Sometimes history is made by groups of people in labs or courtrooms or legislative bodies or battlefields. Sometimes history is made by two people talking to each other quietly. We hear those stories less often. It may be that what makes those changes possible is keeping them secret. Perhaps that is what makes imagining them so irresistible. That is what screenwriter Anthony McCarten has done in fact-based films like Bohemian Rhapsody, The Darkest Hour, and his latest, The Two Popes.
For the first time in nearly 700 years, a pope (Sir Anthony Hopkins as the more conservative Pope Benedict) resigned instead of serving until death. That made it possible for him to play an unprecedented role in encouraging and supporting the choice of his successor, Pope Francis (Jonathan Pryce as the first pope from the Americas).
Copyright Netflix 2019
In an interview, McCarten talked about what “great directing” by Fernando Meirelles added to the film, and why this is his “most adventurous” film…..Minow: In some of your other films based on real-life characters you had tremendous amounts of information about what went on even in their private moments. You had correspondence and diaries as well as a lot of documentation of their public moments. But here you really had to imagine conversations that no one knows anything about.
McCarten: You’re quite right. This is probably the most adventurous of the films I’ve done. There’s some artistic license but, I hope no less responsible than anything that I’ve done and ultimately, hopefully, no less truthful. These conversations that I imagined are based on deep research. In fact I did so much research that there’s an accompanying nonfiction book that you can buy in all good bookstores which shows how I really went into their pasts and looked at all the circumstances surrounding the resignation of Pope Benedict. It’s essential in all these ventures that you get it right as much as possible and in this particular case it is literally sacred ground. So, it cannot be careless and it cannot be flippant in any way. It has to be embedded in known truths. In fact, even when I create these long dialogues between these two, those dialogues are reflections of their stated positions about the future of this 2000 year old institution.
Red Carpet: The Theory of Everything with Eddie Redmayne and Screenwriter Anthony McCarten
Posted on November 6, 2014 at 10:16 pm
Copyright 2014 Nell Minow
Tonight was a special screening of “The Theory of Everything” and I was very lucky to be at the red carpet, with star Eddie Redmayne, who plays physicist Stephen Hawking, and screenwriter Anthony McCarten. Redmayne told me about the meticulous chart he created to keep track of exactly which stage of the motor neuron disease Hawking was in for each scene. He also spoke about how inspired he is by Hawking’s passion for learning in all categories. He said that Hawking has now created a Facebook page, where he wrote:
I have always wondered what makes the universe exist. Time and space may forever be a mystery, but that has not stopped my pursuit. Our connections to one another have grown infinitely and now that I have the chance, I’m eager to share this journey with you. Be curious, I know I will forever be.
Screenwriter Anthony McCarten spoke to me about Jane Hawking, whose book inspired the film. “Just as much as I was in awe of Stephen and his ideas, the man, the concepts he was revealing for us about the universe, when I read Jane’s book, that was the catalyst for me, that was when I knew I wanted to make this film. This young woman who had only just begun to fall in love with this guy who was diagnosed with ALS and given two years to live. Most people would walk away. Her internal conviction, her love for him, made her decide to fight this thing with him and not allow him to be silenced. He credits her with taking him out of his depression and allowing him to work. We have to be truly grateful. Without her, we might not have his ideas. But also, Jane was a forerunner herself. She was a woman of the 50’s, but he had her own ambitions. She raised three children, supported Stephen through all his travails, and somehow managed to get her own work done and go on for her PhD.”
I asked what he had learned from the cosmology he studied to write the film. “How very small we are. We believe that our galaxy is one of 170 billion galaxies. A recent simulation by a German team suggested there might be 500 billion galaxies. That would mean for every star in our galaxy, there’s a corresponding galaxy. Our problems may seem very huge, but as Einstein would say, it’s relative.”
