Martin Scorsese Meets with Pope Francis at the Vatican and Announces a New Jesus Film

Martin Scorsese Meets with Pope Francis at the Vatican and Announces a New Jesus Film

35 years after ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’

    Martin Scorsese is in Italy (the country of his grandparents) holding a series of conferences and screenings of his most iconic films and, last weekend, the filmmaker took advantage of the trip to meet with Pope Francis and announce that he will make a new film about Jesus.

    Scorsese, of strong religious leanings, explained Saturday during a conference in Rome at the Vatican that “I have responded to the Pope’s call to artists in the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a script for a film about Jesus.”, and added: “And I’m about to start making it”, suggesting that this could be his next film after ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’.

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    That same Saturday, before attending a conference entitled “The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination,” Scorsese and his wife Helen Morris met with Pope Francis during a brief private audience in the Vatican.

    The conference was organized by the Jesuit publication La Civiltà Cattolica and Georgetown University. Antonio Spadaro, editor of the religious newspaper, said on the publication’s website that Scorsese alternated in the meeting between references to his films and his personal anecdotes, explaining “How he was moved by the call of the Holy Father ‘so that we see Jesus’.”

    During the conversation, Scorsese mentioned his admiration for ‘The Gospel according to Saint Matthew’ by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Scorsese also discussed the significance of his own 1988 epic ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ and the “further step in his investigation of the figure of Jesus” represented by his smaller-scale 2016 drama ‘Silence,’ about the persecution of Christian Jesuits in seventeenth-century Japan. As it happens, Francis is the first Jesuit Pope and is known to have joined the Jesuit order in hopes of becoming a missionary to Japan..

    Scorsese continues his tour of Italy with a presentation today at the Casa del Cinema in Rome; a master class on Tuesday for students from Rome’s Centro Sperimentale film school; and a conversation on stage Friday in Bologna, where he will be a guest of the Cineteca di Bologna, the film archives that run the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival dedicated to heritage cinema.

    Source: Fotogramas

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