Martin Scorsese is currently wrestling with how to actually make his Jesus movie. He had originally said that the script had been written and he would shoot it in April, but now he’s “not quite sure” how to go about it.
Here he is today, as the special guest at this year’s Berlin Festival, describing his current state of mind for “The Life of Jesus”:
I’m contemplating it right now. What kind of film I’m not quite sure, but I want to make something unique and different that could be thought-provoking and I hope also entertaining. I’m not quite sure yet how to go about it.
This doesn’t sound like a project that will be shooting in April. There’s probably been no casting done, and what about the budget? Some folks even started rumors that Daniel Day-Lewis would come out of retirement to play Jesus …
If it weren’t for his meeting with the Pope, Scorsese would not even be thinking about this film. He’d just be moving on to another project. However, the Pope himself requested he make a Jesus film and it’s an offer Scorsese, clearly, could not refuse.
Last summer, the story goes, 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.
Scorsese had also stated, to the L.A. Times, that he completed the screenplay, collaborating with critic and filmmaker Kent Jones, and planned to shoot it later this year. It’ll be based on Shūsaku Endō’s book, “A Life of Jesus.” (Endō also wrote “Silence.”) and will be set mostly in the present, though Scorsese doesn’t want to be locked into a certain period, because he wants the film to “feel timeless”.
Brief note, and back to this Berlinale chat he had with press, when asked about his favourite recent movies, Scorsese singled out fellow Oscar nominees "Past Lives" by Celine Song and Wim Wenders's "Perfect Days".