The movies Martin Scorsese viewed as his unofficial trilogy: “I’m just obsessed”
Not to put too fine a point on it because he’s made it abundantly clear countless times over, but Martin Scorsese has never been a director with even the slightest interest in franchise filmmaking.
He’s only made one sequel in his entire career, and it wasn’t even to one of his own movies, with Scorsese picking up from where Robert Rossen left off by continuing the story of Paul Newman’s Eddie Felson in The Hustler follow-up The Color of Money, which won the leading man an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’.
The legendary auteur did remake Cape Fear while putting his own stamp on the crowd-pleasing psychological thriller, and he was responsible for the fourth feature-length adaptation of The Age of Innocence, but that’s about as far as his involvement in repurposed properties has ever gone.
He baulked at the mere suggestion of turning The Departed into a money-spinning ongoing film series, has made his feelings on Marvel Studios’ output perfectly clear, and distanced himself as far away from Todd Phillips’ Joker as possible despite the comic book favourite being indebted to his work.
In short, don’t expect Scorsese to mount a sequel to any of his pictures, nor is he ever again likely to make a sequel to anybody else’s. However, that doesn’t mean he can’t view several entries in his own back catalogue as being connected in their own way, and in a recurring them of his professional life, spirituality is key.
He’s been a Catholic since the day he was born, and while that influence has been equal parts pivotal and integral to several of his many classics, Scorsese drew a direct line between three of his features that formed the closest thing he’s ever going to have to a franchise of his very own.
It should probably go without saying, but the first chapter was The Last Temptation of Christ. “It was again a passionate process,” he said, per The Playlist. “Religion is one thing, but spirituality, the interest in it, the drive and the obsession towards it has always been there. I wanted to be a priest at one point – it didn’t work out – and this desire, this obsession to make that film had to come with the exploration of the mystery of faith.”
The middle part of his triptych focused on an entirely different religion and ended up with Scorsese being banned from entering China for being too provocative for the ruling regime’s liking, but it carried many of the same motifs established in The Last Temptation of Christ.
“In the process of making the film, I found the mystery only deepened, and I was only on the surface,” he explained. “And so that’s only continued over the years leading to Kundun.” Scorsese made several films after that to further his lifelong explorations of spirituality, even if a documentary about a member of The Beatles may not have been the most obvious.
“I’m just obsessed with this search for a spiritual core in life,” he mused after pointing towards George Harrison doc Living in the Material World as the third, which once more zeroed in on a different religion by dedicating itself to how the ‘Fab Four’ guitarist struggled to find the spiritual enlightenment he was seeking while trying to reconcile it with his status as a world-famous superstar musician.
Not that he needed to, but Scorsese even offered an apology for connecting them as such. “I’m sorry to have to talk in that way about these films,” he exclaimed. “But that is what they are about. I don’t know how else to discuss it other than to make a film about it.”
At the time, he hadn’t yet embarked upon the movie that would end up becoming the fourth instalment in Scorsese’s unofficial spiritual franchise, but after decades stuck firmly in development hell, the trio eventually became a quartet when Silence released in 2016 to further the connective tissue that tied The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun, and Living in a Material World together in his mind’s eye.
