Martin Scorsese Gives Update On Life Of Jesus Project: “I Am Contemplating It Right Now. I Want To Make Something Unique & Different” – Berlinale

Melanie Goodfellow and Zac Ntim
·3 min read
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Martin Scorsese revealed he is still mulling how to tackle the life of Jesus on the big screen, at a press conference at the Berlin Film Festival where he will receive its honorary Golden Bear on Tuesday evening.

“I’m contemplating it right now. What kind of film I’m not quite sure, but I want to make something unique and different that could be thought-provoking and I hope also entertaining. I’m not quite sure yet how to go about it,” he said.

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Scorsese first revealed that he wanted to make a film about the life of Jesus while attending Pope Francis’s Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination conference at the Vatican last May.

A recent L.A. Times article suggested that he had completed a screenplay adapted from the book A Life Of Jesus by Shūsaku Endō, who was also the author of historical missionary tale Silence which Scorsese brought to the big screen in 2016.

But his comments in Berlin suggest the project is still at a very early stage of development.

He told the press conference that he hoped to resume work on the project once the promotions and awards tour for Killers Of The Flower Moon was completed.

“Maybe I’ll get some sleep and then wake up and I’ll have this fresh idea of how to do it,” he said.

“The possibilities of making a film, the concept of Jesus, the idea of Jesus really stems from my background growing up in the Lower East Side, my interest in Catholicism, in the priesthood, which really led I think, ultimately to the film Silence,” he said.

He revealed that the film,  about Jesuit missionaries in Japan, had in turn connected him with the Pope, who belongs to the Jesuit order.

“That was viewed by the Vatican and so I met the Pope a couple of times based on that and at one point in a meeting he also talked about fresher ways of thinking about of Christianity, the essentials of it. I’m always interested in that.”

Scorsese has been a regular guest at the Berlinale throughout his career, kicking off with Raging Bull, which played Out of Competition in 1981; followed by Cape Fear, which screened in Competition in 1992; Gangs of New York, which played out of Out of competition in 2003 and returned for a retrospective screening in 2010.

His Rolling Stones concert film Shine a Light opened the Berlinale in 2008 while Shutter Island, played Out of Competition in 2010.

He will feted at the festival this evening with a screening of his 2006 film The Departed starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson and Mark Wahlberg.

The packed press conference covered multiple aspects of Scorsese’s life, career and views on cinema.

Asked the old chestnut question on whether cinema was dying, Scorsese said it was “transforming” rather than dying.

“It never was meant to be one thing. We were used to it being one thing. I grew up [with it] as one thing. If you wanted to see a movie, you went to a theatre, a good theatre or a bad theatre, but it was a theatre, it was always a communal experience,” he said.

“The technology’s changed so rapidly, and it’s changed so exhaustively and rapidly keeps changing that. in a sense, the only thing they could really hold on to is the individual voice. The individual voice can express itself on TikTok, can express itself in a four-hour film or a two-hour miniseries…”

“I don’t think we should let the technology scare us. I think, don’t become a slave to technology. Let us control the technology and put it in the right direction. The right direction being from the individual voice rather than again something which is just consumed and tossed away.”

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