplay that earned an Oscar nomination.

Following that, he took the first two books in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy. King wants a son. 18 years of marriage with no heir. About Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII. Now he's decided some sin must have been committed to cause this curse. And miraculously adapted them into a six-episode TV series. And now his latest.

Conclave, a thriller about the machinations at the Vatican. The Pope is dead. To elect a new Pope. The Conclave begins now. Based on the novel by Robert Harris. And one and a quarter billion souls watching. And it's received eight Oscar nominations, including ones for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. Peter, thank you for joining the Book Review Podcast. Thank you for having me, Gilbert.

So, Peter, Conclave is a story that's set in the Vatican, and it stars a cardinal, a bunch of cardinals, and essentially they're taking a bunch of votes. Some people might hear that and think that sounds really boring, bureaucracy within the Catholic Church. Your film is not a boring film. I'm curious, how do you describe the movie to people who have yet to see it?

It has been described as Mean Girls in the Vatican, my favorite description of it. It's a political thriller. It's from a book by Robert Harris, who's excellent at exploring the world of politics, but it's set in the world of a papal election, the sort of secret closed world of a conclave. So obviously you're very experienced at this process, adapting big books. I'm curious, what is your process when you

approach a book like this? Are you highlighting? Are you dog-earing? Are you ripping pages out? How do you start to break apart a book like this so that you can have it in a form that is usable to you?

um i have a pen um good good start usually it's a good start usually i have a pen and i make meaningless scribble marks next to it as if i have some kind of system which in fact i don't so but some of them are sort of asterix a big star in other words i draw a line and i don't really know what that difference is supposed to be i have no idea it's very instinctive i think it's just a pass through and if it's a line i like

a moment I like, sometimes a whole scene. And then it's almost like mosaic work. You know, you have all of these pieces. Sometimes they're going to be laid out in a very similar order to the book. Sometimes in a completely different order. Sometimes you're going to deconstruct and rebuild completely. But yeah, the first thing is to assemble the pieces that you think you're going to use. Sometimes...

um you know with with with all of these with robert and with uh lecaria and with hillary mantel they're all good really good dialogue writers you can get a whole scene sometimes and you think fantastic i just need to maybe a little bit of trimming usually you know but um the whole scene goes in now i have read that the thing that unlocked

con play for you, correct me if I'm wrong, was a particular speech that the main character gives. In the book, he's called Cardinal Lamelli. He's Italian. And in the movie, he's Cardinal Lawrence. He's British. And for those of you who have not seen Con Play of Cardinal Lawrence, it's played by the great Ray Fiennes. He is the dean of the Vatican. He's the manager who's in charge of running this entire process to elect a new pope. Right.

At the beginning of all this, he has to give a homily to the assembled cardinals from around the world. And when you read this homily, this speech in Robert Harris's book, Peter, you said, okay, this is interesting. I think I can do something with this. So talk to me about how that speech sort of opened up the whole thing for you. There were two moments, actually. There was a very small moment earlier in the book where Cardinal Tremblay, one of the characters—

the previous pope has died, and he looks at his phone and says, "Oh, it's trending. The news is trending." And there was something about a cardinal saying, "It's trending online," that I thought, "Oh, that's…" I mean, it made me laugh. And then, as you say, Lombardi gives a homily about a third of the way into the book, something like that, in which he has prepared a careful vanilla homily, which he abandons halfway through and surprises himself by instead saying, "Let me speak from the heart for a moment." Give us a pope who doubts.

Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. And this, you know, this was... I started writing this quite a few years ago, and that felt very... just very valid for the world that I found myself in, even more so now, perhaps. Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery.

and therefore no need for faith. You know, there's a sense that we're becoming more and more polarised by our certainty that our side is right and the other side is wrong. So it seemed quietly subversive and radical in its own little way. So, yeah, it was then that I thought, I really want to do this.

