Amid the “wonderful gift” of six Golden Globe nominations this morning for Conclave, his acclaimed papal thriller for Focus Features, filmmaker Edward Berger got candid about his upcoming slate and the thought process that’s informed his career trajectory.
Most notably, Berger spoke about The Barrier, his time travel film starring Austin Butler, which just landed at 20th Century Studios in a competitive situation, as we were first to report. He called the short story of the same name by MacMillan Hedges, on which it’s based, “a perfect construct for a blockbuster, while having a character at the center of it that has the biggest motivation and the biggest journey that you need for a movie that I could think of.
“So that makes a great mixture,” said Berger. “It’s not only commercially super interesting, and theatrically big and explosive, a movie that can get people to the theaters, but it’s also a great, great, great role for an actor, with a lot of mystery and a lot of drive in his journey.”
Currently, Berger is in post on The Ballad of a Small Player, a Netflix thriller starring Colin Farrell and Tilda Winton about a high-stakes gambler laying low in Macau when his past and debts start to catch up with him. “I would say if Conclave is a really well constructed chess game, very architectural, this embraces chaos and opera,” the filmmaker said re: his hook into the Rowan Joffé-scripted adaptation of Lawrence Osborn’s novel. “In this case, I was curious about the external brouhaha, if that’s the word, the external pomp and circumstances of Colin Farrell in Macau, China, thrown into the last days of capitalism, in a way.”
As he works his way through the edit, Berger is spending months on the awards circuit for Conclave, a film set in the high-stakes, tension-filled days following the death of a Pope, as a group of cardinals assembles in a secretive Vatican conclave to elect his successor. Given publicity commitments and work on the Ballad cut that will take him through June, he says he has no clue at this point what his next film will be, though he “would be very glad” if he knew.
Currently, Berger is attached to direct a Bourne film for Universal, and is also rumored to be in the mix for the next Bond movie, though he’s poured cold water on the latter prospect in conversation with Deadline’s Mike Fleming. Among the other films he’s developing at present is Netflix’s The Vagabonds (fka The Last Adventure), an adaption of the 1967 film of the same name, which starred Alain Delon, Lino Ventura and Joanna Shimkus. But only time will tell if and when that one moves forward.
“That’s one of the movies I’ve developed that I love, but it’s also mainly up to casting,” said Berger. “What is the movie that attracts the cast that you need to make it? So I’m waiting on a few casting decisions and I’m not quite ready yet to know where I really want to be drawn. And I have a year before I make anything. Probably early in the new year, I’m going to decide.”
Reflecting on how he came to direct the chamber piece that is Conclave on the heels of Oscar-winning WWI epic All Quiet on the Western Front, Berger shared that he’d been developing the script for six years and that the intention was to do very much “the opposite” of his most recent project.
“Imagine it maybe as a conversation that you’ve been having about one topic only for years and years and years. And then you have nothing left to say about it and you start to repeat yourself,” Berger mused. “There’s no one there to listen, and then you just turn to another subject, to the opposite, and say, ‘I want to talk about this now.’ And then you do that until you’ve all emptied out and then try to find a new subject matter.”
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For Berger, the decision on what film to make next isn’t simply “calculated,” he says. Rather, “if you’re patient and apply your tastes and your sensibilities, you look at a couple and then somehow, the movie finds you and suddenly rises to the top. Somehow, it decides on its own.”
Continued the filmmaker, “There always needs to be a really sort of flabbergasting interior journey for the hero in the movie; that’s a prerequisite. But somehow, the stuff around it — the style and the visuals — I think that needs to be a new challenge, something that I don’t know how to do, something that I’m afraid of. Something that I could be terrible at and want to try to understand. Curiosity is the main thing.”
An adaptation of the 2016 Robert Harris novel, penned by Peter Straughan, the Ralph Fiennes-led Conclave premiered at Telluride and hit theaters via Focus Features on October 25, grossing over $38M worldwide — not too shabby for an adult drama. On January 5, the film will contend for six Golden Globes, including Best Motion Picture – Drama.
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