UPDATE: In an interview, via America Magazine, Martin Scorsese confirms that he will start production on ‘The Life of Jesus’ in April.
EARLIER: Last summer, the story goes, Martin Scorsese visited the Vatican and was told by Pope Francis to "show us Jesus" onscreen and that “moved” the filmmaker as some sort of higher calling.
“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. And I’m about to start making it.
In a new interview with the Los Angeles Times. Scorsese has confirmed that he plans to direct his Jesus movie later this year. The film will run 80 minutes and mostly focus “on Jesus’ core teachings in a way that explores the principles but doesn’t proselytize.”
It’s kind of a film, but it wouldn’t be a straight narrative, it wouldn’t be a documentary, it’d be a combination of things.
Scorsese completed the screenplay, collaborating with critic and filmmaker Kent Jones, and plans to shoot it later this year. 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.
“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.
“Right now, ‘religion,’ you say that word and everyone is up in arms because it’s failed in so many ways,” Scorsese says. “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 July, Scorsese mentioned that for years he’s been looking to make a film about the life of Christ. He wanted to make one in the late ‘60s, in 16mm black and white. However, it was seeing Pasolini’s “The Gospel According to St Matthew” that made him decide against it.
Of course, he did direct “The Last Temptation of Christ,” but, when asked about it, Scorsese says that the film brought out a lot of misguided anger in people and that this isn’t the film that he now wants to make.
He practically swore to the Pope that he’d be making this movie. There’s no turning back. It’s coming.