It's interesting. Once a movie is put out into the world, the meaning, it's no longer controlled by the director or the actors or you, the screenwriter. So Conflave comes out. It comes out in a moment when the themes of

I guess, conservatism versus progress feel very relevant. You have this character who, for lack of a better phrase, wants to return the church to the past. He wants to make the church great again. And then you have someone who's the complete opposite of that. So you start writing this long ago and you find it being released now into this world in which we're living. How do you manage to see that work that you put on the page and understand that it will

by necessity, be received in whatever way it will be received? I mean, I think I was always aware that the film was operating on three levels. The book narrative operated on three levels, one of which was a kind of more universal tale of politics and elections, the corrupting power of power, those that are drawn to power, who should we elect? You know, and that feels like a timeless tale.

There was a level in which this was about spirituality and about believers. I'm not a believer, but I was broader Catholic, so it was a world I was comfortable with. And I wanted to make sure that

I was able to see the narrative through Lawrence's eyes, through a believer's eyes, because that was a different realm to be in. So there was that level. And then there was one that did feel, and I think intentionally so by Robert Harris, that did feel very relevant to what was happening in the contemporary situation to do with the polarization, increased polarization, the lack of middle ground. As you just said, you were raised Catholic. I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about how that allowed you to sort of

flesh out the central character's belief system? I do think it helped enormously that I came from a Catholic background. I'm not uncritical of the Catholic Church, obviously, but it also, for me, is my mother. There's a nostalgia for it. I went to a Catholic school. I was an altar boy. It's my childhood to some extent. So it's a world I was very comfortable with. And to some extent, that meant that

I didn't feel too reverential either. You know, I'd known priests and canons, some of them flawed, some of them impressive. And then, you know, having been brought up a believer and now no longer being a believer, my family were, I think religion was important to my family. My brother at one point was considering a Christian monastic life. In the end, he became a Buddhist monk. But that sense of searching for meaning through religion,

feels like home territory to me in a way. It hasn't been my path, but it does feel like home territory. So in that sense, Lawrence is someone straining to make contact again with God. That didn't feel like an alien figure, and I had a degree of sympathy for that search. You know, in the book, Lamelli, who again is Cardinal Lawrence in the film, is someone whose inner thoughts we have access to on a regular basis. And when you're writing a screenplay, of course, you have to

externalize it in some way. So how do you do that with the understanding that someone like Ray Fiennes, very talented Ray Fiennes, is also going to bring his own interpretation to whatever you put on the page? I think you bulletproof it early on in the drafts, which is you probably over-

You put up more scaffolding than you need, than you hope that you're actually going to need. So that probably means in terms of description within the script, slightly overwrite the description of the look that's crossing the cardinal's face. You veer into purple prose. And then when you get someone like Rafe, then you can just cut all of that out. Because the thing that maybe you thought was going to take a line, and you would always obviously want to try and be as subtle as you can,

But the thing that you thought might take a line, you realize you don't have to because you can do it with a look. I was also thinking of this moment after Lawrence's homily.

I can't remember the exact specifics, but he talks to someone and he has a front on. That person leaves and then he rips the little thing off the top of his head and sort of wipes his nose in anger or frustration or exasperation. And you see that moment where this man whose job it is to lead this process and appear competent at all times is struggling a little bit. Yeah.

And that was just one take where Rave did that because, you know, again, with the great actors, they're sort of just living freely the moment again and again on each take. And it's a little bit like I used to play in bands. And if you've been in a recording studio, you know, there's sort of the mixing desk. If you set all the levels too high, you've got nowhere to go. If the levels are fairly, usually good sound mixers, they have the levels sort of low to middle and then you can...

Push things up when you want you to give it shape and that's kind of like performance I remember with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Gary Oldman's very quiet very moderate all the way through Did Brito come and see you before he left on that Hungarian mission? And there's one moment towards the end when he loses his temper and he shouts to Colin Firth's character He says well, what are you Bill? Can't I ever consider having you take over the circus? I'm not his bloody office boy What are you then Bill?

It's the only time he does it, but it's like a punch because he's been so controlled up until then. And there's that with Rafe's performance as well. It's so controlled, but when he does that, you see how much he's loathing being put in this position of having to be the investigator. Let's take a little break. We'll be right back.

