After Raging Bull in the early 1980s, Martin Scorsese considered quitting filmmaking, wanting to travel to Rome to shoot a series of television documentaries on the lives of different saints: "I literally thought it would be my last film," said Scorsese in 2016, referring to Raging Bull. "And at the time, because of the films that Bertolucci and the Tavianis and others had made for RAI, and in particular Roberto Rossellini's historical films, I thought that television was the future of cinema. Or, I should say: television mixed with cinema."[3]
Scorsese intended to set the project up at RAI, and explore the various questions of what it meant to be a saint, and where the figures came from.[3] After the project fell apart, Scorsese channeled his spiritual interests into films such as The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun, and Silence. Decades later, the series was revived when it was greenlit by Fox Nation.[4]
