Father Gabriele Amorth described his work meticulously, thanks to which the filmmakers had plenty of source material. The priest not only described the course of the exorcisms he conducted in documents, he also published several books about them, and the rights to their screening were bought in 2020 by Screen Gems.
Screenwriters Michael Petroni, Evan Spiliotopoulos and R. Dean McCreary began writing, with production beginning in August 2022 and continuing through October. Polish viewers will see the effects of the team’s work on April 12, 2023.
Russell Crowe as the Pope’s exorcist. “Such a job really existed in the Vatican”
– In this film I play a real character – Father Gabriele Amorth. There really was a job in the Vatican. He was a very controversial figure. He has performed thousands of exorcisms. He did this for 36 years and kept records of all his experiences.
Father Gabriele Amorth was born in 1925 and died in 2016. As the official exorcist of the Vatican and the Diocese of Rome, he worked since 1985 and retired in 2000 at the age of 75. It was he who initiated the creation of the International Association of Exorcists in 1990, which he led for the first 10 years of its existence. His books have become a worldwide bestseller: they have had 14 editions in Italian and have been translated into 12 other languages.
Russell Crowe’s first such film
– He discovered some dark events in the history of the Catholic Church. It’s a very dark job, and he drew the courage to do it from his faith – said the Oscar winner about his latest project. Interestingly, this will be the first horror film in his career.
Crowe was not exaggerating, because Father Amorth counted that during his lifetime he actually performed about 160,000 exorcisms – with the priest stressing that he meant the number of prayers and rituals said, not people exorcised. The filmmakers showed a recording of one of the real exorcisms:
In addition to Russell Crowe, the cast includes: Daniel Zovatto, Alex Essoe, Franco Nero (the actor known from “Django” and “John Wick 2” starred as the Pope!), Laurel Marsden, Peter DeSouza-Feighoney, Cornell S. John and Ralph Ineson lent his voice to the demon. The production was directed by Julis Avery, known from “Operation Overload”. The team worked throughout the summer of 2022, shooting in Ireland, mainly in Dublin and Limerick. The interiors of the Vatican were imitated by Dublin’s Trinity College.
Source: Gazeta
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