The famous director Martin Scorsese has completed the screenplay for a film on Jesus, collaborating with critic and filmmaker Kent Jones, and plans to shoot it later this year. They’re still “swimming in inspiration,” he said, in an interview with LA Times, 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.Scorsese traveled to Italy with his wife, Helen Morris, to attend a conference titled The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination. Afterward, he met briefly with Pope Francis. Later, he said, “I responded to the Pope’s appeal to artists the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus,” Scorsese told the Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica (The Catholic Civilization) last May.
"...I think, a fear of a society and culture that’s corrupted because of its lack of grounding in morality and spirituality."
“So for me, it’s finding my own way in a ... if you want to say the term ‘religious’ sense, but I hate to use that language, because it’s misinterpreted often,” he continues. “But there’s basic fundamental beliefs that I have — or I’m trying to have — and I’m using these films to find it.”"If we nurture forgiveness, maybe the world could change, ultimately. I’m not saying next year. It could be a thousand years from now, if we’re still around.”
“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.
Every time the word “religion” has come up since we started talking, I say, you’ve tried to find a way around it. “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?”
Sources: LA Times and Hollywood Reporter with Screenshot from Vatican News
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