Martin Scorsese may have put some previously announced projects like “The Wager” and his long-rumored Frank Sinatra biopic on the back burner, but the prolific auteur has teased another adaptation in the works: bringing Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Home” to the screen.
Scorsese told AP that while his “A Life of Jesus” film has been optioned, he is working around the “scheduling issue” of adapting Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robinson’s book.
“It’s an option but I’m still working on it,” Scorsese said of “A Life of Jesus,” adding, “There’s a very strong possibility of me doing a film version of Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Home,’ but that’s a scheduling issue.”
“Home” is part of the Robinson’s Gilead-set series. The novel takes place in a remote fictional rural Iowan town in 1956, with a woman returning to her hometown to care for her ailing father. The novel is rife with philosophical references and Biblical quotations, with the central themes being mortality and theology.
The novel synopsis reads: “Glory Boughton, aged 38, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father, Reverend Robert Boughton. Soon her brother, Jack — the prodigal son of the family, gone for 20 years — comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain.”
Scorsese is also looking to reflect on his own family legacy.
The director told AP that there is a “possibility of me going back and dealing with the stories from my mother and father from the past and how they grew up. Stories about immigrants which tied into my trip to Sicily.”
No matter the project, though, Scorsese is eager to get back behind the camera.
“Right now, there’s been a long period after ‘Killers of the Flower Moon.’ Even though I don’t like getting up early, I’d like to shoot a movie right now,” Scorsese said. “Time is going. I’ll be 82. Gotta go.”
And while Scorsese assured audiences at the 2024 Turin Film Festival, via The Hollywood Reporter, by promising that he is “not saying goodbye to cinema at all,” he told AP that he does question whether or not projects are “worth your time” at this stage in his life.
“You’re guided by: Is it worth doing at this late stage in your life? Can you make it through? Is it worth your time? Because now, the most valuable thing aside from people I love, my family, is time,” Scorsese said. “That’s all there is.”
The director continued, “Filmmaking comes from God. It comes from a gift. And that gift is also involved with an energy or a need to tell stories. As a storyteller, somehow there’s a grace that’s been given to me that’s made me obsessive about that. The grace has been through me having that ability but also to fight over the years to create these films. Because each one is a fight. Sometimes you trip, you fall, you hit the canvas, can’t get up. You crawl over bleeding and knocked around. They throw some water on you and somehow you make it through. You go to another. Then you go to another. This is grace, it really is.”
He summed up, “For me, it’s not that cinema is a god. It’s the expression of God. Creativity is the expression of God. Something happens in you when it clicks, when it works. Not everybody thinks it works, but maybe you do. But something happens and there’s no way of expressing that, except that it’s a gift. For me, it’s a gift to experience and existing for that moment. So it comes through cinema. It comes through movies, even a commercial because commercials are not easy. You have to tell a story in less than 45 seconds. My last picture was three hours, 15 minutes. Come on!”
