Bespoke jewellery and "a claustrophobic mood": creating the visual look of 'Conclave'

A private tour of Vatican City and the Sistine Chapel on a cold, grey November morning arranged for a core Conclave creative team — including director Edward Berger, cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine and production designer Suzie Davies — provided a production epiphany for the chosen few.

“You’re not allowed to enter the Vatican with a camera,” says Fontaine, who earns a first Bafta nomination for his work on Conclave — one of 12 achieved by the film. “Luckily a select few were allowed to go inside the Vatican City, walk the streets and develop a different understanding of life behind the walls.”

Adapted by Peter Straughan from Robert Harris’s novel of the same name, the story unfolds in the immediate aftermath of a pope’s demise, as cardinals from around the world gather for a conclave to elect his successor. The process is led by a reluctant Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), while candidates representing the Catholic church’s factions — from liberal to moderate to various stripes of socially conservative and reactionary — jostle for votes.

The conclave takes place with the cardinals and the nuns looking after them — led by head housekeeper Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini) — locked away from the outside world with shutters drawn, blinds down, and only candles and artificial light. They spend their time between the pope’s quarters, cardinal and priest accommodation, separate board and lodgings for the nuns, and the Sistine Chapel for voting and debating.

“Our tour was very early in the morning, all very dim, you could barely see anything in the Sistine Chapel,” recalls Fontaine. “It was impressive. There’s something which is hard to define, but it is something palpable in the air, something that had to do with art, definitely, and also a sense of power that you could feel. It was a defining moment in my preparation for the film.”

The low-light tour informed the production team, who were only too aware that by page five of Straughan’s script there was to be no natural light for the majority of the film. “Early in the movie, they’re sequestered, which also means they cannot risk being eavesdropped on, so they have to close all the shutters and blinds in the quarters and the chapel,” explains Fontaine.

Berger began developing Conclave with producer Tessa Ross, the former Film4 chief, and Bafta-­winning screenwriter Straughan (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) around six years ago, predating the director’s multi-award-winning All Quiet On The Western Front. A graduate of École Nationale Supérieure Louis-­Lumière in the 1980s, Fontaine’s previous credits include A Prophet (2009), Captain Fantastic (2016) and Jackie (2016).

The cinematographer landed Conclave after fellow DoP James Friend, who shot All Quiet On The Western Front and Patrick Melrose with Berger, was not available and suggested Fontaine for the job. Fontaine was happy to step into Friend’s shoes.

“Edward was keen on not seeing too much of the faces at the beginning of the conclave,” says Fontaine. “In a way the challenge of little natural light became an asset. We wanted to create an even more claustrophobic mood and the dark helped.”

Conclave was shot using two digital Red Raptors, one often mounted on Steadicam. “We were facing two different challenges,” explains Fontaine. “One, we’ve got six storyboarded ballot scenes and we didn’t want them to look too repetitive, so we needed to find different angles for each of them. We also have a lot of talking heads, and we had to find a way to keep the attention of the audience.”

Attention is what has been empirically achieved, given the film’s $76m worldwide gross at press time, including $32m in North America for Focus Features and $8.7m (£7.1m) in the UK and Ireland for Black Bear.

The recce with Berger and department heads also informed the production of the scale and size of Vatican City: the cardinals are typically old but need to traverse quite long distances, and inhabitants may need to take buses to travel from one place to the next.

Even on a private tour, there were no-go zones including the Casa Santa Marta, a five-storey building boasting more than 106 suites, 22 single rooms and one apartment that sits on the edge of Vatican City.

“We created the Casa Santa Marta to look quite different from the other elements, because that’s one place no-one knows about, you can’t go for a tour around it in the Vatican,” explains production designer Suzie Davies, whose credits include Hard Truths (2024), Saltburn (2023) and Mr. Turner (2014) — earning Bafta and Oscar nominations for the latter film. “It’s just pointed out on the tours of Vatican City as, ‘It’s over there,’ and is quite an ugly building.”

Davies, who earns her second Bafta nomination with Conclave, did try to find intel on Casa Santa Marta and sourced some images of the reception area, “but they didn’t reveal anything of much use”. The lack of material actually proved to be a fillip to the film’s look.

“The script gave the opportunity for us to go in a slightly different direction,” says Davies. “A lot of people go to Rome, go to the Vatican, and there have been quite a few recent films [and series] about popes.”

Creative licence

What intrigued Berger and Davies were the bits that no-one knows about and the secrecy around a conclave. “All I knew was the black and the white smoke from the chimney,” says Davies. “There are all the traditions but there are elements that we don’t know, and that’s where we took a little bit of licence. It enabled us to create a visual style that was slightly more unexpected.”

