THE FAITHFUL will not be a freak show, says Berman. "We’re trying to show the human side. There’re plenty of movies that say, Look at these freaky people, aren’t they bizarre? But we see them as, Aren’t they like all of us?" Though she and Theriault can’t recall how many subjects they’ve interviewed for The Faithful — it could be in the hundreds — they plan to feature a vibrant cast of supporting characters because, Berman says, they’re "truly heartfelt and make you feel something."

"Part of the reason it’s taken us so long to do this is because there’s so many really interesting people and we keep finding more," says Theriault. "We’ve shot 170 hours [of footage] for a 70-minute film."

There’s Joni Mabe the Elvis Babe, a leggy blonde from Georgia who maintains the "Panoramic Encyclopedia of Everything Elvis," a roving installation of scrupulously arranged Presley paraphernalia. "A lot of people have Elvis’s jacket or a ring or his Cadillac or something like that," an ebullient Mabe says in a scene slated for The Faithful. "But I actually own a piece of Elvis," she brags, directing the camera to a glass display case. "In 1991, I purchased this wart. It was on Elvis’s right wrist. He was really self-conscious about it. He used to wear a leather band to cover it up. It’s in this shrine here; it’s a work of art. It’s in a test tube of formaldehyde."

There’s Rockin’ Robin from San Jose, an erstwhile Elvis groupie who owns Presley’s dental records. There are Jerry and Annie, two elderly women who make matching outfits to wear to Graceland each year and buy 10 to 50 duplicates of nearly every Elvis item in the Graceland gift shop. There’s Maria, a Princess Diana fan visiting Kensington Palace to leave a book of her poetry near Diana’s grave, and Kyle, a 10-year-old Elvis fan who’s loved the King since he was four.

Then there’s the 80-person Catholic youth group from Dedham that went to see the pope at Youth World Day, a/k/a "Popestock," a camping-and-worship expedition held every four years at a giant airfield. The Toronto installment was more like a concert than a religious service: the audience cried, shook, leapt up on one another’s shoulders, chanted, "JP II! We love you!", and rushed the stage like they were heading for the mosh pit.

"It was crazy," remembers Theriault. "You are being trampled in a crowd of people, pushing and shoving. And everyone’s running — nuns in full habit, running, pushing their way through."

Although they were there to follow the Dedham kids, the crew found it difficult not to film the pope himself. "The direction was always, ‘Don’t look at the pope. Look at the people looking at the pope,’" Berman recalls. "I think it’s our reaction, like everyone else, to film him. He has this presence and he’s this icon."

The first time Berman traveled to film the pope was a year before, at St. Peter’s Basilica — and it was the only time she doubted whether The Faithful would get made. "I realized why no one had already made this film: they weren’t stupid," she laughs. "The idea’s not that extraordinary, someone else probably thought of it, but I’m the only one stupid enough to go to the Vatican and say, ‘Hi, can I film the pope?’" The week before Easter, Berman was in Rome preparing for the Holy Week shoot and applying for a press pass to St. Peter’s. Afraid the Vatican would consider pairing the pope with Presley an insult — or worse, a sacrilege — Berman wasn’t entirely forthcoming about The Faithful when she met with a Vatican media contact. The woman sensed that Berman was holding back. The interview with the contact went terribly.

What’d Berman do? She went to confession. She’d already scheduled an interview with a priest for later in the week. But Berman pre-empted their meeting by appealing to him for forgiveness. "After a long time talking with him, he was like, ‘Okay, I understand, but how can I help you?’" Berman grins. "So I said, ‘Can you say exactly what you said now on camera in a day or two?’ " He agreed. A few days later, press passes for both the Holy Saturday Vigil and the Sunday service were hers.

FISH IN THE Hand" is meant describe the limitations of photography and documentary work — the process of trying to capture the essence of a three-dimensional object by flattening it into two dimensions. "A fish in the hand (a captured fish)," the nonprofit’s homepage states, "is no longer really a fish, though it may look like a fish, it is out of its element and cannot survive. Likewise, a photograph of an object is not that object."

The company’s office is Berman’s second-floor Somerville residence, a few doors down from the Portuguese-American Club. Inside the apartment, which she shares with co-producer Matt Mankins, a three-monitor digital-video-editing suite sits on a large desk by the door. There are also miniature busts of Elvis and the pope, and a cigar box designed by Kata Billups, a contemporary "rock-and-roll icon" artist who paints Elvis in mundane situations.

The Fish in the Hand crew, a team of five that swells to 10 or 20 with occasional volunteers and semester-long interns, works here whenever the members’ other paid jobs allow. That sort of dedication is necessary to keep the project alive, since Fish in the Hand is not yet a self-sustaining enterprise. So far, The Faithful’s funding has come from Berman’s own pocket, with a handful of donations from friends and family members. But in a tight economic climate, grants aren’t easy to come by, especially for a film that’s not trying to save the world. "We can’t get grants because we’re not single-mother lesbian cancer survivors that are fighting a power plant that’s giving everyone leukemia," Theriault jokes.

So they’ve been resourceful. Money for their trips to London, Memphis, Rome, Georgia, Atlanta, South Carolina, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles has come from credit cards, clever management of personal finances, and careful attention to frequent-flier miles. Crews have been all-volunteer. They’ve filmed digitally and relied on a pool of talented friends and acquaintances who’ve been willing to work for free.

Now, Fish in the Hand needs money. The "A Night with the King" benefit brought in more than $5000, but it’s not enough. They need to license some of the images they want to use: the faces of Elvis, Diana, and the pope come with price tags. They need a composer. They need to pay a facility to edit the final cut and the final sound mix. Ideally, they’d like to be able to license archival footage of the hysterical women screaming at Elvis, or the paparazzi chasing Diana. And assuming The Faithful gets finished, they need money to enter it into film festivals.

"Money will make it easier — a lot easier," Theriault says, "but no matter what, we’ll find a way."

IN THE two-minute trailer for The Faithful, the most revealing bit is a four-second clip at St. Peter’s Basilica. At the Holy Saturday Vigil, there’s a multilingual announcement asking the congregation to refrain from using flash photography. Then Pope John Paul II toddles down the cathedral’s aisle. At first, he’s an ethereal, hunchbacked shape guided through the shadows by a candlelit fireball — until suddenly, flashbulbs pop from cameras beyond the frame, erasing the pontiff’s features and turning him, for a split second, into a ghostly white silhouette.

Berman and Theriault think that snapping the pope’s photograph is a cultural instinct. "Somehow objects became a part of [worship]," Berman says. In a sense, everyone wants to own a piece of greatness, and some see cultural artifacts like souvenirs and photographs as a means of sharing an icon’s mystique. "When it all comes down to it, you just realize that everyone just wants to be a part of something bigger than themselves."

But the question remains, why do people buy pope snow globes? "Is it because we really want a snow globe of the pope?" Berman says. "Or someone thought we wanted a snow globe of the pope?"

"Then we think we want a snow globe of the pope and we buy it, so then the Vatican makes more snow globes of the pope," says Theriault. "What feeds that vicious circle?" She pauses. "There isn’t an answer."

So how will The Faithful end? "There really isn’t an ending to the movie," says Theriault. "The ending is the next time you go to the supermarket and the tabloids are full of all these people’s pictures. The end is in your head."

Camille Dodero can be reached at cdodero[a]phx.com