Religion has long been woven into or featured in Martin Scorsese’s films, and now the Oscar-winning director and producer is going to tackle another aspect in a docudrama dramatizing the lives of eight Christian saints.
In partnership with Fox Nation, each episode of “Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints” will profile a different saint, from Joan of Arc to John the Baptist to Mary Magdalene.
The series will examine the “extraordinary figures and their extreme acts of kindness, selflessness, and sacrifice,” Fox News said in a media release Wednesday. It will drop in two four-part premieres, the first half released Nov. 16 and the second concluding in May 2025.
“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,” Scorsese said in the statement. “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 is no stranger to religious themes in his work, from the controversial “The Last Temptation of Christ” in 1988, to “Silence,” a fictionalized look at the persecution levied against Christians in 17th-century Japan. In fact he made “Last Temptation” “to get to know Jesus better,” said the director, who almost went into the priesthood himself.
An entire academic tome, “Scorsese and Religion,” was published about the connection in 2019.
Religion also played out in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which showed the characters attending church and burying their dead in Catholic cemeteries, as The Conversation noted.
Scorsese has also been working with longtime collaborator Kent Jones on a screenplay for a movie about Jesus’ life, which he reportedly plans to shoot later this year. Italian journalist and Jesuit priest Father Antonio Spadaro has served as the film’s consultant.
“The Saints” will join a slew of Christian-themed shows already gracing Fox Nation’s lineup, which includes “nearly 10,000 hours of faith, historic and entertainment programming,” the network said.
Other offerings from the streaming service include deep dives into the murderous Menendez brothers’ possible motives in killing their parents, and into the mind of murder suspect Bryan Kohlberger, who’s accused of killing four University of Idaho students in their beds in 2022.