In HBO’s ‘The Young Pope,’ the Vatican Gets an Eccentric New Resident

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/arts/television/hbo-the-young-pope-paolo-sorrentino.html

Version 0 of 1.

Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 film, “The Great Beauty,” which captured an Oscar for best foreign-language film, was a love letter to Rome, city of saints and sinners, in all its gorgeous entropy. For his latest endeavor, he set his sights on its most intriguing inner sanctum — the Vatican — and claimed an even bigger canvas: a 10-hour television series in which Jude Law stars as the first American pope.

“The Young Pope,” debuting Sunday, Jan. 15, on HBO, lets Mr. Sorrentino once again use his trademark style — saturated Technicolor, a hint of magic realism — to explore some of his recurring preoccupations: power and loneliness.

Mr. Sorrentino said he had long been fascinated with the Vatican. “On the one hand, the Vatican is a state like all states, with its sovereignty and with the problems of a state,” he said in a phone interview. “On the other hand, it’s a place which gives rise to a spiritual life. It’s an anomaly.”

As “The Young Pope” begins, Mr. Law’s Lenny Belardo, a dashing young conservative with a slight New York accent, has just been chosen in a conclave over his mentor by cardinals hoping that the youngest pope in history will be a malleable media darling and energize the faithful.

But this pope is cut from a decidedly different cloth.

He takes the name Pius XIII, one steeped in papal history; Pius XI was the pope during the Fascist era when the Vatican became an independent state in 1929, and Pius XII was pope during the Second World War and the Holocaust.

This American pope smokes cigarettes with a world-weary tilt of his hand, wears flip-flops and dove-white track suits, juggles oranges and demands Cherry Coke for breakfast. He keeps his would-be inner circle off guard, telling advisers that he wants to cultivate his mystique, like Banksy or Daft Punk, and drives Vatican marketers crazy — and broke — by not allowing his face on souvenirs.

When visiting dignitaries meet him for the first time, they’re taken aback. “I know, I’m incredibly handsome, but please let’s try to forget about that,” Pius tells a head of state from Greenland. He then adds, “What have you brought for me?”

But beneath the comedy, the series quickly goes into more contemplative territory, exploring issues of faith and doubt and the isolation of people in positions of power. (Mr. Sorrentino delved into a different facet of power in Italy with his 2009 film, “Il Divo,” about the seven-time Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, who was acquitted of charges of associating with the Mafia. And his earlier film “The Consequences of Love” explored the loneliness of a Mafia accountant banished to a Swiss hotel.)

“The Young Pope” came about after Lorenzo Mieli, a director of Wildside, the Italian production company that co-produced “The Young Pope,” approached Mr. Sorrentino about a series on Padre Pio, a popular Italian friar who was made a saint in 2002. Instead, Mr. Sorrentino suggested a series on the Vatican.

For years, “the Vatican was a taboo and had to be treated with so much respect that all the work on the Vatican in Italy was hagiography, while the Americans tended to push the dial more toward scandal,” Mr. Sorrentino said.

He wanted to stay away from those extremes. “The center had to be the pope and the clergy and the exception of being human — like all human beings, characterized by weaknesses and strengths and their contradictions,” he said. And he wanted an American pope, he added, “because there’s never been one.”

Mr. Sorrentino’s pope has some autobiographical elements. Lenny Belardo is an orphan left by his hippie parents to be raised by nuns in an orphanage in the United States. Mr. Sorrentino lost both of his parents when he was a teenager after a gas leak in a country house in Italy and was educated at a Catholic school; he said he doesn’t consider himself a believer, but he’s clearly drawn to the bigger questions.

“We always start with ourselves and during the writing we move away,” Mr. Sorrentino said.

That’s not all that shifted during the show’s creation.

Alberto Melloni, a church historian who served as an adviser to “The Young Pope,” said: “When the project started late in 2012 during the papacy of Benedict XVI, he was thinking of a totally different type of pope. His idea was to be countercultural, to take an image of a pope very distant from the actual one.” He added, “When Francis was elected, he changed the profile of Lenny and made him very conservative.”

