Martin Scorsese met with Pope Francis in Rome on Wednesday and gifted him with a photo book for his Oscar-nominated movie Killers of the Flower Moon, ahead of attending the pontiff’s weekly general audience.
“The dialogue between Martin Scorsese and Pope Francis continues… two men of genius and experience for whom the figure of Jesus Christ holds an extraordinary fascination and value,” Antonio Spadaro, Undersecretary of the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education, wrote of the meeting in a post on X.
Footage of the meeting shows Pope Francis flicking through the lavish photo book as Scorsese is seen talking animatedly on the other side of a large desk.
Scorsese was then seen joining hundreds of other people at the general audience in the Vatican City alongside wife Helen Morris, at which the Pope gave a lesson on the destructive nature of uncontrolled anger.
The director’s trip to the Vatican comes just weeks after he told The L.A. Times that he had completed a screenplay for a film about the life of Jesus, which he hopes to shoot this year.
The work is adapted from the book A Life Of Jesus by Shūsaku Endō, who was also the author of historical missionary tale Silence which Scorsese brought to the big screen in 2016
Scorsese has met Pope Francis on a number of occasions and attended his Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination conference last May, which gathered hundred of artists from around the world to discuss the Roman Catholic faith’s relationship with art.
The director announced on the fringes of the conference that he planned to make the film about the life of Jesus film, saying: “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.”