Martin Scorsese’s Next Film Could Be Adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-Winner’s Novel

Martin Scorsese has quite a few projects percolating at the moment. There’s The Wager, based on the David Grann book The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder, with Leonardo DiCaprio expected to star. There’s also a proposed Frank Sinatra biopic, and a film about the life of Jesus Christ — the former of which may or may not still be in the works. And then there’s Home, an adaptation of Pulitzer prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson‘s 2008 novel of the same name.

The director first spoke about the project in 2023, indicating at the time he’d written a script with Tàr and In the Bedroom writer-director Todd Field, along with Kent Jones, the filmmaker behind Diane and Hitchcock/Truffaut. Scorsese mentioned Home again in a new interview with The Canadian Press in November 2024, saying there was a “very strong possibility” it would be his next film, but that a “scheduling issue” might prevent it from happening. He did not elaborate if he would still be using the screenplay written with Field and Jones.

A Novel About “Love and Death and Faith”

Robinson’s novel is a companion piece to her Pulitzer-winning previous book, Gilead. The official description from publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux explains the premise as thus:

Hundreds of thousands were enthralled by the luminous voice of John Ames in ‘Gilead,’ Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. ‘Home’ is an entirely independent, deeply affecting novel that takes place concurrently in the same locale, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames’s closest friend.

Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack – the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years – comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain.

Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, he is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s most beloved child. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather and namesake.

‘Home’ is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith. It is Robinson’s greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions.

A novel about “love and death and faith” seems right up Scorsese’s alley, and would make an interesting follow-up to his similarly rural-set Killers of the Flower Moon.

That said, Scorsese’s next picture could instead be something more personal. “There’s also a possibility of me going back and dealing with the stories from my mother and father from the past and how they grew up,” the filmmaker said. “Stories about immigrants which tied into my trip to Sicily.”

Of course, no interview with Scorsese would be complete without asking him about the many other projects he’s mentioned wanting to do in recent years. Concerning The Life of Jesus, another adaptation — this one of Shusaku Endo’s novel of the same name — Scorsese would only say, “It’s an option, but I’m still working on it.”