Filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s been talking about making a new film about Jesus in recent months, and many have asked, does this mean a drama, something in the vein of “The Last Temptation Of Christ” or “Silence,” and we basically have our answer now: likely not.
To recap, after Cannes last year, Scorsese traveled to Italy to attend a Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination seminar, where he met briefly with Pope Francis. He then later announced, “I have responded to the pope’s appeal to artists in the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus.”
In a new LA Times interview about “Killers of The Flower Moon,” Scosese has illuminated the project a bit more and added a few key details, like the co-director he will work with, known for essayistic docs.
For one, Scorsese has finished the screenplay, and he’s collaborating with critic and filmmaker Kent Jones (“Diane”). The plan is to shoot the film later this year. Here’s what the LATimes has to say.
They’re still “swimming in inspiration,” he tells me, still figuring it out. It’ll be based on Shūsaku Endō’s book “A Life of Jesus.” (Endō also wrote “Silence.”) And it’ll be set mostly in the present day, though Scorsese doesn’t want to be locked into a certain period, because he wants the film to feel timeless. He envisions the movie to run around 80 minutes, focusing on Jesus’ core teachings in a way that explores the principles but doesn’t proselytize. “I’m trying to find a new way to make it more accessible and take away the negative onus of what has been associated with organized religion,” Scorsese says.
Kent has collaborated with Scorsese often, and all of the projects they have done together have been thoughtful documentaries, films like “A Letter To Elia,” which he co-directed and co-wrote, and “My Voyage To Italy,” which Scorsese directed and Kent co-wrote, among other collaborations where he directed and Scorsese produced (“Hitchcock/Truffaut,” etc.).
“Right now, ‘religion,’ you say that word, and everyone is up in arms because it’s failed in so many ways,” Scorsese continued. “But that doesn’t mean necessarily that the initial impulse was wrong. Let’s get back. Let’s just think about it. You may reject it. But it might make a difference in how you live your life — even in rejecting it. Don’t dismiss it offhand. That’s all I’m talking about. And I’m saying that as a person who’s going to be 81 in a couple of days. You know what I’m saying?”
Last year, Scorsese suggested something that sounds like part documentary, part essayistic film, and honestly, that sounds about right, given the movies he works on with Kent tend to be more of side-projects away from his more mainstream narratives like ‘Flower Moon.’ The projects are constantly engaging but are akin to palette cleansers between dramatic studio movies.
“I don’t know what it’s going to be, exactly,” he said of the film’s shape last year. “I don’t know what you’d call it. It wouldn’t be a straight narrative, but there would be staged scenes. And I’d be in it.”
Given all the quotes, Scorsese is talking about making Jesus’ teachings accessible; maybe it’s something more experimental, between doc, something staged, and something that illuminates without evangelizing, as he suggests.