‘Conclave’ Director Edward Berger On The Power Of Self-Doubt, His Long Road To The A-List & Those Pesky Rumors He’ll Revive 007

EXCLUSIVE: Though Conclave is fiction based on the Robert Harris novel, you cannot watch Edward Berger’s taut thriller about the election of a new pope without noticing the parallels to the polarizing politics of the race for the White House. The surprise twists and turns abound as it becomes clear the Vatican will either retreat into past conservative, exclusionary policies, or embrace Catholics who’ve been excluded by the institution. The German-born filmmaker is introducing his follow-up to the harrowing WWI drama All Quiet on the Western Front, which won four Oscars including Best International Film. This one-two punch also announces a major filmmaking talent, though he’s no overnight success. Whether he moves on to a major studio franchise like Ocean’s 14 or 007, it is clear from the confident hand in his visual storytelling that Berger is a filmmaker who can make the kind of impact in sophisticated commercial fare as a Sam Mendes or Christopher Nolan. Here, Berger introduces himself to Deadline readers to position Conclave – which Focus Features launches in awards season – and discusses many other things. Ralph Fiennes (already generating strong Oscar buzz), Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini star in a film that made its Toronto debut this morning and screens again Monday and Tuesday.

What a surprise to discover a movie about cardinals gathering in Rome to elect a new pope has the kind of mudslinging and abrupt twists and turns we’re seeing in this heated race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

Edward Berger: Obviously we couldn’t have predicted this because we didn’t know where the word would be. But you take a movie and say, well, this could be relevant or there’s a reason why we make this right now. Yes. And you always want that. I read this article about Nancy Pelosi, how she sort of pulled the strings of getting Kamala and making sure that Biden steps aside and look what good it did. My goodness. Now they at least have a chance.

The Democratic National Convention was exhilarating as a result, and that wouldn’t have been the case had Joe Biden not stepped aside.

Berger: No, of course not. It would’ve been sort of the end of it.

We saw all the new blood among the Democrats, and the diversity. We’re looking at Kamala Harris’ sister, this beautiful woman talking about the family’s challenges and reveling in their racial mix. It reminded when Barack Obama won and there was a feeling that any kid in this country can dream of being president and it could happen.

Berger: That’s what you hope. We had a female chancellor in Germany for the longest time, and just imagine what that does to the world if America has a female president. It’s not just America’s ceiling that is raised, it’s the world. We all follow America; at least the Western world looks to America. But even in, let’s say, Russia, the people who they say, oh, that’s weird that America is swinging that way. It just influences the world so much. If Kamala wins what that does for my children, that there is a future. I think some of these kids are kind of giving up.

They’re not in the 1%…

Berger: Yeah, you’re not in the 1% club. The environment is going down. All the governments are shit, all over the world. What do I have to aspire to? And if they see Kamala up there, they have something to aspire to. It gives the whole world a positive spin somehow.

Where were in the process of making All Quiet On The Western Front when Conclave came about? You’ve made the analogy you went from the mud of the WWI trenches to the figurative mudslinging that happens in any election. 

Berger: Movies have a way of finding you, a way of slotting in at the right time. They come together, they take a while. I started talking to Tessa [Ross, the longtime Film4 head who is a Conclave producer] about it five years ago. The same time or maybe before All Quiet, when the producer called me and said, what do you think of making that movie? I was like, brilliant idea. I’m afraid of it because I don’t want to ruin the legacy of the 1930s film, but it’s truly a challenge. It might be the end of us, but let’s take it on. And that just went quickly. Conclave took a while. Finding the right actor was key. I worked on the script while I shot, refining the script at night and on weekends. When All Quiet was done and I was clear, we got Ralph Fiennes.

You have to find these people, they’re difficult to get. They’re busy. Ralph has a schedule. He’s booked for years, but he wants to pick the right things. You need to find the person that responds and really wants to do it, so that you have a partnership on set. Ralph was that person. He said yes, right away. He read it within three days, called me and asked me to come to his play. Tessa and I went out for dinner with him afterwards. We got along and said, okay, let’s do it. That was it. It was super simple.

It could have been, when you’re making All Quiet that movies change you and you become a different person afterwards. You develop hopefully or you regress, but so you become a different person, but obviously you need to develop these things. You could finish a movie like All Quiet and find you’ve fallen out of love with a movie because the experience has changed you and you go, I love the movie, but I don’t really need to do Conclave anymore. The wonderful thing here is that All Quiet manifested in me the need to make it.

Why?

