The award season is not over, but one of the most beloved filmmakers is going to get himself busy. In the midst of award buzz around Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese is getting ready to film his Jesus movie now that the script has finished. In a new interview, the director discusses his vision and that its runtime will be aimed toward 80 minutes, a stark difference from Flower Moon‘s 206-minute runtime.
Martin Scorses Finishes Script of His Jesus Movie and Dishes Out Details
In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, the auteur details what we can expect from the film, which is an adaptation of Shūsaku Endō’s A Life of Jesus. The film he co-wrote with Kent Jones will begin production later this year. No cast has been attached.
Conceptually, it will hone in on “Jesus’ core teachings,” and it will not “proselytize” them. For Martin Scorsese, the script for his Jesus movie will “make it more accessible and take away the negative onus of what has been associated with organized religion.” It will be largely set in the present, as noted by the LA Times, the director wants “the film to feel timeless.”
The one hitch is that Martin Scorsese does not have a studio attached to A Life of Jesus. The distribution being up in the air is not new for him, as was the case for Killers of the Flower Moon, The Irishman, Silence, which was also an adaptation of a book by Endō. While he is one of the most beloved filmmakers of our time, he still has studio troubles. Looking back on those previously named projects, he recalled that they “were not movies studios were eager to make.”
Much preparation for A Life of Jesus has been made. The filmmaker previously met with Pope Francis at the conference called the Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination. He said that he “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.”
No casting has been announced. The film will not be his next reunion with Leonardo DiCaprio, which will be The Wager, an adaptation of the novel by David Grann.
