Martin Scorsese said he hopes to use his latest film about Jesus Christ as a way to combat the negative associations with organized religion. The award-winning filmmaker and director talked about his past and how it’s shaped his work and his “religious” beliefs in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
After his most recent movie “Killers of the Flower Moon” premiered at Cannes in May, Scorsese traveled to Italy with his wife to attend a conference called the Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination, the LA Times reported. After a short meeting with Pope Francis, the filmmaker announced that he’d “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 has finished the screenplay for the movie, which he reportedly plans to shoot later this year, according to the LA Times. The movie about Jesus will be based on Shūsaku Endō’s book, “A Life of Jesus,” set primarily in the present day while focusing on Jesus’ core teachings. Scorsese said, “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.
He continued, “Right now, ‘religion,’ you say that word, and everyone is up in arms because it’s failed in so many ways. But that doesn’t necessarily mean 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?”
Scorsese explained that, for him, it is about finding his own way that could be described in a “religious” sense. He added, “But I hate to use that language because it’s misinterpreted often. But there’s basic fundamental beliefs that I have — or I’m trying to have — and I’m using these films to find it.” In 2016, ahead of the release of his faith-based film “Silence,” Scorsese said he is “most comfortable” with Catholicism. The movie tells the story of two 17th-century Jesuit priests who travel from Portugal to Japan to find their missing mentor and spread the Catholic religion.
He said, “I believe in the tenets of Catholicism. I’m not a doctor of the church. I’m not a theologian who could argue the Trinity. I’m certainly not interested in the politics of the institution. But the idea of the Resurrection, the idea of the Incarnation, the powerful message of compassion and love, that’s the key. The sacraments, if you are allowed to take them, to experience them, help you stay close to God.”