‘Are They Human?’
Martin Scorsese first considered making a television series about the saints in the 1980s after the success of Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), and Raging Bull (1980). He has expressed, in particular, a lifelong interest in the saints’ humanity. “As a child, you wonder about the saints,” he said in an interview. “Are they human?”
Four decades later, Scorsese is now the presenter and executive producer of The Saints, a docudrama series whose second season recently premiered on the streaming service Fox Nation. Created by Matti Leshem, the series follows the life of one saint in each episode, including early-Church figures like St. Paul and Mary Magdalene as well as more recently canonized saints like Maximilian Kolbe and Carlo Acutis. The episodes mix dramatic historical reenactments with commentary and narration from Scorsese. Each episode ends with a discussion with Scorsese, Fr. James Martin, and the writers Mary Karr and Paul Elie.
It’s not Scorsese’s first attempt to explore the intersection of the human and the divine. Jesus’ humanity was the focus of The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Scorsese’s adaptation of the 1955 Nikos Kazantzakis novel. What drew Scorsese to the novel, as he told Commonweal in 2016, was the sense that Christ’s “temptation was not power; it was just a simple human life. The beauty and the gift of our existence, the gift of our lives, is the temptation.” The film sparked a great deal of controversy, protest, and censorship efforts from a variety of groups. The U.S. bishops declared it “morally offensive,” and Bishop Anthony G. Bosco of New York said, “Scorsese has given us an angry Christ, a bumbling Christ, a Christ more of this world than the next.”
Scorsese continued his exploration of spirituality with Kundun (1997)—based on the life of the fourteenth Dahli Lama (and also subject to censorship)—and Silence (2016), based on Shūsaku Endō’s historical novel about persecuted Jesuit priests in seventeenth-century Japan. Another film based on an Endō novel, The Life of Jesus, is in development.
Commonweal’s features editor Alexander Stern spoke with Scorsese in New York City. Their conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Alexander Stern: I wanted to start by asking about your inspirations. You’ve talked a lot in past interviews about Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Matthew (1964) and Roberto Rossellini. I’m interested in the relationship between film and religion and how you see those filmmakers best using the medium to explore these kinds of religious topics and characters.
Martin Scorsese: Well, I think in the case of the two names you mentioned, they explore it in a very provocative manner, one that is not necessarily the conventional form, having to do purely with the institution thereof.
AS: Not the orthodox form.
MS: Not orthodox, yeah. Yet they still have a truth. The truth is there, enough for Pasolini to dedicate the film to John XXIII. In the case of Rossellini, it’s Europa ’51, trying to find what a modern-day saint would be like. [In Europa ’51 (1952), Ingrid Bergman plays a wealthy woman who becomes a devout humanitarian after her son’s death, only to find herself viewed skeptically from both institutional Christian and radical left-wing points of view.]
Europe, 1951: today’s generation doesn’t understand it, but if you see the footage from that time, there was no Europe. It was all destroyed. It was a civil war, a suicidal civil war, which destroyed all of civilization, in a sense. Civilization had to be built up again. All the belief, all the permutations of different philosophies (particularly German), the great music of Germany, all this resulted in a kind of suicidal civil war, the second one in the century. And so, what would it take to make a saint out of this?
Rossellini also does The Miracle with Anna Magnani, where you see at the end that the miracle is life. [In The Miracle (1948), a devout but simple-minded woman comes across a stranger who gets her drunk and impregnates her. She takes him for St. Joseph and their encounter and her pregnancy for miracles. The film was the subject of a censorship effort by Catholic organizations and the New York Board of Regents.]
This was [deemed] offensive, and they complained about it, but, I think, the movie was provocative in that it made you engage with your actual physical and spiritual existence, rather than thinking—and this goes back to Mean Streets—you go into church on a Sunday morning for forty-five minutes and then you go back outside and everything’s fine. Just because you were in church for forty-five minutes, looking at a plaster saint. Putting it off on the church rather than putting it in yourself.
AS: And so from a filmmaking perspective, do you need that provocation?
MS: I don’t know if you need a provocation like The Miracle causing a problem, or Last Temptation causing a problem. But take a film like Lourdes, by [Jessica] Hausner, an Austrian woman. Lourdes has that power. A number of the films made by the Dardenne brothers [Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne], a number of the films made by Robert Bresson. There are many.
Are there films like that made in the Western canon of Hollywood? I’m not quite sure. They tend more toward [Cecile B.] DeMille, or in the 1960s, biblical epics and that sort of thing. But there have been films made that way by Frank Borzage—films about, in his phrase, “souls made great through love and adversity.”
AS: Pasolini talks about there being some kind of affinity between the religious or spiritual and film as a medium. Do you see that?
MS: It probably is true. I always feel that the two places are kind of sacred: the church and the projection of a film. I really do believe that. The film takes you into the dream in a way, but it’s not a dream that you experience and then it disappears from your consciousness. Sometimes a film can stay with you your whole life and keep revealing itself to you.
