Can a great actor be taken for granted?
It’s been 30 years since Ralph Fiennes broke out as vicious Nazi Amon Goeth in “Schindler’s List,” which earned him his first Oscar nomination, followed three years later by his second, for the romantic adventure “The English Patient.” While he has labored in the commercial trenches on three Bond films (as M) and four Harry Potter installments (as Lord Voldemort), Fiennes has delivered many Oscar-worthy performances over the decades (“Spider,” “The End of the Affair,” “The Constant Gardener,” “A Bigger Splash,” and “The Grand Budapest Hotel” come to mind). Somehow, they were overlooked by the Academy Actors branch.
In short, he’s overdue. “Conclave” is their opportunity to set things right.
Edward Berger‘s follow-up to Oscar-winning German war film “All Quiet on the Western Front” is a total crowdpleaser. The English-language “Conclave,” adapted by Peter Straughan from Robert Harris’s bestselling thriller, played well at Telluride and Toronto (Metascore 78), followed by audience awards at the regional festivals Middleburg and Mill Valley. “Conclave” could prove a theatrical hit as well as a Euro-leaning Oscar contender.
Berger was drawn in by Cardinal Lawrence and his “interior journey of being in doubt of what you are there for, and what you believe in,” the director told IndieWire. So was Fiennes, who read the script in three days and swiftly agreed to do it.
“Robert Harris writes what my dad would call ‘a good yarn,’” Fiennes said in a phone interview. “You want to know what happens next. He writes intelligent potboilers, very good stories, and he does meticulous research.”
So did Fiennes, even if “you don’t know what happens inside of a conclave,” he said. “They know what the ritual is for the voting process. They know lots of things surrounding what kind of music can be played. It was important to me that we got the rituals and the physical details right. I became more interested in Lawrence as a man undergoing questions about his faith. I don’t know that you can research a crisis of faith. Having a lot of facts in your head doesn’t necessarily make you play a scene well.”
The director sought to keep Fiennes’ point of view at the center of the action. “This is an ensemble piece, but you anchor it around Ralph,” said Berger, “and you can be here in his mind at all times, and see what’s going on in his eyes, what he’s thinking, how he’s maneuvering, what his moral compass is, what his doubts are. And I can take the audience on the road with him.”
Working with Fiennes was like a collaboration, said Berger, “He’s a person where I can see what’s going on behind the eyes. Because he doesn’t have the most lines, it’s quite internal. Honestly, he’s thinking the whole time, and so I needed to be led into that process. I’ve never sat across from anyone who has a more intense gaze than Ralph. It’s very powerful. And that gaze is amazing for the screen and for this character.”
Fiennes understood Lawrence right away. “I had an instinctive sense of recognition in the DNA of Lawrence’s character,” he said, “the anxiety and doubt and the questioning. He’s asking gentle questions and listening to answers and watching. He’s watching. You can, as an actor, inhabit an interior life, and you hope it reads on your face. As you listen and respond, you build up a sense of yourself as a character, what you’re thinking and feeling. If you’re open to the energy that the delivery of another actor will have on you, you need the camera to be able to read what’s in your face. That’s why [Berger] uses camera positions that get right into my face. But you’ve got to have your interior life working away.”
Fiennes and Berger tussled briefly over Cardinal Lawrence’s costume after Fiennes met with the British cardinal. “I was allowed to put on some vestments that a cardinal would wear,” said Fiennes. “They use slightly different fabrics for the costume. Essentially, what we wear is accurate. Some things, they’ve taken a bit of artistic license, or you’d have to be pressing a lot of lace every day. And some of the fabrics were changed a bit for a combination of practical and budgetary and aesthetic reasons.”
The Vatican was off-limits, naturally. “It’s always great to be in a real room, a real church, a real antechamber, or a real palace,” said Fiennes. “You would never get the permission to shoot in the Vatican. There was an existing Sistine Chapel set from another production, which you can hire and take out. It’s a brilliant copy. And the atmosphere we created on a copy of the Sistine Chapel felt fantastic. By the time you’ve got everyone in their robes and rehearsed thoroughly into the ritual, we felt we were in the real place. We had a number of locations around Rome, classical structures that reflect the pomp and the grandiosity of the Vatican. If you’re walking through a big colonnade or in a spacious courtyard with classical archways, or in the big palace Caserta near Naples with extraordinarily long marble staircases, high, high heights and decorated pillars, that gives you a feeling you’re in a real place. It lends a general feeling of authenticity.”
Fiennes keeps busy year after year, but two films in one year is unusual: He also shot “The Return” (Bleecker Street, December 6), playing wily Odysseus as he washes ashore naked on the island of Ithaca, so aged and weathered that he is unrecognizable even to his wife Penelope (“The English Patient” star Juliette Binoche). Odysseus wanders the island and regains his strength for the inevitable battle against the many suitors trying to win his wife.
The movie takes liberties with Homer. “The script did away with monsters,” said Fiennes. “It was the end of ‘The Odyssey,’ and there’s no goddess Athena to help Odysseus look pretty and give him a fuller head of hair or make him more useful. So we embrace the idea that he is a man after 20 years of travel, 10 years at war, 20 years lost. He’s washed up naked, with nothing. He’s given a blanket. All I wear is one red piece of cloth I wrapped around me in different ways, and a loin cloth.”
Fiennes plays Odysseus as a lost and wandering soul. “I’m impelled to come to the place where I’m from,” he said, “but I am disoriented. Inside myself, I have a sense of deep psychic psychological displacement. Therefore, I’m not sure if I want to be here even as I am here. And that was a wonderful challenge to play. I’m back here, but I don’t know how to talk to my wife. My confidence in myself is shattered, but I am still who I am, and that is weird. It’s quite a paradoxical state to be in. He goes to the palace. He looks at the suitors. He still has an inner steel. He’s waiting for his moment. He doesn’t come home in full heroic mode, hardly.”
Next up: Fiennes plays a good doctor in “28 Years Later,” Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s follow-up to “28 Days Later.” “It’s three films, of which two have been shot,” he said. “Britain is 28 years into this terrible plague of infected people who are violent, rabid humans with a few pockets of uninfected communities. And it centers on a young boy who wants to find a doctor to help his dying mother. He leads his mother through this beautiful northern English terrain. But of course, around them hiding in forests and hills and woods are the infected. But he finds a doctor who is a man we might think is going to be weird and odd, but actually is a force for good.”
Fiennes also stars in Alan Bennett’s “The Choral,” about a small town community north of England during World War One trying to put on a song concert.
“All the young men are going off to the war in France and are dying,” said Fiennes. “And they hire a new chorus master to perform a piece.” They can’t go to the usual German composers, so Fiennes’ character proposes a difficult choral piece by the English conductor Edward Elgar. “We have an amateur group of singers being inducted into a very demanding choral piece. How do they get there? And the film is a study in the community, all the little relationships and the gossipy back-biting things that are happening, the young people having their first love affairs and flirtations and attractions. And as they work on this piece, conducted by my character, who’s a bit of a strict, aloof martinet, they manage, in the end, to do it, before all the young men are called up.”
As for his “Bigger Splash” director Luca Guadagnino’s take on “Brideshead Revisited,” Fiennes hopes that it happens one day: “Yes, if that gets real, I’d like to do that.”