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See if you qualify at oracle.com slash NYT. Oracle.com slash NYT. There is an inherent cinematic quality to so much of the story beats, so much of what we see. The Vatican, incredibly striking location. You know, the cardinals are all wearing this ornate clothing. You have all this incredible pageantry from the ceiling of the Pope's door after he dies to the way in which

Each ballot is pierced on a needle and then dragged along on this very long red thread. There are all these visuals. How much of that do you work to put in your screenplay, knowing in the end that it's a director's decision on what they're going to shoot? I mean, your job is to see in your mind the first version of the film and to see it as clearly as you can and to try and get that on the page in order to let the director connect with it.

And then the director will take it from there. But the visuals in Conclave, it was always going to be important, I think, because, you know, as you know yourself, there's a very theatrical element to the Catholic Church. It's one of the things the Catholic Church does really well is ritual and spectacle and theatre. And that felt like a core theme in a way, because there's the performative element.

element to that. So I started to think about it as there's the stage in which people are performing in the elections, in the homily, the mass to a certain extent.

And then there's backstage or wings where the masks are off to some extent and the horse trading is going on or the negotiations are going on and people's true selves are showing. And that felt like one of the many interesting tensions that's in the book and could be in the film. And I sort of one way of thinking about the structure of the film was there's a wall between what's happening on stage, the public performance and the private secret performance.

wings area. And when that wall comes crumbling down, that's when everything has to change. And for me, that was around probably the canteen scene. Yeah, that scene which takes place in the cafeteria of this dormitory in which they're all staying is the scene where you see all these cardinals just getting very loud in a way that maybe they haven't been for the entirety of this conflict. They're yelling at each other. Someone calls someone else a traitor. Oh,

Let each man examine his conscience as I have. I have no desire to create bitterness in this conclave and I will be happy to stand down as he.

There's a sense that nobody can hide anymore, that this is no longer a normal conclave. Everything's collapsing. It really is the moment when things turn in a major way. But the reason that that scene is enacted in the first place is because Sister Agnes, who's played by Isabella Rossellini, interrupts this conversation. She speaks for the first time in a real way. Eminences. The nuns that we have seen in the background.

Putting the plates down, washing the dishes, doing all the scut work, she finally sort of inserts herself and makes herself known. Although we sisters are supposed to be invisible, God has nevertheless given us eyes and ears. And it really is one of the few, if not only times you see a woman speak in this movie. I was wondering if you could talk about that moment a little. I think it's kind of like the Chekhov line about having a loaded rifle in the first act. You know, if you have a loaded rifle in the first act of your play, you better fire it in the third act.

If you have a silent nun in the first act of your film, you better give her a speech in the third act. You better let her fire. Again, from the book, and again, you always knew that that was going to, you know, if we got it right, we'd carry a punch. What was lovely about Conclave was I learned a lot of lessons from the book, and it was to do with artistic restraint, I think, you know, that Robert had exercised and that we sort of inherited. So there was this silent chorus of nuns.

who we keep returning to and you see doing everything for the Cardinals. And just their silence starts to become a question.

Which in the end is what the film tries to answer, the question of those silent women. But it's not even that big a speech. But I mean, it helps that you've got Isabella doing it, you know. I think it does. I think it does. It really does. It's probably, you know, seven sentences or something. I don't know. Yeah. But she carries weight. There's a shot earlier on in the film of her. It's when Rafe's delivering his homily and she's outside of the room.

Because, of course, the women are excluded. And it's when he talks about doubting, you just see a cock ahead and it's very, very, it's so precise, the little change that crosses her face. And again, you just think, oh, that's, you know, you don't need lines. You don't need lines. It's all there to be read. How do you know when to add something that's not in the book? There's a moment in Con Play of...

That happens in the book. A character goes into a room that they're not supposed to go in, but the movie gives it an added layer of suspense. Will they get caught by another character? How do you even know to, I can do this. I can add something that does not exist in the text to begin with.

It's a gradual process of divorce, is the truth. You know, normally because when you say yes to a book, hopefully it's because you love the book and you feel very respectful and loyal to the book. That's true with, you know, Wolf Hall and with Conclave and with Tinker Tailor.

