Martin Scorsese plans to shoot his Jesus movie in 2024.
Per The Los Angeles Times, Scorsese has finished the screenplay for his upcoming film about Jesus. Collaborating with critic Kent Jones on the project, Scorsese now intends to shoot the movie in the coming year.
While the script may be done, Scorsese said he’s still “swimming in inspiration” in regards to how the final product will turn out. It will be based on the 1973 novel “A Life of Jesus,” written by Shūsaku Endō. Endō also wrote the 1966 novel Silence, which Scorsese made into a movie starring Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver in 2016.
Scorsese said he intends for the movie to be around 80 minutes long. According to The Los Angeles Times, it will largely be set in the present day and focus “on Jesus’ core teachings in a way that explores the principles but doesn’t proselytize.”
“I’m trying to find a new way to make it more accessible and take away the negative onus of what has been associated with organized religion,” Scorsese said about the movie.
What else do we know about Martin Scorsese’s new Jesus movie?
Scorsese, who already made The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988, announced he was making a new movie about Jesus Christ in May 2023 after he and his wife Helen Morris privately met with Pope Francis at the Vatican.
In October 2023, Scorsese told Sight and Sound that the movie wouldn’t have a straightforward narrative.
“It’s kind of a film, but it wouldn’t be a straight narrative, it wouldn’t be a documentary, it’d be a combination of things,” he said at the time. “And I think it may have to go back to Shūsaku Endō and his Life of Jesus, which I found to be interesting because it takes Jesus as a… figure of thinking, and a question of Jesus from a point of view that’s not Western. And so I’m finding that comfortable in a way. And I’m wondering how I can pull some of my questions over the years and thoughts and attempts together and make it some kind of a film. And so, during this period, I’m working on that myself.”
Scorsese has also said that he plans to play a role in the movie, though it’s unclear how large of a part it will be.
