Pope Francis meets with director Martin Scorsese and his wife Helen Morris during a conference promoted by La Civilta Cattolica and Georgetown University at the Vatican, May 27, 2023. Photo: Reuters
American director Martin Scorsese, who had a private audience with Pope Francis recently, has announced that he is making another movie about Jesus Christ.
Scorsese, 80, who is Catholic, courted controversy in 1988 when he made The Last Temptation Of Christ, which depicted Jesus (played by Willem Dafoe) as a man torn between God and earthly pleasures.
The movie was banned in Singapore as well as a number of other countries due to its content, which some people found to be blasphemous.
“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,” said Scorsese at a conference at the Vatican recently. He added that he was about to start making it.
According to a report on entertainment portal Variety, Scorsese’s manager Rick Yorn did not respond to a request for comment regarding the new project.
Scorsese directed two other religion-related movies over the years – Kundun (1997), about the life and writings of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama; and Silence (2016), about the persecution of Jesuit Christians in 17th-century Japan.
In 2016, he premiered Silence in Rome and had his first meeting with the Pope, 86, who as a young man had joined the Jesuits in the hope of becoming a missionary in Japan. – The Straits Times/Asia News Network
