Spoiler warning: This article discusses the ending of “Conclave”
Nick Emerson was doing his job, sitting in an editing room in London, when he found out that he was up for an Oscar. He received one of the eight nominations for Edward Berger’s “Conclave,” which also scored nods for Best Picture and Best Actor (Ralph Fiennes).
“I just couldn’t believe it,” said Emerson, a first-time nominee for his work on the stylish Vatican potboiler. “We all jumped up and down and screamed. It’s a wonderful honor and I was definitely walking around in a bit of a daze for a couple of days afterwards.”
Emerson’s two decades of credits include “Eileen,” “Lady Macbeth” the TV series “Life After Life,” plus Berger’s forthcoming “The Ballad of a Small Player,” a thriller set in Macau, starring Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton. His filmography is chock full of slow-burns – projects where each cut serves the pulse and exhalation of the narrative being told.
That quality is epitomized in “Conclave,” a closed-room-style mystery where the narrative pace is so crucial to the film’s success. The movie satisfies with both a final twist and a brief, wordless denouement, as we follow protagonist Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), his job now done after a conversation with Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz), as he relaxes into a brave new world.
During a conversation with Emerson, we focused specifically on the final seven minutes of “Conclave” and how the film’s finale was carefully crafted.
In watching the ending of “Conclave” closely, I paid attention the stillness and precision as it unfolds.
What’s been really satisfying is when I’ve seen it with an audience and I can hear a pin drop. And what’s really great for me is to know that people are so engaged with it, all the way until the last moment.
Many shots during the final minutes are held for 35 or 40 seconds. What was your approach to it?
We approached it in the same way as the other scenes, which essentially meant making sure that every cut felt motivated and often leaving the cuts until the last possible second.
In the ending, we were slowing down even more and trying to match the calming presence of Cardinal Benitez. He’s so sure of his place and his existence within the world and we wanted it to be reflected in the cutting. We wanted it to be very simple. There’s no need to cut when you’re watching these great faces delivering these wonderful performances.
The scene between Lawrence and Benitez just alternates between their two closeups. Did you work on the rhythm between them?
Yes. Every scene has certain anchor points within it, in terms of points that I can look at and go, “I’m 90% sure I need to be on Lawrence’s face for this moment.” So when constructing that scene, we knew that the audience has just been delivered a shock and that bought us a little capital in terms of some time to let the news settle.
Yes, Lawrence and the audience need a minute to process what we’ve just heard. The revelation does cause a stir in the audience, but it must have been important that it doesn’t get a bad laugh.
Yeah, absolutely. It’s a tricky one because it needs the emphasis as well. It needs a purposeful cut to Lawrence to get his reaction. Ralph played that so beautifully – he’s not angry in his reaction – but we certainly experimented with different takes and different sizes of shots. We even experimented with altering the length by a few frames, either longer or shorter.
For example, Edward did shoot a closer shot of Lawrence reacting to Benitez’s revelation, but we elected to go for the slightly looser shot, because the close up just felt a little too aggressive and it might have seemed a little bit like, as you say, a punchline.
At the same time, you don’t want to undersell the scene’s impact.
Right. If there is any sort of audience laughter there, it’s more from their reaction of, “Wow, Lawrence has just gone through all these momentous obstacles and now he hears this unexpected thing.” But that’s immediately followed by the moment between him and Benitez. The footage I had between Ralph and Carlos was all really so beautiful and I was confident it was going to land.
I love that there is one closeup of Benitez, when he talks about existing between the world’s certainties, which holds for 40 seconds, even though we hear Lawrence’s dialogue too.
Yeah, for that moment, I remember we tried cutting back to Ralph but it didn’t feel motivated. And that’s the biggest thing. When you’re being so careful about when to cut, or when you try to force a cut, it just won’t work. It’ll stink.
That’s how Edward and I work together. We like to look at a scene, like this one, and say, “OK, there are seven cuts in here, can we make it in four? OK, now can we do it in three?”
The story then stays with Cardinal Lawrence for a couple minutes. We hear the crowd outside the Vatican erupt in cheers when the white smoke is visible, but we never seen the crowd or the smoke.
We experimented with that. We had shots of the chimney, with all the white smoke and so forth, but we elected not to show it. We also wondered if maybe the audience should hear the new pope on the radio somehow in that scene. But we felt confident that it was enough to hear the cheers and see the relief and the smile on his face. That’s what the audience needs to know.
And it felt right?
Exactly. It’s just so much about feeling your way through it and sensing what’s right for the film? During the beginning of the editing process, you’re wrestling to control all this material and trying to shape it into your vision, but ultimately the film starts to tell you what it needs. It reveals its own roadmap.
I always think that you know you’re close to finishing the film when it starts to reject ideas. You have ideas and you start to try them and you’re like, “Oh, wow, that really doesn’t work.” And that’s a sign. Because you could just go on editing forever, but the film tells you when it’s done.
Let’s talk about the final shot: Lawrence gazes out the window and we see his point of view, which shows three nuns chatting and laughing in a courtyard. A cousin of mine said, “Women get the last laugh.”
I love that interpretation. Yeah, Edward always wanted to end on that shot and the optimism of it. There’s the gentle sound of their laughter, and I always like the way they come outside and how the door closes. One door closes, but another one is opening.
It’s when the door gently closes that the film goes to black.
Yes. We spent a lot of time on the length of that shot, in terms of how long to leave it before the black screen comes. And then we also had this long audio track, the women laughing and so we spent a lot of time sifting through that, finding the best exact pieces of laughter.
There was a musicality to it that we liked. There’s a musicality to the wind, there’s a musicality to the laughter and there’s a musicality to the door. Click, cut to black, and it sets up this wall of music that it’s going to come at you in a second or two. That’s the stuff that Edward and I love to do, create these interesting rhythms in the storytelling.
One other question. What’s an ending to a movie that you really love? As an editor, sometimes you must really notice bad endings. But what’s a perfect ending?
“Zodiac,” David Fincher.
Oh, what a great answer.
It’s not necessarily a satisfactory ending from a plot point of view, but you leave the theater thinking, “Wow, that murderer is still out there.” It doesn’t matter if he’s dead or alive – that dread is still out there. It’s just so clever and tense and terrifying. I remember thinking how brilliant it was that Fincher pulled that off. It’s a classic.
Also, “Zodiac” opens with a Donovan song and then the tune slithers back onto the soundtrack in the final seconds.
Oh, my goodness, “The Hurdy Gurdy Man.” It’s very clever because it’s actually a really odd, creepy vocal. It really underscores the movie’s whole idea of the boogeyman, who’s lurking. Fincher was ahead of the curve with that film. It wasn’t appreciated enough when it came out but it’s an American masterpiece.
