Martin Scorsese’s Jesuit priest drama Silence will be his next film, becomes re-attached to The Wolf of Wall Street

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

If there’s one subject or theme that pervades Martin Scorsese’s films more than gangsters, troubled men, or broken families… it’s religion. And now, as his follow-up to HUGO CABRET, the famed filmmaker will finally be pulling the trigger on his much-discussed and loooong-gestating passion project, SILENCE.

The adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s novel, about “two 17th century Jesuit priests who face violence and persecution when they travel to Japan to locate their mentor and to spread the gospel of Christianity,” has been in the works for about a decade. The film even has a tremendous trio attached – Daniel Day-Lewis, Benicio del Toro, and Gael Garcia Bernal – though it’s not entirely clear if scheduling and other commitments made since will permit them to take on the project.

SILENCE will come written by Jay Cocks, the man behind Scorsese’s THE AGE OF INNOCENCE as well as the original version of GANGS OF NEW YORK, which he began writing back in 1976.

Meanwhile, Marty has re-attached himself to THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, a project he dropped and handed over to Ridley Scott before coming back to it once again. That film would see the director reunite with his go-to man Leonardo DiCaprio and his “Boardwalk Empire” producer/writer Terrence Winter (who wrote the 2007 Blacklist script) for the financial malfeasance memoir of stockbroker decadence by Jordan Belfort. Here’s more on that, via Amazon:

“Belfort, who founded one of the first and largest chop shop brokerage firms in 1987, was banned from the securities business for life by 1994, and later went to jail for fraud and money-laundering, delivers a memoir that reads like fiction. It covers his decade of success with straightforward accounts of how he worked with managers of obscure companies to acquire large amounts of stock with minimal public disclosure, then pumped up the price and sold it, so he and the insiders made large profits while public investors usually lost. Profits were laundered through purchase of legitimate businesses and cash deposits in Swiss banks. There is only brief mention of Belfort’s life before Wall Street or events since 1997. The book’s main topic is the vast amount of sex, drugs and risky physical behavior Belfort managed to survive. As might be expected in the autobiography of a veteran con man with movie rights already sold, it’s hard to know how much to believe.”