Sunday marks the beginning Martin Scorsese Presents: SaintsIt is a docu-drama series debuting Sunday on Fox Nation, hosted, narrated and executive produced by the Oscar winner. Scorsese will tell the remarkable stories of eight men and women whose unwavering faith was led by the Catholic Church to be canonized. Each episode focuses 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 the Black Moses. The series was the idea of Mati Leshem, a Hollywood producer who hails from Israel and is Jewish. How did this happen?
“I have to tell you, most people don't think a proud Jew like me would come up with this idea of saints,” Leshem said. “My father was an ambassador to Israel. Like many Holocaust survivors of his generation, he was a staunch atheist, which really helped because he didn't care what school I went to. So I went to the 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 actually exempt from catechism classes, I went anyway and found that I loved the stories. I've always been interested in how people connect to faith. It's complicated because religion often gets in the way of faith. But the stories of these saints that I heard as a seven-year-old child really stuck with me.
He came up with the idea for an anthology series about saints, with one person in mind: Scorsese, a former seminary student. Leshem got half an hour to plead his case.
“Marty 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 up and says, 'Okay, it's over.' “Basically your time. Marty goes, 'No, no, wait a second.' And two and a half hours later we were still talking.”
Scorsese was fascinated by the premise and Leshem was fascinated by the director's knowledge of the Saints. “It was an incredibly in-depth conversation about the stories of these saints and what the best humanity has to offer, which is what the show is really about,” Leshem said. “At the end of the two-and-a-half hours, he looked at me and I looked at him and said, ‘Okay, Mr. Scorsese, what should we do? And he goes, I'm your partner. “And he shook my hand.”
