“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.”
The legendary director — and a one-time seminarian — shares details about his upcoming work about the life of Christ in a long interview with The Los Angeles Times:
After “Killers of the Flower Moon” premiered at Cannes in May, 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 and later announced, “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 has completed the screenplay for that film, collaborating with critic and filmmaker Kent Jones, and plans to shoot it later this year. They’re still “swimming in inspiration,” he tells me, 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.
“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?”
He has more to say about themes in his work of spirituality, religion and the importance of forgiveness. Read it all.
Scorsese spoke more directly about his Catholic upbringing several years ago in an interview with America:
Early in this interview, Mr. Scorsese spoke about his childhood as a Catholic schoolboy educated by the Sisters of Charity on the Lower East Side of New York, his brief stint at a minor seminary, his love for the church, which he said took him out of the “everyday world,” as well as his early fascination with Maryknoll Missionaries. “I loved what they had to say,” he said about the Maryknolls, “the courage, the testing and the helping.”
He added later:
“The vehicle that one takes towards faith can be very helpful. So, the church—the institution of the church, the sacraments—this all can be very helpful. But ultimately it has to be yourself, and you have to find it. You have to find that faith, or you have to find a relationship with Jesus with yourself really, because ultimately that’s the one you face.”
