“I’ve responded to the appeal which the pope made to artists in the only way I know how: imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus, and I’m set to start making it,” the 80-year-old director of Taxi DriverRaging Bull and Goodfellas, who also made the controversial Last Temptation of Christ in 1988, said.

Speaking as a guest of twice-monthly Jesuit publication La Civiltà Cattollica, Scorsese, who has Sicilian-born grandparents on both sides, told editor-in-chief Father Antonio Spadaro: “I’ve answered the pope’s call to make us see Jesus”.

The great director, who won an Oscar for The Departed in 2006, spoke freely about his life and work for a major interview with the Jesuit organ, at whose symposium with Georgetown University Saturday he also met the pope, who greeted him warmly.

ANSA