Martin Scorsese is on tour after the presentation of his new film at the Cannes Film Festival, The flower moon killers, along with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. Back in Italy, over the weekend the director, known to have his religious leanings, met the Pope francesco.
and announced it make a movie about Jesus.
“I answered the pope’s call to artists the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a script for a film about Jesus,” Scorsese announced during a conference in Rome at the Vatican, reportedly. “And I’m about to start making it,” added the director, hinting that this could be his next film.
What is striking is that the director of Taxi driver, the wild bull AND the infiltratorsfor which he won the Oscar, he has already made a film with Jesus as the exclusive protagonist, which amazed the Church at the time: The Last Temptation of Christ. The 1988 film was not released commercially in Argentina, nor in many other countries. Scorsese was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director for the film.
Also on Saturday, before participating in the conference entitled The global aesthetics of the Catholic imaginationScorsese and his wife Helen Morris met Pope Francis during a brief private audience at the Vatican.
What Scorsese told the Pope
The conference was organized by Jesuit Publishing Catholic civilization and Georgetown University. Antonio Spadaro, director of the religious journal, told that publication’s website that during their conversation, Scorsese alternated between references to his films and personal anecdotes, explaining “how he was moved by the Holy Father’s call ‘to show us Jesus’ “. he assured.
As for the cinematic references, Scorsese mentioned his admiration during the conversation The Gospel according to St. Matthewby Pierpaolo Pasolini. And I wouldn’t let go The Last Temptation of Christ…
Scorsese then spoke about the significance of his own film, based on the novel of the same name by Nikos Kazantzakis, starring Willem Dafoe as Christ, Barbara Hershey as Mary Magdalene and David Bowie as Pontius Pilate. And he also referred to “her search for him on the figure of Jesus” represented by his he drama Silence (2016), on the persecution of Christian Jesuits in seventeenth-century Japan.
That film, starring Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver and Liam Neeson, was shown in 2016 at the Vatican. Francis is the first Jesuit pope and is known to have joined the Jesuit order in hopes of becoming a missionary to Japan.
Source: Clarin