Contrasting location work ranged from the fascist Brutalist architecture found in Rome and the EUR business district that boasts contemporary architecture, to the city’s historic locations such as the Palazzo Barberini, a 17th-century palace that houses a collection of Italian masterpieces.

“You expect cardinals to be in beautiful churches and cathedrals and in those gorgeous courtyards. That’s why we created the Casa Santa Marta to look quite different from the other elements,” says Davies. “The opposite of the Sistine Chapel, this more brutal style plays on a couple of levels. It plays to that juxtaposition of seeing these cardinals in bright-red colours in municipal-type buildings, but also it brings a heaviness and a stillness. I tried to make Casa Santa Marta like a prison.”

Berger and Davies took the modern and contemporary options whenever they were available. “The balance of our locations with this more fascist, brutal contemporary architecture, which has these wonderful low ceilings, plays into a widescreen feeling,” says Davies.

The film’s 40-day shoot was split about evenly between locations dotted around Rome and a set built in the city’s famous Cinecitta Studios, which housed the production’s Sistine Chapel, a Casa Santa Marta corridor and some of the quarters where the cardinals stay for the duration of the conclave. For the latter, Davies created subtle differences to indicate gradations of status or entitlement.

“John Lithgow’s character [the nakedly ambitious Cardinal Tremblay from Canada], someone probably put a telephone call in and said, ‘Can you give this cardinal a better room?’ He’s got more of a suite,” she says. “Ralph’s cardinal, it doesn’t even cross Cardinal Lawrence’s mind that he could choose the room. He’ll take the worst room. It doesn’t bother him what­soever that he’s right next to the lift, and it’s more like a bedsit room.”

Lucky find

Hidden amid random props at the back of a warehouse at Cinecitta was flattage for an old Sistine Chapel set. “I changed the architecture of it just to enable us to have two opposing stalls to make it like a congress or a parliament again,” says Davies. “We played with the design, and the craftsmen at Cinecitta put it back together using the same painters who put it together in the first place.”

Palazzo Barberini’s gold room was chosen for the film’s moving scene where a choir is singing and Cardinal Lawrence delivers a speech to the gathered cardinals ahead of the first vote. “It’s got an amazing painted ceiling, the most glorious gold wall­paper and is a massive room, the ceiling might be 10 metres high,” says Davies. “That was a case of perhaps me being slightly restrained. Sometimes it’s as important to know to do less as the designer. I didn’t want to go overboard with our dressing or anything, because we had 100 cardinals in all those wonderful Lisy Christl-designed costumes, and that was dressing enough in that room.” Davies did build a large crucifix.

Berger began talking to Christl about Conclave when they were working together on All Quiet On The Western Front, for which she likewise served as costume designer — and has achieved Bafta nominations for both films. “I’m born in a very Catholic part of Germany, Edward is born in a Protestant family,” says Christl. “I figured out very quickly I don’t know much about this whole liturgical world, and that I had a lot to study, a lot to read. I needed to do a lot of groundwork to build ideas for the costumes.”

As with All Quiet On The Western Front, Christl pitched to create the costumes from scratch, rather than going to a rental house. That meant early sketches of individual costumes for key cardinals with subtle differences to inform the characters — played by a cast that includes Stanley Tucci and Carlos Diehz — while maintaining a sense of uniform among them. It also meant securing budget support from Ross, who backed Christl’s request.

Christl was not happy with the weight and colour of the real fabric used for the cardinals’ dress. “I showed it to Edward and Stéphane and said if you look at the colour for more than five minutes straight it’s not good for your eyes,” she explains. “We made colour swatches, did camera tests and went for a darker, richer red. The fabric is a heavy wool, the real fabric is more flimsy.”

She also changed the proportions for each cardinal’s robes, which are in three parts: the mozzetta (a small cape), the rochet (the white vestment worn over the cassock) and then the cassock in red underneath. For the order of nuns at the Vatican where Rossellini’s Sister Agnes presides, their habits are blue.

“Isabella has a higher position, and usually in this position you don’t wear blue, you wear black,” says Christl, who nevertheless awarded the actress a deep-blue cape to create unity within the nuns’ order. “After learning so much about Catholic vestments, I also saw there is, in 2025, more freedom,” she adds.

“It’s important to send the essence of my work to the actors so they can enter the world and learn about the wardrobe before they meet me,” says Christl. “I like to be prepared and help an actor be involved in what the costume can bring to their performance.”

Christl and her Italian costume department team had just shy of 10 weeks to weave, dye and stitch the entire wardrobe while also making crosses and rings and doing fittings. “It was long working nights, not much sleep, long working days, not many weekends,” she says. “I was so embraced by the Italian costume crew. It’s not every day you have the chance to do something like this.” 

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