Film director, producer and screenwriter Fernando Meirelles sits down with Father Dave to discuss his new film, “The Two Popes,” which chronicles the friendship between Pope Benedict XVI and the future Pope Francis through a series of imagined conversations.
Father Dave asks Meirelles what it was like to work with Jonathan Pryce, who plays Pope Francis, and Anthony Hopkins, who plays Pope Benedict. “It was amazing because they came to set completely prepared,” Meirelles says. “Sometimes, I would ask them to do another take or another thing just to see them play because it’s really fun to watch them.”
Meirelles explains the story behind the film. “Let’s call it an imagined conversation between Pope Francis, while he was still Cardinal Bergoglio, and Pope Benedict. But the dialogue is largely taken from their actual published writings. So, while the setting of it may be imagined, this is the thinking of these two men … Everything they say in the film was taken from books or from interviews they did. That’s the brilliance of the script … The story is actually about these two men who disagree in almost everything, but they are parts of the same institution, so they have to find the common ground. It’s a film about forgiving yourself and them absolving each other.”
The Two Popes is available now on Netflix.