Berger: Because it felt like I had not flexed this muscle, and I don’t want to repeat myself. Let’s do the opposite. This is a chamber piece, really, with a lot of dialogue. All Quiet had literally like 10 sentences of dialogue. This one is basically driven by smart dialogue. The challenge and the worry of how afraid I was of filming long dialogue and make it interesting enough to make you keep listening, that is very difficult. The dialogue needs to be great. I wanted to try that now, and work with this ensemble to try and make something different. It was the exact opposite challenge that all quiet put in front of me.

All Quiet won the Oscar and received much adulation. You say that the film changed you. How?

Berger: The adulation doesn’t change you. That doesn’t matter; in a way that’s noise. What changes you is the physical experience on of the making of it. I can’t put my finger on it, but maybe you learn certain things or I tried things that didn’t work or worked. I don’t need to try it again. I’ve proven that to myself and next time I want to prove myself something else and be afraid again of a different task. Now, I wouldn’t be afraid of a war movie, but it wouldn’t be the same challenge. I would think, you know what? I might be a little bit bored doing it. It’s little things where you go, you become more mature, you grow up, you want to explore something else of yourself.

A friend of mine asked me, why do you flock to this movie or that movie? How do you determine? I think in the end, there’s a theme in both movies that is not too dissimilar. First of all, they’re both movies that are really driven by one main character, Ralph here and Felix [Kammerer] in All Quiet. And you just follow that person. It gives me the opportunity to put the camera in places that ideally get you to feel what they feel, really put you in his shoes and experience and really live it with him. I tried that with All Quiet in very different ways. They’re very different type of movies. Conclave is a much more static movie than All Quiet for obvious reasons. People sit, so why move the camera?

But let’s say Ralph is thinking and put the camera right here to try to keep it in his brain or straight on. It makes a huge difference how it impacts you. If he plays it a certain way, that means I need to put the camera there to make me feel what he feels. Perspective is a really important part of what draws me to Conclave because I know I’m going to be with Ralph the entire time. And the other similar thing is probably the theme of liberation in the end. Ralph opens the window and he’s liberated from this burden that was on his shoulders…

Overseeing the choosing of the Pope…

Berger: In the end of a quiet, Felix dies and is kind of liberated from the burden of what he had to go through.

Are you a religious man?

Berger: I would say I don’t go to church. I’ve been confirmed. My kids are confirmed because what I like about it is that it passes whatever religion it is, it passes on the history and the culture and a piece of identity that I’d hate to imagine we didn’t have. My wife said, just imagine we didn’t have church or any religion or a temple and what comes with it, you lose a part of the culture and the identity. I think in that case it’s very important, but to me that’s not what drew me to Conclave. To me it was really all the power struggles that go behind the wall. It is a universal story. It could be a board room or it could be politics or it could be how to get on the field in the football team, and fight for that position in the squad. It could be the same story. And that’s why I think in the end it’s a universal power struggle story. That’s what drew me to it. Along with Ralphs’ interior journey of doubt, which I really liked.

Doubt drives Conclave, doesn’t it?

Berger: I love the doubt theme. It resonates with a lot of people because we all have it. We all have our own journey and this one melds both my faith and my faith in movies as a changing, inspiring force. Doubt creeps in all the time. Except for the Italian Cardinal Tedesco [played by Sergio Castellitto as an arch-Conservative candidate who wants to take the Roman Catholic Church back to the stone age]. The idea is that nobody knows what the right thing is, you’re going to have to go with your gut. It’s no different when you make a movie and you’ve got to choose what’s going to happen. That’s your job. And you don’t know if you’re right.

Ralph Fiennes delivers a speech about doubt that changes the direction of Conclave…

Berger: I think the main reason why Ralph did the movie is the speech about doubt. I think when you look into his character’s eyes, he’s driven by doubt. And as an actor or a filmmaker, it’s not an exact science. You have the best intentions to make a good movie. Is it going to be a good movie? I don’t know. No one knows.

We would only have good movies if we knew. There’s no recipe. You put the camera there, you hope and pray that it’s going to be good. But you never know until you show it to the public. Not before. Until you are alone with the movie and that crowd. You have your producers around you, and everyone’s corrupted because they’ve seen it 50 times. They say, okay, this is the best it’s going to be now, let’s just hope that the public’s going to like it. It’s out of your control. And sometimes that movie can tank, even though it’s maybe a good movie. And sometimes it resonates with people and takes hold, but you never know. And so I am completely driven by doubt. Every time I put the camera somewhere or I make an edit, I question myself. Is it the right one? I’m completely driven by doubt and I actually take all my energy from it.

