Martin Scorsese Spoke to Pope Francis and Announced a Movie About Jesus

Martin Scorsese met with Pope Francis and has announced he’s now working on a movie about Jesus.

As reported by Variety, Scorsese revealed the new movie during a conference organized by the Jesuit publication La Civiltà Cattolica and Georgetown University that took place not long after he met the Pope.

“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,” said Scorsese. “And I’m about to start making it.”

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, who said among other things, “This is… pic.twitter.com/yG6bEyo2Wq

— Antonio Spadaro (@antoniospadaro) May 27, 2023

Little else was said about the film during The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination conference, though the as-yet-untitled movie could be Scorsese’s next project following the critically acclaimed Killers of the Flower Moon.

Scorsese also spoke about his love for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew, and about his own film The Last Temptation of Christ, which released in 1988 and starred Willem Dafoe as Jesus Christ.

This film was met with plenty of controversy, with Christian groups organizing protests and boycotts, while Scorsese himself received death threats. The film angered conservative Catholics largely due to its depiction of Christ as a man torn between God and earthly desires.

Want to read more about Martin Scorsese? Check out the recent trailer for Killers of the Flower Moon and find out what he really thinks about Marvel movies.

Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.