Acclaimed director Martin Scorsese has said that he will start filming this year on a new movie about Jesus. Scorsese says that his goal is to make Jesus’ teachings “accessible” while avoiding the negative connotations of organized religion.
“Right now, ‘religion,’ you say that word and everyone is up in arms because it’s failed in so many ways,” Scorsese said in a Jan. 8 interview with the Los Angeles Times. “But that doesn’t mean necessarily that the initial impulse was wrong. Let’s get back. Let’s just think about it.”
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“You may reject it. But it might make a difference in how you live your life—even in rejecting it,” the director continued. “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.”
Martin Scorsese Wrestles With the ‘Christian Way’
Martin Scorsese, whose films include “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” “Goodfellas,” “Gangs of New York,” “Hugo,” The Wolf of Wall Street,” and “Shutter Island,” has been nominated for numerous Academy Awards and won one for “The Departed.” His most recent film, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” is an “epic western crime saga” about the murders members of the Osage Nation suffer because of their oil profits.
Scorsese’s 1988 film “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which depicts Jesus and Mary Magdalene making love, was widely decried by Catholic, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox church leaders as offensive and immoral. Even film critic Roger Ebert called the movie “technically blasphemous.”
Scorsese told the Los Angeles Times that in that movie, as well as in others he has directed, he was exploring “ways into redemption and the human condition and how we deal with the negative things inside us. Are we decent and then learn to become indecent? Can we change? Will others accept that change?”
Scorsese believes that society has become “corrupted because of its lack of grounding in morality and spirituality. Not religion. Spirituality.” He said he does not like the word “religious” 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.”
Scorsese’s 2016 film, “Silence,” is about two Jesuit priests who travel to Japan to search for their mentor, who has gone missing. It is based on Shūsaku Endō’s book of the same name and explores the challenges of maintaining faith in the face of evil and suffering.
Actor Andrew Garfield, while not identifying as a Christian, has said that practicing the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius in preparation for his role as one of the two priests caused him to fall in love with Jesus. “That was the most remarkable thing,” said Garfield in an interview, “falling in love, and how easy it was to fall in love with Jesus.”
