Karl Marx called religion the “opium of the masses”. Legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese will now try and erase that negativity. He has just completed his screenplay for a movie about Jesus Christ. It will be only 80 minutes long.
“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 organised religion,” Scorsese told the Los Angeles Times on Monday.
“I responded to the Pope’s appeal to artists the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus,” Scorsese told the Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica (The Catholic Civilisation) last May.
He wrote it along with movie critic and movie director Kent Jones, and it is based on Shūsaku Endō’s book A Life of Jesus.
Endo also wrote Silence, which Scorsese adapted for the screen in 2016 with actors Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver and Liam Neeson.
Scorsese is known for making long films (his last Killers of a Flower Moon was 206 minutes, and is now headed for the Oscars). It will be interesting to watch how he will make his work on Jesus, a mere 80 minutes long.
This film on Jesus will be set in today’s times and follow Christ’s core teachings.
“Right now, ‘religion,’ you say that word and everyone is up in arms because it’s failed in so many ways,” Scorsese said. “But that doesn’t mean necessarily that the initial impulse was wrong. Let’s get back. Let’s just think about it. You may reject it. But it might make a difference in how you live your life — even in rejecting it. Don’t dismiss it offhand. That’s all I’m talking about. And I’m saying that as a person who’s going to be 81 in a couple of days,” he added.
“I tried finding it with Kundun and The Last Temptation of Christ, even Gangs of New York, to a certain extent, ways into redemption and the human condition and how we deal with the negative things inside us,” he said. “Are we decent and then learn to become indecent? Can we change? Will others accept that change? And it really is, I think, a fear of society and culture that’s corrupted because of its lack of grounding in morality and spirituality. Not religion. Spirituality. Denying that.”
He continued, “It’s finding my own way in a … if you want to say the term ‘religious’ sense, but I hate to use that language, because it’s misinterpreted often. But there’s a basic fundamental beliefs that I have — or I’m trying to have — and I’m using these films to find it.”
Although Kundun and The Last Temptation of Christ were great pieces of cinema, my favourite has been Gangs of New York. Also about religion, Gangs plots two parallel plots: a personal enmity between the characters played by Daniel Day-Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio, and the other between Protestants and Catholics. Running well into 167 minutes, the work is a masterpiece. It was nominated for 10 Oscars, but did not win any!
Comments
0 comment