‘Conclave’ Wins Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar
Release the white smoke! Academy voters have awarded “Conclave” the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Written by Peter Straughan, adapting a 2016 Robert Harris novel of the same name, the papal election drama has now sweeped just about every major screenplay award it was eligible for, including the Golden Globes, the Critics Choice Awards, the BAFTA Awards, and the USC Scripter Awards.
First premiering at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival, the Edward Berger film starring Oscar nominees Ralph Fiennes and Isabella Rossellini gained a reputation for being one of the most crowdpleasing watches of 2024. The Focus Features release, which first hit theaters on October 25, 2024, has since been a mainstay in theaters, making nearly $100 million worldwide.
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The film adaptation of “Conclave” notably stays very faithful to the book, even sticking to its unpredictable twist ending. Oscar winner Straughan told IndieWire in November 2024 that he took that approach because “the book, it’s very precise and controlled. It worked within a sort of emotional bandwidth. It worked well as a thriller plot.” He added, “Sometimes, I’ve worked on books where you really restructure them hugely. This was one of the ones that ended up being quite faithful. So it felt more like there was some keyhole surgery done at various places rather than ripping out the appendix.”
As someone who grew up Catholic, the screenwriter was particularly interested in how the book dove deep into “the biggest patriarchy in the world. It’s told from within the POV of a believer,” he said, referencing Fiennes’ character Cardinal Lawrence. “The book is quietly subversive in that Lawrence ends up being involved in deconstructing the pieces entirely. It’s in pieces by the time it’s finished. If Lawrence, at the beginning of the film, had seen where it was going to end up, he would have been horrified. I thought that was an interesting idea, that the Lord works in mysterious ways, and you might not like the direction he takes things in.”
Straughan could also already see the parallels between the story “Conclave” was telling, and the global political landscape as pivotal elections in places like the United States and Germany were approaching. “There’s a moment where Lawrence is giving his homily. I remember reading it in the book, reaching it in the book where he says, ‘God, give us a pope who will doubt.’ And I really liked that, and I found that quite electrifying because this was a few years ago, but things were already becoming horrifically polarized in the world,” he said. “And even more so now, the idea that the quietly revolutionary stance is to embrace doubt rather than certainty. That felt like a character I wanted to get behind.”
“Conclave” earned Straughan his first Oscar, though the British screenwriter had been a previous Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nominee for the 2011 film adaptation of John le Carré’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”
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