American Cinematographer - May 2017 - 24

A New Pope
By Patricia Thomson

Italian
writer-director
Paolo
Sorrentino was at work on his Oscarwinning feature The Great Beauty in 2012
when he first conceived of The Young Pope.
He'd long been fascinated by the Vatican -
so when Wildside producer Lorenzo Mieli
approached him about doing a series, possibly about the venerated saint Padre Pio,
Sorrentino countered with the idea of a
show about the pope himself.
The main character coalesced after
the real-life election of Pope Francis, the
most liberal and open-minded pontiff in
recent memory. Sorrentino wanted a foil, a
Pope who'd never been seen before. What
he created was Lenny Belardo (Jude Law),
aka Pope Pius XIII, a young, chain-smoking,
Cherry Coke Zero-loving American man of
the cloth - one who is personally devout
and rigidly dogmatic, capable of Machiavellian maneuvers but also vulnerable, insecure, and suffering from a midlife crisis of
faith. Sorrentino's script follows the
upheavals in Vatican City after the pope's
election, and offers enough intrigue, scandals, big life questions and visual splendor
to keep viewers hooked for 10 episodes -
all shot by Sorrentino's longtime director of
photography, Luca Bigazzi.
24

May 2017

The two - neither of whom had
formal film training - have been on a roll.
They first teamed up in 2004 for The Consequences of Love, then continued with The
Family Friend, Il Divo, This Must Be the
Place, The Great Beauty, and Youth (AC Jan.
'16), earning piles of awards along the way.
"I work with Luca on all my films,"
Sorrentino says via email. "We get along
well; we're fond of each other; and we
have an immediate understanding without
having to talk too much, which I detest."
For his part, Bigazzi considers Sorrentino a
genius and a good friend.
The Young Pope - a coproduction
of Sky, HBO and Canal+, that debuted in
the U.S. on Jan. 15 - was Bigazzi and
Sorrentino's first foray into television. Their
approach was to treat the 10-hour series
like a very long feature. "Paolo and I
wanted to make a TV series as similar as
possible to a movie, both in terms of frames
and the visual look - with no fear about
using wide shots and decisively extreme
contrasts," notes the cinematographer via
email.
Still, The Young Pope was on a
whole different scale. It was shot over 24
weeks, "so half an hour of edited material
each week," Bigazzi says. "A terrifying pressure." The 122 days of production resulted
in 2,777 shots and 189 terabytes of
American Cinematographer

footage, and London's Double Negative
created around 900 visual effects. The fixed
crew numbered 131, with 464 daily crew
added as needed. Locations spanned Italy,
the U.S. and South Africa.
The settings were big, too: St.
Peter's, the Sistine Chapel, the pope's
expansive office. During prep, "our main
preoccupation was undoubtedly the vastness of the environments," Bigazzi says.
"Working with Paolo is a source of great
gratification, but his requests are often the
source of nightmares! Extreme speed, the
use of several cameras at the same time -
often alternating wide-angle and telephoto
lenses - which means finding a light that
will work both for the close-ups and the
more extreme full shots."
No cameras can be placed on Vatican soil, so Vatican City had to be conjured
from scratch. At Cinecittà in Rome, production designer Ludovica Ferrario - another
Sorrentino veteran - supervised the
creation of a full-scale, in-studio replica of
the Sistine Chapel, measuring 581,251
square feet. Other sets included the pope's
private office, the Vatican balcony, and the
balcony of Saint Mark's Basilica cathedral in
Venice. The rest were practical locations in
and around Rome: Santi Luca e Martina
standing in for St. Peter's Basilica; Villa Doria
Pamphili and Villa Medici for Castel

The Young Pope photos by Gianni Fiorito and Mary Cybulski, courtesy of HBO.

Lenny Belardo
(Jude Law, center)
takes the name
Pius XIII when he
becomes the first
American Bishop
of Rome in the
HBO drama series
The Young Pope.

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