Launch the white smoke! Academy voters have awarded “Conclave” the Oscar for Finest Tailored Screenplay. Written by Peter Straughan, adapting a 2016 Robert Harris novel of the identical identify, the papal election drama has now sweeped nearly each main screenplay award it was eligible for, together with the Golden Globes, the Critics Selection Awards, the BAFTA Awards, and the USC Scripter Awards.
First premiering on the 2024 Telluride Movie Competition, the Edward Berger movie starring Oscar nominees Ralph Fiennes and Isabella Rossellini gained a popularity for being one of the crowdpleasing watches of 2024. The Focus Options launch, which first hit theaters on October 25, 2024, has since been a mainstay in theaters, making practically $100 million worldwide.
The movie adaptation of “Conclave” notably stays very trustworthy to the e-book, even sticking to its unpredictable twist ending. Oscar winner Straughan informed IndieWire in November 2024 that he took that strategy as a result of “the e-book, it’s very exact and managed. It labored inside a type of emotional bandwidth. It labored nicely as a thriller plot.” He added, “Generally, I’ve labored on books the place you actually restructure them vastly. This was one of many ones that ended up being fairly trustworthy. So it felt extra like there was some keyhole surgical procedure executed at numerous locations moderately than ripping out the appendix.”
As somebody who grew up Catholic, the screenwriter was significantly desirous about how the e-book dove deep into “the most important patriarchy on the earth. It’s informed from throughout the POV of a believer,” he mentioned, referencing Fiennes’ character Cardinal Lawrence. “The e-book is quietly subversive in that Lawrence finally ends up being concerned in deconstructing the items solely. It’s in items by the point it’s completed. If Lawrence, at first of the movie, had seen the place it was going to finish up, he would have been horrified. I believed that was an fascinating concept, that the Lord works in mysterious methods, and also you may not just like the course he takes issues in.”
Straughan might additionally already see the parallels between the story “Conclave” was telling, and the worldwide political panorama as pivotal elections in locations like the USA and Germany had been approaching. “There’s a second the place Lawrence is giving his homily. I keep in mind studying it within the e-book, reaching it within the e-book the place he says, ‘God, give us a pope who will doubt.’ And I actually preferred that, and I discovered that fairly electrifying as a result of this was a number of years in the past, however issues had been already turning into horrifically polarized on the earth,” he mentioned. “And much more so now, the concept that the quietly revolutionary stance is to embrace doubt moderately than certainty. That felt like a personality I wished to get behind.”
“Conclave” earned Straughan his first Oscar, although the British screenwriter had been a earlier Finest Tailored Screenplay Oscar nominee for the 2011 movie adaptation of John le Carré’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”