AS: Like a kind of vision.
MS: Yeah, a vision that also teaches you more about yourself as you go on with this movie. You can do it with novels, too. But somehow something happens with the projection of the film and the light.
AS: I think Pasolini’s point was also that bare reality reveals itself in film in a way that you can’t achieve in a novel, for example, just because of the technology.
MS: That’s a good point. Of course, I don’t know if this is the place for us to engage in a major discussion of literature versus cinema, or literature and cinema. Can they both be together rather than “versus”? Is the word more important than the image?
AS: Well, you’ve put them together a few times.
MS: In the beginning was the word. Well, actually, there was light.
AS: What kind of difficulties do you confront in trying to put these religious stories on film and TV today, especially given the cultural climate?
MS: I’ve always wanted to do films on the concept of a saint, what constitutes a saint—whether in his or her real time or a couple hundred years later. There was a beautiful film about St. Vincent de Paul: Monsieur Vincent, a French film made in the forties. But I wanted to make a series on the saints since 1980, and then ended up finding flawed saints in characters in the movies I was making—and the ones I’d already made—without realizing it. And so my energy went there.
But [creator] Matti Leshem and [executive producer] Julie Yorn came to me about five years ago and said, “You always wanted to do [a show about] the saints. We have the possibility of doing the show.” Usually with these things, I think it’s going to be a fifteen-minute pitch. Instead, we talked for about an hour and a half and I realized something was there. And I said, “Okay, what’s the form?” And, “There are going to have to be people discussing it after.”
AS: Why did you particularly want to include that?
MS: Because it’s entertainment—you present it as entertainment—but at the same time, it’s knowledge. For example, on Turner Classic Movies, where they discuss a film after seeing it, I learn things about the movie, about the people who made it, about the way it was shot. The curiosity is important, and more than curiosity, the knowledge is really important. So is the idea of presenting a story, and then saying, “Hey, let’s think about that for a second.” “Think” is the key word. It doesn’t mean you have to suddenly become Rodin, and sit there all day thinking, but these ideas are going to float out there. Maybe they might take root in your mind or in your heart, and you might think about life a little differently. I asked, “What if that’s the format?” They said, “Absolutely,” and I didn’t quite believe it.
It’s on Fox Nation. The thing that is key for me, the only thing I’m interested in, is creative freedom, and that’s basically what we’ve had for the past two seasons. They wanted to do Paul. With Paul, you could do a whole two, three, four seasons. What aspect of Paul do we want to take on? And I worked with Kent Jones, who is a wonderful filmmaker and writer. He was the head of the New York Film Festival for many years. [Kent Jones, writer of The Saints, is a film scholar and critic who worked as archivist for Scorsese and later codirected documentaries with him.] We found a way in: an aspect of Paul that reflects others, we think, to concentrate on the particular, rather than the bigger picture. And in the particular, we could get the bigger picture.
AS: Do you think your approach has changed? Let’s say that you did actually start on this project right after Raging Bull. Do you think your approach now is different than it would have been then?
MS: I think so. At that time, I was curious about how to explore faith. What is it? Do I have it? Could I? And if I do have it, how does it express itself? How do I express it? Does the story of this person reflect that, or anything I could find in that? There was another aspect, too, which was curiosity about the purely anthropological legends. How a saint is portrayed with a flower of a certain kind that represents a story— myths and anthropology. But I quickly lost interest in that because it’s just…
AS: Too academic?
MS: Yeah. Really, it was really a journey of exploring faith. Faith and living according to it, a Christian faith.
AS: Would it be too personal to ask how your faith has changed over those years or how you see it now?
MS: Well, I think I can express it in terms of certain films. Let’s say you go from the relative obliqueness of Taxi Driver, through an element of redemption at the end of Raging Bull, all the way up through an exploration in Last Temptation, to an embrace of faith, true faith, in Silence.
It’s been a long road. I don’t know if I’m at the end of it. I guess I’m at the end of my life, of course, but am I at the end of the road in terms of faith? I have no idea. It’s still a question. Here we are talking about it. It’s still in my mind and more in my life.
AS: To pick up on the evolution from Last Temptation to Silence, would you say that Last Temptation represents an existential struggle of being lost in the wilderness, trying to figure things out? And Silence says, “I’m here now, but how do I deal with these different moral questions?”
MS: It could be. For one thing, with Last Temptation, I was concerned that the presentation of Jesus had become a foreign object, so to speak, like a figure that glows in the dark. He becomes something distant, even idolatrous. How do we get away from the idol?
We may like the beauty of the idol, the beauty of the Renaissance painting. What is the Renaissance painting really? A painting of Jesus taken down from the cross, or a Brunelleschi, or the Flemish painters: it’s the emaciated body of Jesus in the tomb, in the sepulcher. What do these things tell us about ourselves and suffering, and our relationship to Jesus and suffering? They’re not idolatry, but I’m talking about something that is distancing you from who Jesus is and what he wants from us.
