Martin Scorsese reveals about his shortest project ever

Martin Scorsese

In a piece that appeared in the Los Angeles Times on Monday, director Martin Scorsese said that he had finished writing the screenplay for the Jesus movie he had originally hinted at back in May. The project is scheduled to shoot later this year and will likely run no more than eighty minutes.

“I’m trying to find a new way to make it more accessible and take away the negative onus of what has been associated with organized religion,” Scorsese said.

The new film was co-written by Scorsese and critic Kent Jones. Shūsaku Endō, who also penned Silence, which Scorsese adapted for the big screen in 2016 starring Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, and Liam Neeson, is the basis for this film.

“I responded to the Pope’s appeal to artists the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus,” Scorsese told the Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica last May.

If Scorsese’s 80-minute estimate comes to pass, the new movie might be his shortest ever.

The majority of the Jesus movie will take place in the present, with an emphasis on the basic ideas of Jesus’ teachings rather than on any one religious dogma.

“Right now, ‘religion,’ you say that word and everyone is up in arms because it’s failed in so many ways,” Scorsese said. “But that doesn’t mean necessarily that the initial impulse was wrong. Let’s get back. Let’s just think about it. You may reject it. But it might make a difference in how you live your life — even in rejecting it. 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.”

The project represents a culmination of Scorsese’s career-long pursuit of several film goals.

“I tried finding it with Kundun and The Last Temptation of Christ, even Gangs of New York, to a certain extent, ways into redemption and the human condition and how we deal with the negative things inside us,” he said. “Are we decent and then learn to become indecent? Can we change? Will others accept that change? And it really is, I think, a fear of society and culture that’s corrupted because of its lack of grounding in morality and spirituality. Not religion. Spirituality. Denying that.”

He continued, “It’s finding my own way in a … if you want to say the term ‘religious’ sense, but I hate to use that language because it’s misinterpreted often. But there’s a basic fundamental beliefs that I have — or I’m trying to have — and I’m using these films to find it.”

[via]