The director Martin Scorsese’s filmography teems with troubled protagonists struggling with moral codes. With his new project, that canon now includes the canonized.
“Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints,” premiering Sunday on the Fox Nation streaming service, is hosted and narrated by the filmmaker and dramatizes the lives of eight Catholic saints.
The series is premiering in two parts, with the first four episodes rolling out weekly and featuring well-known saints, including Joan of Arc and John the Baptist, as well as more obscure ones like Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest who volunteered to die in place of another man at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The second part, scheduled to premiere in April, will include episodes about the Italian friar Francis of Assisi and Mary Magdalene, a follower of Jesus Christ, among others.
The series was created by Matti Leshem, a founder of New Mandate Films, a production company that focuses on storytelling rooted in Jewish history and culture. Scorsese is an executive producer. Kent Jones, a frequent collaborator of the filmmaker’s, wrote the scripts, which were informed by lengthy discussions on theology he had with Scorsese.
Catholic saints, who are people recognized by the church after death for their virtue as models for holiness, have long interested Scorsese. “I was always fascinated by the idea of a saint and what a saint could be,” he said earlier this week, recalling how he found respite in St. Patrick’s Cathedral as a child growing up in 1950s New York City.
In an interview at a hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Scorsese discussed the show, his relationship to Catholicism and why he thinks faith-based entertainment needs to have depth. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
You’ve wanted to do a series on Catholic saints for decades. Why is it happening now and in this way?
The world had changed. Hollywood had changed. After making “Raging Bull” [in 1980] I decided, now was the time to draw myself into exploring the lives of the saints. We had a deal to make this series, but it wasn’t set yet. I didn’t know where and how to go about it. If a saint is something that is designated as special, for many of us as children, we thought that therefore the saints must be superhuman. But no. The whole point is that it’s human. The point is that we’re all capable of certain attributes.
I always wanted to make something on different saints over the years. About 10 years ago, we got as far as a few scripts, and it just never developed. About five years ago, Matti Leshem [and the producers] Julie Yorn and Chris Donnelly came to me and they said, “This really may happen. Are you still interested?” Of course I am, but in a case like that I needed to determine: Can I have freedom to explore these historical figures as we want? I thought we were in pretty good hands there.
The world as it is now, it is good to have examples of people who led their lives through compassion and love. Some are martyrs; some died for it. Some of the eight that were chosen deal with legend, but the legend does come from one or two facts. Legends grow out of actions that really did mean the sacrifice of someone. It’s all about faith, something one struggles toward. It’s always been important to me. You could just go back and look at my first films and it’s all there.
Faith-based entertainment and stories dealing with themes and characters from religious traditions have can have partisan associations for audiences today. This series is streaming on Fox Nation. What do you make of that context, both for this work and for these stories?
I thought, ‘Well, as long as we have the freedom,’ which we did. If I were to make or be involved with something that is primarily aimed at people who agree with me, what good is that? It also comes from experience, being around America and spending time in different places outside Manhattan. Spending time in Italy and spending time in France, in England. A lot of it in the past 10 years has been around the country, including a profound experience in Oklahoma, where I saw the difference clearly in rural and urban. The people that I met there were excellent people, and we may disagree politically but I had a very good experience there and a very enlightening one.
I don’t see it as a limiting situation. You could do the version of Saint Francis of Assisi that Michael Curtiz did back in the 1950s in widescreen in color, a straight biopic from Hollywood. Or you could look at Roberto Rossellini’s “Flowers of St. Francis,” which I think is the best. I think that if anybody saw the Rossellini, they would find it enlightening.
My question would be, is this something that is basically an illustration of what you believe? Simply to say, “This is what you believe in, this what it looks like. Isn’t it nice?” What if it makes you think a little more? What if it makes you think about how we perceive life as wanting certainty? Of course, there is none. Is that faith? You lose that faith. Let’s say you don’t have faith. Wanting certainty and not having any, it falls into the category of life isn’t worth living. So you make it worth living.
What do you look for in works about faith?
Some of these things are illustrations and they might be pretty to look at, but I was hoping to get something deeper at times. The Pasolini version of “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” is deeper. There’s a film made by Jessica Hausner called “Lourdes” with a beautiful ending that’s deeply spiritual and funny.
I’m hoping that you’re watching something and suddenly you hit a level of beauty that gives you hope for life, and part of that is a better appreciation of what faith could be. It doesn’t mean that life’s going to be any easier, but at least you don’t fall off the edge into the abyss.
What does your relationship with Catholicism look like at this stage in your life?
At times I’m a practicing Catholic. At this point my relationship with it is a dialogue that I have with certain clerics and priests. My gravitation is toward people who want to explore deeper and not just to condemn, because that’s still there. There are certain rules, true. Maybe sometimes you break them. To be draconian about it is something that I grew up with back in the early 1950s. As you lead a whole life, it’s not that black and white. I tend to to do more with people that are more open minded in terms of the church itself.
For me, it’s time to go back to the perennial values of the church and, which Pope Francis is trying to do, help it evolve to the world of the next century. What is the real sense and what is the real truth of Christianity? A lot of people have died for it over the years, and a lot of people have lived a good life because of it. There are values there. What are those values? Can we explore those values and maybe even try to live by them?
How do you think this series is different from how you would have approached it in the 1980s, when you were first considering it?
I think it needed time for me to be able to deal seriously with the questions of faith, rather than interesting stories about people who lived a certain way. There are interesting stories of Saint Lucy. That’s a great story, but it’s also partially legend. Let’s get beyond the story and use the story as a framework for what’s going on there for real, in terms of their faith. What does it mean for us?
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