Godo Stoyke asked Joanne Harris:

In "Chocolat", the antagonist is the priest, in the movie, it is the mayor. How do you feel about that?

Joanne Harris I knew pretty much from the start that the change from priest to mayor would be made, so it didn't surprise me as much as it did some readers, and it didn't really trouble me. The important thing for me wasn't that Reynaud was a priest; simply that he was a man in authority, using his power and his ideology to establish an agenda of control. He could have been a mayor, a politician, even a chief of police. Of course, a mayor in the role doesn't reflect the religious themes as closely as I might have hoped, but I guess Hollywood just didn't feel ready to depict a priest as a bad guy...

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