The papacy of Benedict, a traditionalist intellectual who seemed uncomfortable with governing and the performative aspects of power, was dragged down by the Roman Catholic Church’s pedophilia scandals; in 2013, he became the first pope in modern history to resign. Francis, in contrast, has shown a more open and energized approach and has endeavored to reform the Vatican.

“I wanted a conservative because one idea was to imagine what pope could come after Francis,” Mr. Sorrentino said. “Francis is going in a different direction, and as happens with different directions, it’s like Trump after Obama.”

Pius wants to prosecute all cases of pedophilia — as well as expel all gay priests from the Catholic Church and not allow any gay men to be ordained. “Let’s do it for real, without exceptions and without hypocrisy,” the pope tells his secretary of state. “Pedophilia and homosexuality are two very different things,” the cardinal answers. “It would be a war that would leave the ground littered with corpses, Holy Father.”

The series eventually approaches the issue in a way that humanizes both the victims and their perpetrators in the church hierarchy.

With “The Young Pope,” Mr. Sorrentino joins the ranks of film directors who have turned to television. But unlike most moonlighting movie directors, who oversee an episode or two, Mr. Sorrentino directed every moment. This sort of intensive immersion is proving increasingly attractive to directors. Steven Soderbergh (the “Ocean’s Eleven” trilogy, “Traffic,” “Sex, Lies, and Videotape”) has directed all the episodes of “The Knick.” Cary Fukunaga (“Beasts of No Nation, “Sin Nombre”), directed all eight episodes of the first season of “True Detective,” and Jean-Marc Vallée (“Wild,” “Dallas Buyers’ Club”) has directed the entire season of the coming HBO limited series “Big Little Lies.”

Mr. Sorrentino said his subject lent itself to a longer treatment. “There was a richness that couldn’t be captured in the confines of a film,” he said. “Inside that, world History with a capital H unfolds, so when there was a chance to do a series with a certain creative liberty and a certain economic means, I took it,” he added. Drawing a story out rather than condensing was “just more tiring,” he said. “It’s more like a big novel than a novella.”

He was also handed a budget — €40 million (about $42.3 million) — bigger than anything he has had in the past. A joint production of HBO, Canal Plus in France and Sky in Italy, “The Young Pope” is filmed in English and has an international cast, including Diane Keaton as the nun who raised Lenny as a boy, and the Italian actor Silvio Orlando as Cardinal Voiello, the secretary of state, who is as devoted to his hometown soccer team, Napoli, as he is to the church.

The production didn’t have access to film at the Vatican itself, beyond external shots of the facade of St. Peter’s Basilica, so the Sistine Chapel was reconstructed at Cinecittà, Rome’s famous film studio. The cast and crew shot in Rome’s botanical garden and Villa Medici and used other villas around Rome for scenes set in Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence outside Rome.

Ludovica Ferrario, the set designer, said she tried to balance the monumental architecture of the Catholic Church with more intimate and sober interior spaces. “The atmosphere was to create the power of the role of a pope beyond the sacred and the religious,” she said.

In Italy, Mr. Sorrentino is a somewhat divisive figure. “The Great Beauty” was disdained by some leading Italian film critics — and Romans — maybe because it hit too close to home with its portrait of the ruling class’s complicity in the country’s decline. (For all of his international success, some critics in the hothouse that is Italian culture find the director banal, self-referential and derivative of Fellini.)

“It’s the same phenomenon with Fellini,” Aldo Grasso, the television critic for the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, said of Mr. Sorrentino. “Either you like him or you don’t.”

Still, “The Young Pope” has received generally positive reviews in Italy and in France. One exception was Famiglia Cristiana, a magazine published by the Italian bishops’ conference, which found the series full of clichés and said it was for American export. (The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, which once gave a negative review to the film “The Da Vinci Code,” hasn’t reviewed it.) This series is bound to raise Mr. Sorrentino’s international profile even further.

Mr. Sorrentino said he would leave it to critics to place “The Young Pope” in the context of his other work. “I liked the subject,” he said. “Basta” — that’s all.