Conclave

1. Director Edward Berger earned back-to-back Academy Award nominations with two very different films. All Quiet on the Western Front won Best International Feature Film in 2023, and Conclave earned Berger a Best Director nomination in 2025 — making him one of the rare directors to achieve major Oscar recognition in consecutive years with successive projects.

2. The Vatican interiors were recreated in detail at Rome's Cinecittà Studios. Production designer Stefan Dechant oversaw the construction of faithful replicas of the Sistine Chapel, the Domus Sanctae Marthae residence, and the Vatican corridors — spaces that could not be filmed inside the real Vatican during the production, requiring months of research and craftsmanship to recreate authentically.

3. Robert Harris, author of the source novel, collaborated closely with screenwriter Peter Straughan during the adaptation. Harris is known for the painstaking historical and institutional research that underpins his political thrillers, and his involvement ensured that the film's depiction of conclave protocol — the burnt ballots, the sealed chambers, the ritualized voting procedures — was grounded in canonical and historical accuracy.

4. Ralph Fiennes reportedly spent months studying the physical and behavioral vocabulary of senior Catholic clergy. The actor worked with consultants and watched archival footage to learn the specific way senior cardinals hold themselves, use their hands, and occupy formal spaces — a discipline of embodiment that critics cited as central to Lawrence's authority and moral weight on screen.

5. The film's central narrative revelation was kept out of all promotional materials under a deliberate secrecy campaign. Focus Features asked critics who received early screenings to avoid describing the film's final act — an unusual measure that proved largely effective in preserving the impact of the film's climactic disclosure for general audiences across the theatrical run.

6. Conclave won the BAFTA Award for Best British Film of 2024. This win reflected the film's primarily British financing structure and its largely British creative team, and positioned Berger — a German director working in English — as one of the most significant voices in prestige British cinema despite being an outsider to that tradition.

7. Sound designer Johnnie Burn structured the film's soundscape around extended passages of institutional silence. Burn, whose earlier work on The Zone of Interest had earned wide acclaim for its radical use of ambient industrial sound, approached Conclave with an opposite sensibility — deploying silence as a dramatic instrument to convey the suffocating pressure of the conclave's locked, ritualized world.