Scorsese meets with pope, announces new film about Jesus

American film director Martin Scorsese announced over the weekend, shortly after meeting with the pope, that he would soon begin making a new film about Jesus, according to multiple reports.

The announcement came at a Rome conference Saturday at the Vatican titled “The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination,” and was a response to Pope Francis’s personal appeal to artists.

“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 reportedly said at the conference. “And I’m about to start making it.”

Representatives for the director told The Guardian they had no further information on the movie beyond what he’d provided.

In 1988, Scorsese’s controversial “The Last Temptation of Christ” earned him a best director nomination at the Academy Awards. And in 2016, he made the film “Silence” about two Jesuit priests.

Scorsese, who is on a post-Cannes tour of Italy, had a brief personal audience with Francis, whom he had first met in 2016 alongside a Vatican screening of “Silence.”

This week’s conference was organized by Jesuit publication La Civiltà Cattolica and Georgetown University. Its editor, Antonio Spadaro, posted photos of Scorsese’s encounter with the pontiff and thanked him for attending the conference.

“Thank you to Martin #Scorsese for accepting the invitation to join us of La Civiltà Cattolica and Georgetown University – along with his wife and daughter – in the meeting of 40 poets and writers from different Countries with #PopeFrancesco,” Spadaro wrote on Twitter, before quoting the pope’s words from Saturday.

“This is your work as poets, storytellers, filmmakers, artists: to give life, to give body, to give word to everything that human beings live, feel, dream, suffer, creating harmony and beauty…. Will they criticize you? All right, carry the burden of criticism, also trying to learn from criticism. But still, don’t stop being original, creative. Do not lose the wonder of being alive,” Francis told the artists in attendance, according to Spadaro’s tweet.

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