That is…profound…

Berger: I have learned to embrace it. I’ve learned to embrace doubt as a source of strength. I used to have confidence problems because of doubt, because I doubted so much. It’s not like something that takes hours to decide; it’s in the split second you have to make a decision. But still, your need to doubt is such an important part of making movies. And any actor who’s probably doesn’t know, and any director feels that all the time. Probably any journalist or a baker, an engineer, whatever you are, you’re going to identify with a question of doubt. Because at some point you’re going to go to your office, and think, is this really what I want?

My father was an engineer and when I was 19 and he said, you’re going to have to sign up for college, I said, yeah, I’m going to be an engineer. He said, really? I mean filmmaking wasn’t an option. I come from a car manufacturing town. There was no filmmaker. I didn’t even know you could study it. But he saw something in me. He didn’t say, don’t do it. He said, you can do it. But I think I always thought your interests were elsewhere. And I didn’t really know that because I was like, yeah, movies is a hobby, but it’s not the job. It’s not a profession. So then I suddenly realized, maybe I should look into this. Maybe I should look into if I can make my passion to my profession?

You were a big movie fan?

Berger: Big movie fan, but I thought, I’m a movie watcher. Who doesn’t love movies?

What was the north star film that made you want to do this?

Berger: Apocalypse Now. That changed me because it was the first movie that I consciously saw that I actually didn’t understand and that I had to watch a couple of times. It wasn’t driven by a plot because it’s meandering to an upper river and looking for someone. If you’re 19 or 18, you’re looking for the darkness. You kind of don’t quite know what that means.

Talk about doubt. Francis owns that movie because nobody would take a chance on it, even after The Godfather. He had plenty of reasons to doubt himself until he brought it to Cannes as a work in progress and saw it share the Palme d’Or and position itself as a classic…

Berger: A hundred percent. You see it in the documentary. He constantly goes, what are we doing? Anybody, any director in their right mind, would think that.

When your father doubted your career path, did he feel like the structured sandbox he played in was too rigid, that you had a more creative mind and he sacrificed to put you in position to indulge it?

Berger: My father is an engineer, he was a post-war child. He had doubts if it’s the right thing that he chose. He told me, he was not going to study art because that wasn’t work. But when he was 18 and in college, all he did was go to the library, read books and hear classical music. There was a dream there, but that wasn’t a job. He told me that.  And I suddenly realized, oh, he lived a life for pragmatic reasons. And he sort of gave me that choice that I don’t have to live that life. Luckily, I was born in 1970 and not 1939. I had the opportunity to not have to have to do that.

Watching you temper your dreams would have meant what he sacrificed was lost?

Berger: Exactly. Your job as a father or a mother I think is partly to empower your children to find their path in life, whatever that is, just to give them the freedom of choice.

Did you and your dad have a moment where he saw your movie and you could see the pleasure in you realizing your path?

Berger: He was always proud of all his children, he’s the best father I could imagine. The most positive, inspiring beacon of positivity, and the rock. He passed away about a year and a half ago, so he didn’t see the Oscar. It wouldn’t have made him any prouder. He did see the movie. But he was already pretty far gone. I think he liked it, but he was not in a position to really take it in. I think he probably slept halfway through.

But he collected all newspaper articles and everything. I know he was super proud that I took a profession because he knew how hard the profession is. Because probably for 20 years, I was stuck in quite a rigid system, which is German television. You can make a movie or two, and then afterwards that path kind of closes because movie making in Germany’s cinema, it’s limited to certain genres. Most of movies are silly comedies. That’s the only thing that somehow works, really. People think that works. And then there’s very small few arthouse movies that succeed and once in a while break out. But the path there is very driven by television, and that’s a product. And that took me time also to realize that I was there as a director basically to fill up airspace. And I suddenly realized, I don’t want to do that, I don’t want to service something that some national broadcaster decides their audience wants. It’s state funded, so they need to satisfy everyone. So they decide, okay, someone from nine years old to 78 needs to like this.

What gave you the courage to break free of that path?

Berger: I studied in New York at Tisch School, and then I knocked on the door of a company that you probably know, Good Machine. I knocked on the door and said, I like your movies. I want to work. I’d finished school there, and they tell you in school you’re a director, you study directing in ‘94, and suddenly summer of ‘94, I realized I’m a director in this school, but no one else knows I’m a director, and no one else is going to pay me for that. So what do I do? I looked back at the movies that I’d liked over the time, and Good Machine was a driving force back then in making these New York independent movies. So I said, where are they? I looked in the phone book and knocked on the door. Anthony Bregman opened it. He and I are going to make a movie together, and it’s so nice to reunite with him after 20, 25 years. After I knocked on the door, Anthony said, come in. We chatted and he said, yeah, you can be an intern here. I was an intern for three months working for free. And then I got a job there and I worked.

