How did 'Conclave,' 'The Two Popes' shoot Sistine Chapel scenes?
MANILA, Philippines — It is common knowledge that visitors are not allowed to use cameras when inside Vatican City's Sistine Chapel, the famous location where the papal conclave takes place.
Yet somehow movies, such as "Conclave" and "The Two Popes," managed to have scenes taking place in the chapel, as if actually being surrounded by historic frescoes of Sandro Boticelli, Pietro Perugino, and Michelangelo.
Suzie Davies and Cynthia Sleiter received a Production Design Oscar nomination for their work in 2024's "Conclave," which dramatizes the election of a new pope.
In an interview with studio distributors Focus Features, Davies said her crewmates toured the Vatican to "get a sense of the real place," taking artistic license when necessary.
"We had to get clearance to use the art in the Sistine Chapel, which weirdly isn't actually owned by the Sistine Chapel but by a company that's not even Italian," Davies continued. "As with any film, I have to get the artwork cleared or I have to make it bespoke."
Principal photography on "Conclave" was done in Rome but a huge chunk of the shoot was done in Rome's Cinecittà Studios, the largest film studio in Europe.
Many directors have shot films at Cinecittà, including Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Sergio Leone, Federico Fellini, and Roberto Rossellini, father of Isabella Rossellini, who scored her first Best Supporting Actress nomination for "Conclave."
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Davies said half of the Sistine Chapel set was built on an extended soundstage, and it was so high that a blue screen had to be used for the upper portions, including the windows and famous ceiling.
The Sistine Chapel set was so big, that the Casa Santa Marta (where the cardinals reside while sequestered) set was built on the same stage.
"If you went through some of the doors in the Casa Santa Marta, you'd end up in the Sistine Chapel. It was like a massive jigsaw puzzle in which I ended up using every available space on that sound stage," Davies added.
Making the process easier was, as Davies noted in a separate interview with Variety, she found incomplete flat-packed scenery of the Sistine Chapel from a previous production.
The production and set design team built back up the flats, found the local artists who made the original set, and put everything together in 10 weeks.
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It is very possible that Davies and her team used the same Sistine Chapel set used for 2019's "The Two Popes," if not from the 2016 series "The Young Pope" as both were shot at Cinecittà.
"The Two Popes" covers fictional conversations between Pope Benedict XVI (Anthony Hopkins) and his succesor Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce), the future Pope Francis, and much of the film also takes place in the Sistine Chapel.
During the shoot of "The Two Popes," Cinecittà's biggest studio space was not available so the iconic ceiling fresco of Michelangelo was recreated from high-resolution images with visual effects.
Production designer Mark Tildesley got a private tour of the Sistine Chapel with leading art historian Enrico Bruschini. The production then hired Italian artists to paint one-third scale copies of the fresco, which could not be color corrected digitally.
Tildesley enlisted the help of Milan-based company TattooWall to apply printed film on wooden boards with a plaster surface to replicate a fresco's texture before applying the digital reproduction onto the wall, saving production nine weeks of work.
"We built the Sistine Chapel... and it took them four weeks to paper the tattoos onto the wall," Tildesley told Variety at the time.
Unlike "Conclave" though, "The Two Popes" did not get a production design Oscar nomination, represented instead at the 2020 Academy Awards by Pryce, Hopkins, and screenwriter Anthony McCarten (who wrote the play the movie is based on).
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