Legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who visited the Vatican several times, has said he was lucky to have known Pope Francis, who died yesterday at the age of 88.
“There is so much that can be said about the significance of Pope Francis and everything he meant to the world, to the church, to the papacy I will leave that to others,” Scorsese said in a statement to Variety. “He was, in every way, a remarkable human being. He acknowledged his own failings. He radiated wisdom. He radiated goodness. He had an ironclad commitment to the good."
Scorsese added: “He knew in his soul that ignorance was a terrible plague on humanity. So he never stopped learning. And he never stopped enlightening. And, he embraced, preached, and practiced forgiveness. Universal and constant forgiveness.”
The Oscar-winning director of Taxi Driver, The Departed and Killers of the Flower Moon met with Pope Francis in 2023 and announced that he was making another film about Jesus - following his critically acclaimed yet polarizing 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ and his 2016 film Silence, which chronicled the plights of Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in 17th-century Japan.
At the time of the announcement, Scorsese said: “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. And I’m about to start making it.”
The status of the as-yet-untitled film is unknown. However, Scorsese's consultant on the movie, Father Antonio Spadaro, published a draft and a series of conversations he had with Scorsese in his new book, "Dialoghi sulla fede" ("Dialogues on Faith"), last year.
The last chapter from the book, titled "Screenplay for a Possible Film on Jesus," is a 20-page text Scorsese gave Father Spadaro permission to publish. It offers insight into the director's approach to the film.
“When the idea of making cinema started to become concrete, I had in mind to make a film about Christ in the modern world, in modern clothes, shot in 16mm and in black and white in the streets of New York,” part of the excerpt read.
Reports state that Scorsese has been collaborating on the screenplay for his Jesus film with Kent Jones, with the project based on Shūsaku Endō's novel, "A Life of Jesus". Endō also authored Silence, which premiered at the Vatican in 2016. Scorsese was joined by 400 priests for the screening of the film.
In his recent statement, Scorsese added that the death of Pope Francis has had a deep impact on him.
“The loss for me runs deep - I was lucky enough to know him, and I will miss his presence and his warmth,” he said. “The loss for the world is immense. But he left a light behind, and it can never be extinguished.”