Where did that take you?

Berger: I learned there the ethos of filmmaking, that there has to be a reason why you make a film. What’s the director’s vision? We’ve got to support that. At some point I was inspired, wrote a script that took place in Germany, went back in Germany, made it there. I basically left Good Machine. I made the movie there. And then another. The first was was really successful. But you always have one movie in you when you’re a kid and I was 26. You have that one movie in you and you want to tell that story.

And the second movie was kind of mediocre. It just didn’t work and it took me 10 years of working in television to understand why it was only mediocre.

Why was it mediocre?

Berger: I didn’t have enough to say it. I was too young. I didn’t know why I made the movie. And so I continued to earn my money in German television and I always made these German television movies with a heart. I put everything in there until I realized that movie by movie, I gave something of myself away. I made another compromise that took me away from the first reason why I knocked on Good Machine Store. And then I cut the ties with that and I said, I’m never going to make one of those again. And I made a movie called Jack that was tiny, half a million or something, shot right around my house and got a kid that looks for his mom basically in Berlin.

That got me back to my roots. It recalibrated my brain. I said, why am I making movies? I wanted to know the reason. Every movie that I make needs to have a really good personal reason why I make it.  Only then can I have the hope of transferring to the audience. It’s just not employment. I was done seeking employment.

At Good Machine, you worked with Ang Lee and Todd Haynes and others. What did you learn?

Berger: I worked on Sense and Sensibility. That was the main movie we did while I was there. A couple of other ones, like Walking and Talking. But the first big Hollywood movie was Sense and Sensibility. And then Ice Storm came and I had made the budget with Anthony Bregman, and there was a position there called Production Supervisor. I was making 425 bucks a week and Anthony I think was making 600 or something. And we were like six people or eight people, a tiny company.

And he took me to lunch and said, we’re making Ice Storm. I want you to be the production supervisor. Would you take that job? And I kind of swallowed, because I had done the budget with him, and there was $2,500 a week in the budget for that job. That was a 400% increase or 600% increase in salary, something like that. I was like, wow. And I said, I can’t do it. And Anthony said, I was hoping you would say that.

Isn’t that a lovely story? He knew. Twice a year we did company reviews and evaluations of ourselves. We each wrote a page of what we want to be. And I always wrote in there, I want to be a director. And Ted Hope had always told me, what, you want to be a director? I thought you wanted to be a producer. Why? I see you work here. I said, I need to make money. And he said, if you want to be a director, you got to leave. He told me at some point, you going to have to go out there and do it.

You feared that salary would make it a comfortable living you’d be hard pressed to leave?

Berger: You make 2,500 a week, yeah, that’s a profession. Your choice. You choose, you become a producer. It’s 10 grand a month. If I stop that, no one’s ever going to pay me that amount of money for starting out directing. Not even close. In 1994, that’s like a massive salary. Sure it is. I just knew if I took that I would continue doing it. You just get comfortable in it and it’s really hard to stop.

That’s why Anthony Bregman was happy you quit?

Berger: He knew I was needed to pursue what I really wanted to do. And then 20 years later we meet in New York, Anthony and I, and say, let’s make a movie together.

What did you learn from Good Machine directors that steeled you to believe you had to be one?

Berger: I would say their approach, especially from Ang Lee. Talk about a director who always chose a different movie next and who wanted to be challenged. I would say with Ang, it would be about his approach to humanity, because I feel like he’s a really human director, trying to understand the humanity in people, but also not someone who is sappy and goes all right, let’s put the strings on this. With Todd Haynes, it would be similar. The incredible passion that he has, and he’s a very precise director, and I admire that. I admire when directors are precise and not like, oh, let’s try to capture this moment. But Todd Haynes, when he does a shot and writes a scene, it always has a purpose.

Last one. Look up Edward Berger on the internet, and you see he’s going to direct the next James Bond movie. What’s the deal?

Berger: That’s an absolute rumor. There’s no truth to it whatsoever. I would be very grateful if you put out that fire.

I will, but I’d like to leave a couple embers smoking. Sam Mendes made some damn good ones and he kind of reminds me of you. You’d make a great 007 director…

Berger: He’s a great filmmaker. But Barbara Broccoli is a wonderful producer. She will know what to do at the right time, and it’s her family legacy. It’s her job to protect this and whatever choice she’s going to make is going to be the right choice for the legacy of that genre.