American film director Martin Scorsese announced over the weekend, shortly after meeting the pope, that he will soon begin working on a new film about Jesus, according to multiple reports.
The announcement came at a conference in Rome on Saturday at the Vatican, entitled “The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination,” and was a response to Pope Francis’ personal appeal to artists.
“I answered the pope’s request to artists in the only way I knew how: by imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus,” Scorsese said at the conference. “And I’m about to start making it.”
The director’s representatives told The Guardian that they have no further information on the movie beyond what he has provided.
In 1988, Scorsese’s controversial “The Last Temptation of Christ” earned him a best director nod at the Academy Awards. And in 2016, he made the film “Silence” about two Jesuit priests.
Scorsese, who is on a post-Cannes tour of Italy, had a brief personal audience with Francis, whom he first met in 2016 with a Vatican screening of “Silence.”
This week’s conference is organized by the Jesuit publication La Civiltà Cattolica and Georgetown University. Its editor, Antonio Spadaro, posted photos of Scorsese’s meeting with the pontiff and thanked him for attending the conference.
“Thanks to Martin #Scorsese to accept the invitation to join us at La Civiltà Cattolica and Georgetown University – with his wife and daughter – at the meeting of 40 poets and writers from different countries with #PopeFrancesco,” Spadaro WRITES on Twitter, before quoting the pope’s words from Saturday.
“This is your job as poets, storytellers, filmmakers, artists: to give life, give body, give words to everything that people live, feel, dream, suffer, create harmony and beauty . Do they criticize you? Go ahead, take the burden of criticism, also trying to learn from criticism. But still, don’t stop being original, creative. Don’t lose the wonder of being alive,” Francis told the artists in attendance, according to Spadaro’s tweet.
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