Academy Award-winning director Martin Scorsese recently paid a visit to Pope Francis where he announced that he will be making a new movie about Jesus Christ.
Scorsese made his intention to make another movie about Jesus Christ known while on his European tour to promote his films. According to the director, his desire to make a movie about Jesus stemmed from Pope Francis’ call for artists to use their gifts in service of the faith.
“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, according to a rep.
According to Fox News, Scorsese visited the Vatican along with his wife, Helen Morris, “at a conference promoted in partnership by a Jesuit publication, La Civiltà Cattolica and Georgetown Univeristy.”
Antonio Spador, editor of La Civiltà Cattolica, Pope Francis told an audience of artists that they had a calling to give dignity to the human experience.
“This is your work as poets, storytellers, filmmakers, artists: to give life, to give body, to give word to everything that human beings live, feel, dream, suffer, creating harmony and beauty,” the pope reportedly said. “Will they criticize you? All right, carry the burden of criticism, also trying to learn from criticism. But still, don’t stop being original, creative. Do not lose the wonder of being alive.”
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
Should Martin Scorsese follow-through on the project and see it to completion, it would be his third Christian-themed film after 1988’s controversial The Last Temptation of Christ and 2016’s Silence, which followed a group of Portuguese monks in feudal Japan as they struggled with the temptation of apostasy in the face of persecution. It took roughly 28 years for Scorsese to bring Silence to the big screen.
“It’s amazing that with all the things against the film that it got made and it’s going to be shown,” Scorsese said at the time of its release. “There was a lot of sacrifice, a lot of problems, a lot of delays. But this is where I felt I should spend my time.”
Though critics embraced Silence, the film did poorly at the box office and garnered only one Oscar nomination while general audiences were somewhat mixed. On IMDB, the film currently holds a 7.1 rating, with some viewers hailing it as an underrated masterpiece while others felt it offered muddled messages about faith amid persecution.
Paul Roland Bois joined Breitbart News in 2021. He also directed the award-winning feature film, EXEMPLUM, which can be viewed on Tubi, Google Play, YouTube Movies, or Vimeo on Demand. Follow him on Twitter @prolandfilms or Instagram @prolandfilms.