Rome: Director Martin Scorsese is currently on a tour of Italy following the conclusion of the Cannes Film Festival. During his visit to Rome, he had the honour of meeting Pope Francis and made an exciting announcement, as reported by 'Variety'. Scorsese revealed his intention to create a film centred around the life of Jesus Christ.

Scorsese was recently at the Cannes Film Festival, where his film with Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, 'Killers of the Flower Moon', received a long-standing ovation after being screened.

"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," Scorsese said on Saturday during a Rome conference at the Vatican, according to multiple reports quoted by 'Variety'.

'And I'm about to start making it', the director added, suggesting that this could be his next film.

Also on Saturday, before attending the conference—titled 'The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination'—Scorsese and his wife Helen Morris met Pope Francis during a brief private audience at the Vatican.

The Jesuit publication 'La Civilta Cattolica' and Georgetown University organized the conference. Antonio Spadaro, the editor of the religious periodical, said on the publication's website that during their conversation at the conference, Scorsese alternated between references to his films and personal anecdotes and explained "How the Holy Father's appeal 'to let us see Jesus' moved him."

Scorsese, as noted by 'Variety', cited his admiration for Pier Paolo Pasolini's "The Gospel According to St Matthew." He also discussed the significance of his own 1988 epic 'The Last Temptation of Christ' and the 'subsequent step in his research on the figure of Jesus' represented by his smaller-scale 2016 drama 'Silence', which depicted the persecution of Jesuits in 17th-century Japan.

That film was screened in 2016 at the Vatican. Francis, the first Jesuit pope, is known to have joined the Jesuit order with the hope of becoming a missionary in Japan.
(With IANS inputs)

TAGS