Martin Scorsese’s Jesus Movie Details Revealed by New Excerpt From Early Draft

Martin Scorsese’s upcoming movie about Jesus Christ gets a first look as an early draft of the Academy Award-winning director’s project emerges.

As Martin Scorsese continues developing his long-announced Jesus film, a first look at the planned project emerges thanks to an excerpt from his consultant’s book.

Per Variety, Scorsese’s consultant on the Jesus movie, Father Antonio Spadaro, published the draft and a series of conversations he had with Scorsese in his new book, Dialoghi sulla fede (Dialogues on Faith), in his native Italy. The last chapter from the book, titled “Screenplay for a Possible Film on Jesus,” is a 20-page text Scorsese gave Father Spadaro permission to publish. While the text is an early draft and not the actual screenplay Scorsese will work from for the movie, it offers insight into the director’s motivations and approach to the film. “When the idea of making cinema started to become concrete, I had in mind to make a film about Christ in the modern world, in modern clothes, shot in 16mm and in black and white in the streets of New York,” part of the excerpt read.

Father Spadaro, the editor of the Jesuit journal, La Civiltà Cattolica, also spoke about his relationship with Scorsese, indulging in several conversations with the Oscar-winning helmer before he attended a conference at the Vatican last May, where he announced his intention to make a film chronicling Jesus Christ. Spadaro met Scorsese after one of his Jesuit brothers helped the director during the production of Silence and bonded from there. Speaking about the significance of Scorsese’s film, Spadaro said, “It’s still a work in progress. But what strikes me most is that ultimately, it’s not just a reflection on the figure of Jesus but also a reflection on his cinema. Because, as we can already glean from this first draft, he reads his previous cinematographic production from this point of view. So I realize that this film will be an integral part of his journey as an artist and that it will provide an illumination to interpret what he has done up until now.”

Scorsese has been collaborating on the screenplay for his Jesus film with Kent Jones, with the project based on Shūsaku Endō’s novel, A Life of Jesus. Endō also authored Silence, which Scorsese adapted into a movie, released in 2016, chronicling the plights of Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in 17th-century Japan. Along with Silence, Scorsese is known for making the critically acclaimed yet polarizing 1988 film, The Last Temptation of Christ, which captured Jesus and his struggle with temptation.

Martin Scorsese May Appear in the Jesus Movie

Scorsese, who most recently made the Academy Award-nominated Killers of the Flower Moonteased plans to make a cameo in the 80-minute-long Jesus film, which is expected to enter production later this year. Scorsese has admitted viewers may reject the film given its subject but hopes moviegoers will have an open mind.

Along with his Jesus movie, Scorsese has expressed his hope to make a “couple more” movies before retiring. The 81-year-old helmer set the record for most Best Director nominations among living filmmakers with his nod for Killers of the Flower Moon, his latest collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. The film also features Oscar-nominated star Lily Gladstone and Academy Award winner, Brendan Fraser.

Killers of the Flower Moon is available for streaming via Netflix. Meanwhile, no release window has been confirmed for the Jesus film. The full excerpt of the film’s early draft can be viewed below.

“Let’s start immersed in the dark.

A painted image of Jesus’ face suddenly lights up the frame… then, just as quickly, it disappears into the darkness again.

CUT to a series of images: a simple wooden cross hanging above a neatly made bed in the apartment of a popular tenement… church windows with scenes from the life of Jesus… a marble sculpture of Mary holding the body of Jesus in her arms… a small gold cross next to a popular image of Jesus praying towards heaven… a child sitting at a table looking into tall the cross next to complex colorful drawings for a fictional film titled ‘The Eternal City.’

More images of Jesus: other mass-produced family portraits, short moving images from ‘Intolerance,’ the silent version of [Cecil B. DeMille film] ‘The King of Kings,’ [Henry Koster’s Biblical epic] ‘The Robe’ and the sound version of ‘King of Kings.’

VOICE: Like millions of other children around the world, I grew up surrounded by images of Jesus, all based on a common idea of ​​his appearance and behavior: handsome, with wonderful long hair and beard, ascetic, pious…

A scene from Pasolini’s ‘The Gospel According to St. Matthew,’ the sermon on the mountain.

VOICE: When the idea of ​​making cinema started to become concrete, I had in mind to make a film about Christ in the modern world, in modern clothes, shot in 16mm and in black and white in the streets of New York, with apostles in suits and ties in old, peeling, weathered hallways, with the crucifixion set on the West Side piers and cops instead of centurions… my world. But then I saw Pasolini’s Christ. The setting wasn’t modern, but the feeling it conveyed was. There was the immediacy of Christ. Pasolini showed us a Jesus who was often heated and angry. Who fought… His film had made what I had in mind become quite superfluous, but it inspired me to keep going.”

Leave a Comment