Martin Scorsese To Produce Docuseries On The Saints
Clemente Lisi
2 min read ⭑
He’s made plenty of movies featuring sinners. Now, he’s turning to the life of saints.
Famed movie director Martin Scorsese — known for mob movies such as “Goodfellas” and “The Departed,” for which he won an Oscar for best director — signed a deal with FOX Nation to produce and host an eight-part docudrama series on saints.
The series, according to FOX, will explore the “remarkable stories of eight men and women who risked everything to embody humanity’s most noble and complex trait — faith.”
The series will follow the lives of saints such as Joan of Arc, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Becket, Mary Magdalene and Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan friar who volunteered to die at Auschwitz to save the life of another man.
Jason Klarman, FOX News Media chief digital and marketing officer, said the series will debut this coming November.
“Having the greatest storyteller tell some of the greatest stories of all time is exactly the kind of exclusive content that is driving FOX Nation’s success,” he said. “It’s an honor to welcome the world-renowned Martin Scorsese to the FOX Nation platform.”
Scorsese, who briefly considered becoming a Catholic priest before switching to filmmaking, told the Los Angeles Times this past January that his next film would be an adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s book “A Life of Jesus.”
“These are stories of eight very different men and women, each of them living through vastly different periods of history and struggling to follow the way of love revealed to them and to us by Jesus’ words in the gospels.”
Scorsese also made the controversial “The Last Temptation of Christ” in 1988. At the same time, he’s always been open about his Catholic faith and his struggles with it.
“I’ve lived with the stories of the saints for most of my life, thinking about their words and actions, imagining the worlds they inhabited, the choices they faced, the examples they set,” he said. “These are stories of eight very different men and women, each of them living through vastly different periods of history and struggling to follow the way of love revealed to them and to us by Jesus’ words in the gospels.”
The episodes — called “Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints” — will premiere in two parts. The first four episodes are set to be released on Nov. 16 and the final four in May 2025, running during Easter time.
Clemente Lisi is the executive editor at Religion Unplugged. He is the author of The FIFA World Cup: A History of the Planet’s Biggest Sporting Event and previously served as deputy head of news at the New York Daily News and a longtime reporter at The New York Post. Follow him on Twitter @ClementeLisi.
This article is republished from Religion Unplugged under a Creative Commons license.
