Filmmaker Martin Scorsese has announced that he will make another film about Jesus Christ after his recent meeting with Pope Francis at Vatican City, according to reports.
The 80-year-old director met with Pope Francis on his tour to Italy after the Cannes premiere of his latest film Killers of the Flower Moon with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.
“I have responded to the Pope’s appeal to artistes in the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus,” Scorsese announced on May 27 during a conference at the Vatican.
“And I’m about to start making it,” the director added, suggesting that this could be his next film.
The new movie would be the auteur’s second movie on Jesus. He had previously directed the religious drama film The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988.
During his conversation, Scorsese expressed his admiration for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Scorsese also talked about the meaning of The Last Temptation of Christ and of “the subsequent step in his research on the figure of Jesus” represented by his smaller-scale 2016 drama Silence about the persecution of Jesuit Christians in 17th-century Japan.
Scorsese’s Italian tour also involved a series of screenings of his films paired with a series of works that have inspired his body of work. He will participate in a conversation on Friday in Bologna at Cineteca di Bologna, the film archives that run the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival dedicated to heritage films.
