As with most good mysteries, editor Nick Emerson worked backward from where “Conclave” ends to design the pace of the intrigue that runs throughout the film’s papal election. The film intends to keep us with the perspective of Ralph Fiennes’ Cardinal Lawrence throughout the voting he reluctantly runs and to make that election as electric as the scandals that come out about the frontrunners for the Holy See. But, as Emerson pointed out to IndieWire, there’s a lot of dialogue.
So for Lawrence to earn the calmness and stillness of his eventual audience with the new Pope and the pause just before he leaves the seclusion of the Casa Santa Marta, everything leading up to those moments needed to be as tense and chewy as possible. Alongside Lawrence, we must work through a blistering amount of scheming, a set of abrupt reaction shots meant to knock us off balance, and one extremely loud Vatican coffee machine.
“These little moments of jarring, whether it be cuts or a sort of shifting point of view, [they help] illustrate the disorientation that [Lawrence] is going under. A good example of that is the opening sequence where we intercut the body being prepared, and his journey [to the Vatican], and it [shows] all these things are firing off in his head. It’s like, ‘Oh my goodness, what I am going to do?’” Emerson told IndieWire.
Editing rhythm and an emotive use of sound are two of the ways that Emerson and director Edward Berger refuse to let Lawrence’s brain rest until the conclave, and “Conclave,” have ended. Even in moments without Lawrence on screen, his anxiety allowed the editing team to push for more tension in how long we stay in each shot and how much suspense can fit inside it.
“I think that when you’re following a character’s point-of-view, as long as you’re true to that [and] you know what they’re feeling, it can give you permission to be bold in the cutting and help emphasize it,” Emerson said. “Edward would always say, ‘Let’s test the limits,’ which is such a wonderful instruction to be given. ‘Let’s just leave it as long as you can. Let’s see.’”
In the case of the film’s opening, Berger had always wanted to put the “Conclave” title card over the image of the body being transported in the back of an ambulance. But Emerson played the mundane rattle of the shifting metal gurney in the ambulance, picked up while shooting, as a way of emphasizing the discord between sound and image, between what we project and what we are, that runs like a current throughout the film.
“We actually kept extending [that shot]. And we created this rhythm of [the rattle] going. And we just became obsessed with it,” Emerson said. “It’s something that Edward was super keen to get across — all of these people are human beings with flaws, and they’re made out of flesh and bones.”
The film’s ending is as sculpted as its beginning to ground us emotionally in Lawrence’s perspective, even as the image mostly peers at him from the outside. The last moments of “Conclave” are extremely simple. Lawrence looks out his window and sees young nuns exiting another building below him, laughing and hopeful. But Emerson organized both that shot and our view of Lawrence as intricately as any Vatican ceremonial protocol.
“You’ve got to be with him and watch his face and hear the wind, and then he catches something on the wind, the sound of laughter, and so he looks out,” Emerson. “We experimented a lot in the edit [with] the timing and placement of the laughter. We had a big wild track of those actors laughing and talking, so we spent a lot of time pulling out particular laughs and placing them within the shot to create a certain rhythm because we wanted to get it absolutely perfect.”
The placement of the motivating sounds and the length of the shot allow the film to work alongside Fiennes’ performance to convey the feeling of something, a wordless optimism, as a swell of satisfaction — or perhaps of faith — that builds in Lawrence. That effect required Emerson and Berger to be rigorously precise. “Once we [set] the length of the shot, where do we want to use this piece of laughter to motivate his look? Or do we want this one later on when [the nuns are] walking through the shot? But that’s the stuff that I love, and Edward [also] loves that level of detail,” Emerson said.
The ability to manipulate what we see and hear to that level of detail is obviously not something “Conclave” wants us to think about. Most films don’t tip their hands to how artificial and constructed every element is. But in swinging hard into certain cuts and establishing a rhythm only to upend it, the editing of “Conclave” emotionally keeps us in our protagonist’s velvet shoes.
“The biggest challenge was trying to maintain this sort of structural idea, the form of it that [Edward and I] wanted to do, and be very careful about the shots that we used and still keep it entertaining and thrilling within that framework,” Emerson said. “It’s a constant process of refining and tightening and changing and exploring.”
