Peter Straughan wasn’t walking around with his cell phone in hand to hear if the film academy would recognize him for his film adaptation. concave.
With the film grossing nearly $38 million in theaters before Focus Features moved it to Peacock, Straughan had some concerns about finding an audience for the thriller. “I mean, obviously on paper it doesn’t look like box office gold…middle-aged men talking in a room,” Straughan told Deadline. “You wouldn’t think this would necessarily catch fire, but then it did. And I have to say the one thing I’m really thrilled about is that I keep finding young people who really relate to it.”
Based on Robert Harris’ best-selling book of the same name, concave It follows one of the most ancient and secret events in the world – the selection of a new pope. Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is tasked with running this secret operation after the unexpected death of his beloved Pope. Once the most powerful leaders of the Catholic Church from around the world gather and gather together in the halls of the Vatican, Lawrence uncovers a series of deep secrets left in the dead pope’s wake, secrets that could shake the foundations of the church.
“I never thought I’d get notice of these awards, to be honest,” continued Straughan, who received his first Oscar nomination for his writing. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy In 2012. Maybe that was a bit pessimistic of me, but I made the movie because I loved the book and I loved the people who were in it. So it felt like a special labor of love for me.
“I think the Catholic Church is good at theater and drama,” Straughan continued, speaking of Hollywood’s desire to continue making films about the church. “And I’m speaking as a former altar boy who used to be there at the altar, and I remember that feeling. I think she had an interesting relationship with power and worldly authority, which came about because the Roman Empire embraced Christianity. So I think she was always in this kind of very cool, focused position between The spiritual and the mundane, which makes it a great fit for good stories.
concave He adds that he certainly has a point.
“It hovers between saying something universal about politics and saying something just about humanity. It’s something that feels quite contemporary and relevant to the world we live in now,” he said. “I felt like I was able to kind of do both. So I wanted to make sure we did that as well. I also feel like the thing that we inherited from the book was this kind of dual ambition of having something to say, and talking about it quite seriously, but to do it in as entertaining and interesting a way as possible. And that was kind of the ambition that we brought to the film as well. I grew up in the great golden age of American cinema in the 1970s, where I think there were a lot of films that were tackling something serious or contemporary and relevant, but were also successful pieces of entertainment. So I think that was kind of an inspiration for us.
Straughan also answered one of the burning questions coming out of the film: why do the nuns have so little dialogue. (Obviously it didn’t matter to Isabella Rossellini, who received a nomination this morning in the supporting actress category.)
“It’s by design,” Straughan explained. “I mean, obviously it’s about a real order of nuns who serve the conclave and they wouldn’t talk. But we also wanted to connect these nuns throughout the film as a kind of silent chorus. And it was really interesting because once you do that, once you have these women there and we continue to Coming back to them and they’re not talking, it starts to become a question and I felt in a way that’s what the movie was about. She was trying to find an answer to the question that these silent women were asking, if that makes sense.