“I needed to make one thing like this after Raging Bull,” Scorsese remarked throughout a panel dialogue following a premiere occasion for The Saints. After that 1980 movie, he deliberate to go away Hollywood behind and accomplice with Italy’s RAI Tv, which had produced comparable ardour tasks with famed administrators like Roberto Rossellini. However that model by no means got here collectively, and the thought sat on the shelf till he and Leshem met in 2017 for what was speculated to be a 30-minute pitch session.
“Three hours later, we had been nonetheless in that assembly,” Leshem says about promoting Scorsese on the sequence that flowered into The Saints. “On the finish of it, he shook my hand and mentioned: ‘Nice, let’s do it.’”
Leshem’s personal journey in the direction of The Saints required no small quantity of religion. The son of Holocaust survivor and, later, Israeli ambassador Moshe Leshem, he grew up in a Jewish family the place training was prioritized over faith. The truth is, Leshem’s father—who he describes as a “religious atheist”—despatched him to Catholic college whereas the household was stationed in Cophenhagen, Denmark, particularly due to it supplied superior lecturers.
“That’s the place I first heard the tales of the saints,” Leshem remembers. “Listening to them from a Jewish perspective, I used to be much less within the miracles and extra on this notion that these individuals believed in one thing so strongly that in lots of instances they had been keen to die for it.”
That notion adopted Leshem into maturity, shaping not solely his concepts about faith, but additionally storytelling. He views canonized saints like Joan of Arc and Thomas Becket not as spiritual idols frozen in time, however flesh and blood people made heroic by their perception in one thing larger than themselves—be it a deity or a great. That dovetails with Scorsese’s personal longtime fascination with flawed characters caught between the dual poles of punishment and enlightenment.
“Even Scorsese movies that appear to have nothing to do with faith or religion, are about individuals who flip to religion and individuals who flip away from religion,” Leshem notes, pointing to gangster tales like Goodfellas and On line casino as examples. “We actually noticed eye-to-eye about the way to inform these tales. We’re attempting to offer you a way of what these individuals had been actually like and why they had been keen to do no matter’s essential to observe one thing they consider in.”
