Martin Scorsese to make new film “about Jesus” after meeting Pope Francis

Martin Scorsese has announced that he’s making a new film about Jesus after meeting Pope Francis in Italy.

The director, who identifies as Catholic, shared the news on Saturday (May 27) during a conference at the Vatican.

“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,” Scorsese said (via Variety), adding: “And I’m about to start making it.”

Scorsese was in Rome with his wife, Helen Morris, to attend a conference titled The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination, where he briefly met Pope Francis.

The director previously tackled the life of Jesus Christ in his 1988 religious epic The Last Temptation Of Christ, where Willem Dafoe played the lead character. The film, based on the novel of the same name, attracted controversy from certain Christian groups due to its departure from the gospel narratives.

Thank you to Martin #Scorsese for accepting the invitation to join us of La Civiltà Cattolica and Georgetown University – along with his wife and daughter – in the meeting of 40 poets and writers from different Countries with #PopeFrancesco, who said among other things, “This is… pic.twitter.com/yG6bEyo2Wq

— Antonio Spadaro (@antoniospadaro) May 27, 2023

Scorsese last explored religion directly in his 2016 historical drama Silence, which starred Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver as two Jesuit priests in the 17th century who travel from Portugal to Japan to spread Christianity.

It comes after the director premiered his latest film, Killers Of The Flower Moon, at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this month, where it received a nine-minute standing ovation.

Alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, the film stars Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, Lily Gladstone, Brendan Fraser, John Lithgow and Tantoo Cardinal.

In a five-star review, NME described it as “a film that will linger in the minds of its audience for a long time”.