\n<\/p>\n
For \u201cConclave,\u201d Rossellini was on set for only three weeks; her screen time amounts to less than 10 minutes, but scenes are shot from her point of view, making her character a crucial vantage point. She invented a background for Sister Agnes: Having been close to the pope, she was probably very erudite, Rossellini reasoned, a scholar in religion, art or literature. \u201cShe listened,\u201d Rossellini said. \u201cShe probably just listened because she wasn\u2019t allowed to talk. So I listened very carefully.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s important to embody something, right?\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
At the end of her standout scene, in which she dresses down a roomful of cardinals, in particular Lithgow\u2019s wayward character, Rossellini added something that wasn\u2019t in the script, Berger said: a little curtsy when she finishes her monologue. That flounce \u2014 at once polite and a kiss-off \u2014 was an audience favorite, an applause moment from the very first screening, at the Telluride Film Festival. \u201cThe power of the curtsy \u2014 none of us had a clue,\u201d Berger said. \u201cIt was definitely her.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cConclave\u201d was filmed at Cinecitt\u00e0, the storied Italian studio, where Rossellini spent time as a child, knocking around Federico Fellini\u2019s sets and watching him coach his cast of nonactors. \u201cI remember Fellini showing them what to do,\u201d Rossellini said of the filmmaker, a close friend of her father\u2019s. Instead of having the amateurs try any dialogue, \u201cthey made them count, and then they dubbed them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rossellini\u2019s illustrious cinematic history is always within reach. Mama Farm is filled with mementos of her family, including a bedroom decorated with the banged-up helmets her father wore when he raced Ferraris, and a \u201cCasablanca\u201d magnet, with her mother\u2019s famous profile, floating on the fridge. Lynch, her partner from \u201cBlue Velvet\u201d (1986) to \u201cWild At Heart\u201d (1990), designed the blue-and-white dishware stacked neatly in the kitchen. (Lynch died in January. She helped present him with an honorary Oscar<\/a> in 2019.)<\/p>\n