After meeting with Pope Francis, the famous film director Martin Scorsese announced his intention to make a new film about Jesus.

Scorsese, director of films such as “The Aviator,” “The Irishman” and “The Departed,” expressed this intention after meeting with the Holy Father on May 27 during a meeting of artists organized by the Jesuit magazine La Civiltá Cattolica and Georgetown University (United States).

“I have responded to the Pope’s call to artists in the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a script for a film about Jesus,” said the 80-year-old American director, according to the British newspaper The Guardian.

“And I’m about to start doing it,” he added.

In his speech to the participants of the meeting, Pope Francis emphasized that the Church needs his “genius” and that the great challenge ahead of them “is not to ‘explain’ the mystery of Christ, which in reality is inexhaustible; but to make us touch him, to make us feel him immediately close, to give him to us as a living reality, and to make us grasp the beauty of his promise.”

The announced film would be Scorsese’s second film about Jesus. In 1998, he directed the controversial film “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

Martin Scorsese has met on other occasions with Pope Francis.

In October 2018, he attended a meeting in Rome with young and old people, and in 2016 he presented his film “Silence” about the persecution suffered by the Jesuits in Japan in the 17th century.

This article was originally published on ACI Prensa.