Martin Scorsese meets Pope Francis, reportedly announces new film about Jesus

ROME — Academy Award-winning director Martin Scorsese, in the aftermath of a meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican, reportedly announced that he will make another film about Jesus.

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Scorsese, 80, who directed the controversial “The Last Temptation of Christ” in 1988, met the pontiff on Saturday. He was in Rome with his wife, Helen Morris, to attend a conference called “The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination,” Variety reported.

“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 said during the conference, according to multiple media outlets in Italy. “And I’m about to start making it.”

Variety reported that Antonio Spadaro, the editor of the Jesuit publication La Civiltà Cattolica, which organized the conference, said that a conversation between Scorsese and the pope included shared film references.

Spadaro said that Scorsese was moved by the pontiff’s appeal to “let us see Jesus.”

Scorsese has been nominated for 14 Academy Awards and won an Oscar as best director for the 2006 film, “The Departed.”

“The Last Temptation of Christ” angered conservative Catholics for its depiction of Jesus as a man torn between God and earthly pleasures, The Guardian reported. The film had a dream sequence in which Jesus has sex with Mary Magdalene, according to the newspaper.

In addition to “The Last Temptation of Christ,” Scorsese has directed 1997′s “Kundun,” about the life of the Dalai Lama; and “Silence,” a 2016 film about Jesuit Christians in 17th-century Japan, Deadline reported.

Scorsese’s manager, Rick Yorn, did not immediately respond to Variety’s request for comment.

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