AS: Not understanding him as a man, right?
MS: Totally. In the case of Temptation, for sure. In being both fully human and fully divine, all the aspects of humanity are there. As children, we always felt that if he was God, it was easy for him to die. Or was it?
AS: Those films are obviously trying to achieve the expression of something that’s universal but also particular to your life. Do you think that that’s also happening with The Saints or is it a different goal there?
MS: I think it’s similar. I really do. It all has to do with how the saints lead their lives. When you see the episode of Peter, let’s say, when he’s arguing with Jesus. It’s very, very strong. Or in the case of Patrick, we know that he was kind of hard-headed. We have aspects of that in the episode, where he really got into arguments with people. He was really difficult. So, for me, these are aspects of the humanity of the “sacred.”
AS: So you’re trying to figure out what it actually means to go through these transformations and conversions that the saints went through.
MS: Yeah. In the case of Longinus, it’s written, and I believe it’s factual, he was martyred. He was killed by superiors. There are many Praetorian Guards who became Christian—we know that. Rome was open to many different religions. But the problem was that Christianity, for them, was atheism, because Christians didn’t believe in any of the Roman gods. And also, Christianity really weakens the Roman system by breaking up its spiritual unity, I think.
AS: It also doesn’t help with the violence, right? Becoming a Christian.
MS: Oh, of course not. It’s outrageous—I mean, to show pity was weakness. So, this was the most extraordinary revolution of all time, although the Roman gladiatorial games went on for another couple of hundred years. But still, I think that one has to understand what a gladiatorial game is, in terms of the virtue of a fighting man, what a real Roman was. That sort of thing.
AS: A completely different ideal.
MS: A completely different mindset. There’s a new book coming out by a man named Harry Sidebottom, called Those Who Are About to Die. It’s all about the gladiators, and it’s quite interesting. Because it’s about the ancient Roman mindset, as opposed to the Christian one. And so we begin to understand how these things could happen and how they could be accepted in Roman culture. The saints do change on the spot. Longinus changed after crucifying somebody.
AS: Can we go back to that St. Patrick episode? I want to ask about the discussion you have at the end of the episode. You mentioned that you were inspired [in creating a part of the narrative] by a scene from Ingmar Bergman’s Virgin Spring.
MS: That was Kent Jones and me: where she lifts her head and the spring comes out of the ground.
AS: Can you talk about how you’re drawing on film history to fill in some of the blanks with these saints, these legends? Obviously, you’re taking some artistic license, but how do you think about adding to these stories?
MS: Well in that case, the water comes out of the ground. It’s reminiscent of Ishmael in the desert or Moses striking a rock. That’s a symbolic trope that goes back to the original Old Testament: purity, water as cleansing, a baptism in a way. It’s miraculous in that sense.
We were also thinking of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet [Dreyer’s 1995 film, translated in English as The Word], movies like that, which inspired us. We try not to do a transliteration, so to speak. But for Patrick, there were elements of it that had to be part of the legend.
AS: Maybe we could end with the Carlo Acutis episode. You’ve been talking about what it would be like to be a modern-day saint, and here you have an example of that. Is that what you were thinking with him?
MS: Yeah. He has been canonized, regardless of whether he would have continued, as we point out in the discussion afterwards, or of how he would have changed in life. But he lived up to that point utilizing technology for something that was good for life, rather than negative or exploitative. And there’s no reason why that can’t be celebrated, particularly among the young who are so naturally addicted to technology.
It can be a good example of person leading a life of faith and the spirit in the most physical of all worlds. What I mean by that is the decline in attendance in churches. On every street, churches are closed up, they’ve become nightclubs. It’s been fifty or sixty years since the period I grew up in when there was a church on every corner. There’s been a move away from that. Where has it gone? Could it be in that ether [online]? In other words, can it still be explored in a different way now? And that comes out of how young people are living their lives and the example they’re given.
You try to set a good example. Me as a filmmaker, I’m just trying to do the best I can in terms of creative work—what example that sets, I’m not sure. But some people have said—for some of the films I have made, not all—they feel there is a genuine search of some kind, and they feel a connection to the films. I don’t have the answers, but I know we’re searching. That’s all. And now there’s a new way to search: through the ether.
AS: He was in a period of the internet before it became as toxic as it is now. He kind of hit at the right time.
MS: It’s so toxic. Yeah, he hit at the right time. And he was a kid, too, you know, watching South Park, having fun. His friends are going out, screwing around.
AS: Yeah, it shows that you can kind of just be a regular person to some extent.
MS: You can be a regular person, but what’s expected of a young person today? What is condoned? It’s the old story. You get a young person, particularly early teenager. How do you guide him or her away from hurting themselves or weakening their spiritual constitution without becoming a disciplinarian? By doing it with love. It’s not easy.
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