And the first drafts tend to be quite faithful and then but bit by bit you have to start to leave that behind completely and cross the bridge into the film until in the end you don't even bother looking back at the book. You don't care about the book anymore. You only care about the film. What's worked? What does the film need? What's working for the film? So it's always this process of kind of leaving one for the other. And with Conclave,

It was always about balancing these different tones, you know, sort of the political thriller with something that was a more serious exploration of faith and doubt.

thinking if we tip the dial too far one way it's going to be dry it won't be entertaining if we go too far the other way we end up with scooby-doo in the vatican so it was always it's just this sort of balancing process so there were times when we thought okay let's add a little bit of filler so you know there's a couple of scenes that we added that were just to kind of build that kind of tension um there were other things that we decided to go the other way you know so it's

I've never worked on anything that felt like such miniature work where it was all very – we didn't do anything that big that wasn't in the book, but we did lots and lots of checking and adjusting and fine-tuning. You, on your other works, had to sort of do the opposite. You know, Conclave is this very linear story. You know, Tinker, Taylor, and Wolf Hall –

Or the Wolf Hall books, the two books that you adapt into the series. They're both stuffed with characters. They both move around in time. And they really required immense compression on your part. Very different challenge than what you had to do on Conclave. How do you take something like Tinker Tailor, which some people read and still don't understand what happened until they read it a second time. Me too. Or Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, which just have all of the characters and get into manageable shape.

There's three books, by the way, for World War IV. There's The Mirror and the Light, the third one, which we've also adapted. Yes, which will be coming out in the US in March. Coming to a screen near you soon. It's interesting. I mean, I think if you saw someone rebuilding a building and you saw someone building a building, it looks like they're doing the same thing. I guess the difference is the rebuilders working with or against, but certainly in dialogue with an existing structure. And a lot of the bricks have been supplied. So it kind of feels like that.

with i mean wolf hall which i loved absolutely loved i think hillary mantella's you know one of the greatest british novelists uh but it was a huge forest and there were lots of paths you could choose to go to go through it same with tinker taylor really um so you find the story that speaks to you um

And I've discovered, strangely, it's always the same story, which is a story of those who are loyal and those who betray. And I don't know why that's my story, but that seems to be the thing I'm responding to in other people's work again and again. So with Wolf Hall, I decided, and this is there in the book, but it's not all that was there in the book, but I decided that my narrative in Wolf Hall was going to focus on a revenge drama. Cromwell, one by one, takes revenge on those who betrayed his master, the Cardinal.

And obviously Tinker, I noticed that I was doing this really because of Tinker Tailor, because it's so explicit in Tinker Tailor, which of course is about the search for a traitor. But Conclave II is about those who are loyal to the wishes of the dead pope and those who are betraying, those who have betrayed the church, those who are loyal to the heart of the church. And I don't know why I'm drawn to that story, but so that guides me. Everything that was helping to reinforce that spine, I would use. Things that weren't going to be of any use to that, I didn't use.

It is interesting how loyalty and betrayal work hand in hand with politics and power and with these very secret worlds. In all three of those projects, those are all sort of part of the scaffolding. Absolutely. And I suppose they're working on a human – they're about sort of abstract concepts of power.

and politics, but on a very human scale where, you know, it's the individual personalities of these men that's going to decide the future of the church. And Tinker Tail are the same. It's these sort of the upper echelons and it's their friendships, their love affairs, their betrayals that are steering these, you know, larger events. So, I mean, and in a way that's just obvious, isn't it? That means it's dramatizable. If it's something that's to do with human

then you can turn it into drama. I'd love to end by asking you, you know, don't jinx yourself, but they say put your desires out there into the world. What is a book that you would just love to take a crack at in terms of adaptation? Well, I know what it is. I don't know. I guess I can probably say. The only reason I hesitate is because I want to try and persuade people

people to let me do it but it's another book by Hilary Montel which is called A Place of Greater Safety about the French Revolution which she wrote before Wolf Hall and I read long ago and loved and I've loved it ever since and always wanted to do it so I'd love to be given a chance to try to do that well good luck getting the rights to that book thank you so much for joining the book review podcast Peter Straughan talking about Oscar nominated screenplay Conflate thank you so much for being here thank you so much

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