INTERVIEW: This Easter season, PBS offers a behind-the-scenes look at the Vatican
Photo: Pope Francis is one of the focus points of Inside the Vatican. Photo courtesy of Tim Cragg, © Copyright Governatorato dello S.C.V. – Direzione dei Musei / Provided by PBS press site with permission.
Inside the Vatican, the new two-hour documentary from PBS, offers viewers unparalleled access to the community of people working around Pope Francis. There’s a fine focus on a singer in the Sistine Chapel Choir, bishops and archbishops who are about to become cardinals, various diplomats for the Vatican State and security guards who keep the crowds nice and orderly. Then there are the gardeners, the cleaners of the St. Peter’s baldachin and the interpreters who translate the pontiff’s addresses to a global audience.
The structure of Inside the Vatican is split into two main parts. There’s the lead-up to the Easter season, the holiest time on the church calendar, and then the papal consistory, when new cardinals are chosen by Pope Francis. There’s an important and vital segment about the ongoing sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, which flared up while the filmmakers were recording.
Silvia Sacco, director and producer, and his team spent a year with the pontiff, documenting every twist and turn. There’s a real sense of Pope Francis’ priorities, especially his work with the poor and disadvantaged, and perhaps this is most intimately displayed when the pontiff heads to a local prison to wash the feet of the incarcerated on Holy Thursday. Another scene shows the Vatican’s feeding of the homeless, who camp out along the Medieval walls of the city-state.
Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Nick Kent, a producer who worked on Inside the Vatican, which is set to premiere Tuesday, April 28 at 9 p.m. on PBS. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
How did you gain access to the Vatican for the year of filming?
We spent two years building trust with key people inside the Vatican before we began filming. Making documentaries of this kind comes down to a matter of trust, and eventually enough people inside the Vatican decided to trust us. Patience and perseverance on our part was essential. I always knew it would take time to make this series, and we had to commit to staying the course over the long haul.
It helped that we didn’t [approach] the Vatican with a specific journalistic agenda. For example, we weren’t setting out to do a piece of investigative journalism exposing abuse or malpractice or corruption, and a lot of media coverage of the Vatican is about power and the abuse of power. Our angle of approach was very simple: a curiosity to explore the workings of faith in the 21st century and how that was reflected through the prism of this papacy.
Were there special rules and regulations while filming?
There were no special rules or regulations other than needing to secure permission to film in key locations. One of the surprising aspects of working with the Vatican is that no single person or department is in overall charge. Different locations are regulated by different official bodies, so you need to coordinate permissions in order to be able to film in a variety of locations.
Why was it important to structure the documentary with two main parts, one focusing on the Easter season and the other on the cardinal appointments?
We always knew that Easter would be the focus of the first part of the documentary, but the appointment of the cardinals was an event that happened while we were filming and became a point of focus later in the process. We didn’t set out to structure the documentary in that way. The great thing about coming into any world or institution as an outsider is that you notice things that people inside that world tend to take for granted. To that extent, it helps to approach the subject without too many preconceptions. The beauty of documentaries is often to be found in the unexpected: the events, characters and revelations that take you by surprise.
The appointment of the cardinals is an example of that, and it became a key storyline for us because it’s emblematic of the way Pope Francis approaches his vocation. Pope Francis is a radical and a reformer. One of the ways in which he is trying to reform the Vatican is to appoint cardinals from the margins of the Catholic Church.
We witnessed that process unfold as the pope announced the appointment of 14 new cardinals from places such as Iraq, Madagascar and Pakistan, rather than from the traditional great power centers of the church in Europe and America. Those appointments were controversial, and in the film we hear from an Italian journalist who is an outspoken critic of the ways in which this pope is seeking to change the church.
Francis is more interested in the church as a battlefield hospital, tending to the urgent needs of those on the frontline, rather than as Vatican HQ. Francis is very outward-facing, speaking about hot-button issues such as climate change and migration. Some people inside the Vatican feel that in doing so he exceeds his brief as pope. Many others welcome his engagement with these issues.
Do you think Roman Catholics and non-Catholics will have different viewing experiences?
I suspect they will have different viewing experiences, although you don’t need to be Catholic or even believe in God to be fascinated by the power of faith in our own time. I’m not Catholic myself, but I’ve always found faith to be a fascinating phenomenon. On the one hand, it is a very private, personal matter of prayer and contemplation. We were fortunate to capture such moments in the lives of some of our characters. On the other hand, it is a matter of great public spectacle, and nothing is more spectacular than Easter, when the Vatican becomes a theatre stage for the Greatest Show on Earth.
Of course, that spectacle could not happen this year. So instead you are thrown back on the private and the personal, and perhaps you learn to share that in new ways. Throughout history, faith has shown itself to be amazingly resilient. The great thing about faith — its enduring constant — is that whatever happens in the world, however painful or challenging events may be, faith endures and deepens under the pressure.
What’s it like to film people at their most vulnerable and intimate, i.e. praying, receiving the Eucharist?
That’s a good question, and it was one of our hardest challenges. Faith is hard to capture on screen, and those private moments of prayer and reflection, as well as doubts about one’s faith, were gratifying when they occurred. I was especially moved by the Muslim prisoner in the gaol who was astounded that he would be meeting Pope Francis and even more so when the pope washed his feet.
We tried to find characters whose stories were emblematic of this world and the tensions within it. Often, when you start following a character, you don’t know where their story will take you. That was the case with Mark, for example, the English chorister who sings in the Sistine Chapel Choir. He was appealing as a way to get into the story of the choir because he was English, and he sings solo before the pope at Easter. But the heart of his story — the doubts he felt about his own personal faith — only became evident later, after we had built up a strong foundation of trust.
Was the Vatican aware that you would also focus on the clergy sex abuse scandal, and was it difficult to broach that topic?
We didn’t set out to focus on the clergy sex abuse scandal. We didn’t anticipate that the scandal would erupt so dramatically just before the pope’s visit to Ireland. But once it happened it inevitably became the focus of the final part of the film. Fortunately, by the time the scandal broke, we had already been filming for several months, and building trust with key people inside the Vatican for two years before that, so we were able to follow the way in which the Vatican tried to deal with the profound problem of abuse from inside the institution.
What do you hope is the ultimate takeaway from watching these two hours?
The initial trigger for making this documentary came to me when I saw photos and news [archive] of various people meeting Pope Francis, and almost all of them had tears in their eyes. It was a visible manifestation of the emotional depth of their faith and the ability of this pope to evoke such an explicit display of faith from them.
Ever since I was a boy studying the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation at school, I’ve been fascinated by the power of faith. Although faith can be reflected in an intolerance that manifests itself in persecution and wars, it can also be an extraordinary power for good in the world. So if there is one thing I would hope people — Catholics and non-Catholics — would take away from watching this film, it’s a respect for the power of faith, whether you share that faith or not.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Inside the Vatican, directed and produced by Silvia Sacco, and produced by Nick Kent, will premiere Tuesday, April 28 at 9 p.m. on PBS. Click here for more information.
