Last May, after “Killers of the Flower Moon” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Martin Scorsese traveled to Rome with his wife, Helen Morris, to attend a conference titled “The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination.” There, the director announced that he had responded to an appeal by Pope Francis to artists “in the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus.” 

The conference was organized by Jesuit publication “La Civiltà Cattolica.” It took place after the journal’s editor, Father Antonio Spadaro, held a series of one-on-one conversations with Scorsese that have just come out in Italy in a book published by La nave di Teseo titled “Dialoghi sulla fede” (“Dialogues on Faith”).