Sunday marks the beginning of Presents Martin Scorsese: Saintsa docu-drama series premiering Sunday on Fox Nation, hosted, narrated and executive produced by the Academy Award winner. Scorsese will tell the remarkable stories of eight men and women who were led by the Catholic Church to be canonized for their unwavering faith. Each episode will focus on one saint, starting with four episodes over the following month, with the final four episodes running in the lead-up to Easter.
The series focuses on Joan of Arc, John the Baptist, Sebastian, Maximilian Kolbe, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Becket, Mary Magdalene, and Moses the Black. The series was the idea of Mati Leshem, a Hollywood producer who hails from Israel and is Jewish. How did this happen?
Leshem said: “I have to tell you, most people don’t think a proud Jew like me would come up with this idea about the saints.” “My father was an ambassador to Israel. Like many of his generation who survived the Holocaust, he was deeply atheist, which really helped me because he didn’t care what school I went to. So I went to Ramaz School in New York, which was a religious school, and then when we moved to Denmark, the best school was the Catholic school and he was like, great, go there. So he sent me to this Catholic school and while I was already exempt from catechism classes, I went anyway and found that I loved stories. I’ve always been interested in how to connect people to faith. And it’s complicated because a lot of times religion gets in the way of faith. But the stories of these saints that I heard as a seven-year-old kid really stuck with me.
He came up with the idea for an anthology series on saints, and there was one person in mind, Scorsese, a former seminary student. Leshem got half an hour to plead his case.
“Marty,” he says, “I’m so sorry, but I can only see you for half an hour. I’m really busy. And I said, great, I’ll start talking. And I literally opened up my laptop and talked for half an hour and then the guy comes in and says, well, your time is basically up. Marty goes, no, no, no, wait a second. Wait a second. And two and a half hours later we were still talking.”
Scorsese was intrigued by the premise and Leshem was intrigued by the director’s knowledge of the saints. Leshem said: “It was an incredibly in-depth conversation about the stories of these saints and what is the best that humanity has to offer, which is what the show is really about.” “At the end of the two and a half hours, he looked at me and I looked at him and I said, ‘Okay, Mr. Scorsese, what should we do? And he shook my hand.”
A source