The Two Popes director Fernando Meirelles says he likes Pope Francis more because of his politics than his faith.
The Brazilian film director Fernando Meirelles hasn’t attended church regularly since his family stopped going when he was only 8. He didn’t know much about the papacy and didn’t think he cared … until he read the script for The Two Popes.
“What got me was Pope Francis: I was interested in knowing more,” he said in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. “We are in a very bad situation, the planet, this whole wave of nationalism, ‘My country first!’ kind of thing and not just in America. Francis is the most important voice in the world saying, ‘No, no, we are brotherhood, we are sisterhood. We are just one.’”
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Producer Dan Lin had initially approached Meirelles with the concept for a documentary, then a docu-drama, about the 2013 handover of power from the cerebral Pope Benedict to the humanitarian Pope Francis. However, the director, known for City of God and The Constant Gardener, was uninterested in Vatican politics and too busy working on the opening ceremony for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics.
Yet, when he finally read Anthony McCarten’s script, he signed on immediately for what had become a Netflix drama “inspired by true events.” Jonathan Pryce was to play the gentle and humble Pope Francis, formerly the much-loved Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, Anthony Hopkins was in talks to play Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict, the unbending German scholar who, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, had acted as the Church’s doctrinal enforcer.
“When I first read the script, it was very clear we have a good guy and a bad guy, and Benedict was the bad guy, but then Tony came on board. He likes Benedict, he understands Benedict; he read his writing so he was able to humanize or bring grey areas. By the end of the process, I was really admiring Benedict.”
Hopkins’s charisma helped greatly in making Benedict more likeable, Meirelles said, noting the contrasts between the approaches of his two stars, one intellectual and text-based, the other instinctive and gestural.
“The only thing I asked them all the time was to make it very personal, very intimate and any joke would be welcome. Jonathan is a natural joker, when you talk with him you laugh all the time,” the director said. “Tony, his acting is based on the lines. So five months before we start shooting he wants the script and he asked very clearly: Don’t change a word because I am going to work on those words … he is a man of the brain,” Meirelles added, recalling that a moment in the film when Benedict swats away a fly was no accident, but an addition purposefully conceived by Hopkins.
Anthony Hopkins, left (who plays Pope Benedict), is seen with Jonathan Pryce (starring as Pope Francis) at the premier of The Two Popes during AFI Fest on Nov. 18, 2019 in Hollywood, Cali.Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images
“Jonathan, what he tried to do is watch Pope Francis a lot, get his body language, his expression, his feeling. Changing a line on the day? He would do it and it would feel like Francis because his work incorporated the character.”
Pryce was called on to play the sympathetic Francis, but there is also a more troubling version of the man depicted in the film: Flashback scenes take the audience to Argentina during the Dirty War of the 1970s, when Bergoglio, as head of the local Jesuits, failed to save two of his priests from authorities arresting activists working among the poor. The younger Bergoglio is played by Juan Minujin, a big star in Argentina known for his work in film and on several popular television shows. He portrays a painfully conflicted and sometimes naive character trying to uphold his beliefs in the face of violent political realities.
Balancing these dramatic scenes of abuses and betrayals with Hopkins and Pryce’s tightly focused two-hander was a tricky proposition.
“This issue [of the dictatorship] in Argentina speaks a lot to me. In Brazil it was less brutal but we had the same militaristic control,” Meirelles said. “It’s a big thing in Latin America but the American producers didn’t respond to the material in the same way.” So, a 40-minute flashback at the centre of the film was increasingly interrupted with scenes that returned to the more genteel struggle over faith and power going on at the Vatican.
“Because the actors were so good, everybody at Netflix said, it’s too long, we want to go back to them. Little by little we started putting them in the middle of the flashbacks,” Meirelles said. “We learned to shape it in the cutting room.”
Now, as the film appears both on the streaming service and in cinemas, Meirelles has moved on to his next projects. He owns a farm north of Sao Paulo where he is replacing sugar cane plantations with an experimental forest for timber and fruit and, not coincidentally, he’s working on a science documentary about the chemistry of soil. He has also reunited with Braulio Mantovani, who wrote the script for the 2002 crime feature City of God that Meirelles co-directed with Katia Lund, to make a drama about climate change.
That is another reason the director admires Francis, praising his strong position on environmental issues and linking them to the Pope’s sense of human unity.
“Whatever you do in the U.S. is reflected in Mali. You have to think of the planet as one,” he said, adding that he agreed with the Pope’s call for environmental action articulated in the 2015 papal encyclical Laudato si’.
“It’s funny. I like Pope Francis more because of his politics than his faith,” Meirelles said. “I respect his faith, but I’m agnostic.”
The Two Popes opens Nov. 29 in Toronto; Dec. 6 in Ottawa and Montreal; Dec. 13 in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg and Victoria; and Dec. 20 on Netflix.
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Kate Taylor