The next Martin Scorsese film after Killers of the Flower Moon will be dedicated to Jesus with the aim of "eliminating the negativity associated with organized religion", but "not to make proselytes". This was announced by the 81-year-old Italian-American director in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. It will be a short film, only 80 minutes, not the three hours and more of the director's latest creations including, in addition to Killers, also The Irishman for Netflix. The starting point, as Scorsese himself explained to the newspaper, was the audience at the Vatican with Pope Francis after the debut of the film with Leonardo DiCaprio in Cannes: "I responded to the Pope's appeal to the art world in the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a script for a film about Jesus," the director told the Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica at the time. Scorsese wrote the screenplay with the help of critic and filmmaker Kent Jones. Filming is expected to begin later this year. "We're still swimming in inspiration," the director said, explaining that the starting point was the book A Life of Jesus by Shūsaku Endō, the author of 1966's Silence about Jesuit missionaries in Japan, which Scorsese himself transposed for the big screen. The plot will be set almost entirely in the present, even if Scorsese does not want to force himself into a particular moment: the film will have to be timeless. The 80 minutes will be devoted to preaching Jesus "to explore his principles," not to make proselytes. "Right now the word religion creates outrage because in many ways religion has failed. That doesn't mean the initial impulse was wrong," Scorsese said. While he is known for violent or gangster films such as Taxi Driver, Mean Street and Goodfellas, Scorsese also has a number of films with overtly religious themes behind him and others, such as Gangs of New York in which concepts such as redemption underlie the plot. In 1988 his adaptation of The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis (the author of Zorba the Greek) created worldwide controversy because the Jesus full of doubts was judged blasphemous by the most fundamentalist Catholic groups (but not by the Venetian judiciary which authorized the screening out of competition at the Venice Film Festival). Nine years later, Scorsese dedicated Kundun to the life of the Dalai Lama. More recently, 2016's Silence starring Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver and Liam Neeson focused on the plight of Japanese Jesuits persecuted for their religion in 17th-century Japan. The commitment to the Life of Jesus seems to have mothballed another recently announced Scorsese project: the adaptation of an essay by David Grann, the author of the book on which Killers of the Flower Moon was based, on the so-called Wager Mutiny of 1741. On Sunday, Killers of the Flower Moon picked up its first award on the road to the Oscars: Lily Gladstone, the protagonist, won the Golden Globe for Best Actress.
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