Italian-American directing great Martin Scorsese met Pope Francis privately this morning (Weds 31 Jan) in an encounter which father Antonio Spadaro, undersecretary of the Dicastery for culture and education, called the “(continuation) of a dialogue between…two men of genius and experience for whom the figure of Christ has an extraordinary fascination and value”.

The pair met previously in May this year when Scorsese announced his intention to make a feature film focused on the life of Jesus, inspired by the Gospel according to Matthew by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

The director decided to respond to Pope Francis’s call, who asked artists to create more content based on the concept of ‘faith’.

“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,” Scorsese said during a Rome conference at the Vatican.

“And I’m about to start making it,” the director added, suggesting that this could be his next film.

The conference had been organised by Jesuit publication La Civiltà Cattolica and Georgetown University. Antonio Spadaro, editor of the religious periodical, said on the publication’s website that during their conversation at the confab Scorsese alternated between references to his films and personal anecdotes and explained “How the Holy Father’s appeal ‘to let us see Jesus’ moved him,” he said.

Scorsese had also talked about the meaning of his own controversial 1988 epic The Last Temptation of Christ and of “the subsequent step in his research on the figure of Jesus” represented by his smaller-scale 2016 drama Silence about the persecution of Jesuit Christians in 17th-century Japan. That film screened in 2016 at the Vatican. Francis is the first Jesuit pope and is known to have joined the Jesuit order hoping to become a missionary in Japan.

Scorsese has imbued many of his films, even the Mob epics, with Catholic themes.