Why Martin Scorsese Put His Faith in Fox Nation

Cinephile eyebrows were raised earlier this year when Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese announced that he’d partnering with Fox News Media’s streaming service, Fox Nation, for his new TV venture, Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints. But the show’s executive producer, Matti Leshem, characterizes the unlikely partnership as a match made in… well, heaven. “Fox Nation has been incredibly supportive,” Leshem tells TVNewser about his and Scorsese's working relationship with the streamer, which premieres the first half of the eight-episode docudrama on Nov. 17. Each of the hour-long installments dramatizes the life and times of a Catholic Church-beatified saint ranging from 15th century warrior Joan of Arc to 20th century friar Maximilian Kolbe. The remaining four episodes will stream in the spring, with the possibility of additional seasons to come. Still, Leshem understands if devout Scorsese disciples have mixed feelings about subscribing to a streaming platform that’s associated with a conservative-leaning news network. That’s why he stresses the importance of nuance—something that can get lost when discussing loaded topics like politics and faith in the country’s current climate. “Look, Fox Nation is not Fox News,” Leshem emphasizes. “It’s a really important distinction. Fox Nation is a streaming platform that has all kinds of programming on it. Especially at this time in America, it’s important for everyone to keep an open mind.” And if you’re still on the fence, Leshem has a streaming-era sales pitch ready to go. “If you’re interested in the show, sample it by downloading Fox Nation for $5.99,” he advises with a laugh. “And If you don’t like it, cancel it! You can sign up for one of the 18 other subscription services that I currently have.” The story of how The Saints ended up at Fox Nation in the first place is as simple as a parable: They wanted to make it. Getting that “yes” capped a seven-year journey for Leshem and Scorsese—although the latter has dreamed of telling stories about the saints for even longer. Scorsese and a panel of religious commentators following a premiere event for The Saints “I wanted to make something like this after Raging Bull,” Scorsese remarked during a panel discussion following a premiere event for The Saints. After that 1980 film, he planned to leave Hollywood behind and partner with Italy’s RAI Television, which had produced similar passion projects with famed directors like Roberto Rossellini. But that version never came together, and the idea sat on the shelf until he and Leshem met in 2017 for what was supposed to be a 30-minute pitch session. “Three hours later, we were still in that meeting,” Leshem says about selling Scorsese on the series that flowered into The Saints. “At the end of it, he shook my hand and said: ‘Great, let’s do it.’” Leshem’s own journey towards The Saints required no small amount of faith. The son of Holocaust survivor and, later, Israeli ambassador Moshe Leshem, he grew up in a Jewish household where education was prioritized over religion. In fact, Leshem’s father—who he describes as a “devout atheist”—sent him to Catholic school while the family was stationed in Cophenhagen, Denmark, specifically because of it offered superior academics. “That’s where I first heard the stories of the saints,” Leshem recalls. “Listening to them from a Jewish perspective, I was less interested in the miracles and more interested in this notion that these people believed in something so strongly that in many cases they were willing to die for it.” Liah O'Prey as Joan of Arc in The Saints That notion followed Leshem into adulthood, shaping not only his ideas about religion, but also storytelling. He views canonized saints like Joan of Arc and Thomas Becket not as religious idols frozen in time, but flesh and blood humans made heroic by their belief in something greater than themselves—be it a deity or an ideal. That dovetails with Scorsese’s own longtime fascination with flawed characters caught between the twin poles of punishment and enlightenment. "Even Scorsese films that seem to have nothing to do with religion or faith, are about people who turn to faith and people who turn away from faith," Leshem notes, pointing to gangster stories like Goodfellas and Casino as examples. "We really saw eye-to-eye about how to tell these stories. We’re trying to give you a sense of what these people were really like and why they were willing to do whatever’s necessary to follow something they believe in.” And because both he and Scorsese worship at the altar of cinema, each chapter of The Saints is filled with allusions to the movies they love. The Joan of Arc episode, for example, pays homage to Robert Bresson and Carl Theodor Dryer, while the Kolbe episode has some of the verite immediacy of such neorealist masters as Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica. But Leshem is also adamant that being a believer in a particular faith—Catholicism in Scorsese’s case or Judaism in his—isn’t a pre-requisite to watch The Saints. In fact, he decries the “partisanship” that’s complicated the national conversation around religion, especially in the media. “People have a knee-jerk reaction when they hear something describes as ‘faith-based programming,” Leshem says. “It has come to mean something very specific—that it’s aligned with a certain group of people and a certain political party in this country.” Milivoje Obradović as Maximilian Kolbe in The Saints “The truth of the matter is that America is a country of believers and belief is a spectrum,” he adds. “Atheism is on that spectrum as far as I’m concerned. When you cover religion in a partisan way, you miss the point." To help further an honest and partisan-free conversation about faith, each episode of The Saints ends with Scorsese leading a panel of friends and prominent religious commentators—including Stephen Colbert’s go-to Jesuit scholar Father James Martin—tackling subjects ranging from the Catholic Church’s history of antisemitism to the concept of martyrdom. Those substantive discussions offer a welcome corrective to the partisanship-laden shouting matches that Leshem sees elsewhere in the 24/7 news cycle. “I have this perspective that God created religion—Judaism for Jews, Catholicism for Catholics, and Islam for Muslims—as a path towards a higher understanding,” he says, expressing a sentiment that complements his father’s belief in education rather than strict adherence to one mode of belief. "It's almost incidental that Marty's a Catholic and I'm a Jew. We're trying to tell great stories that are for everyone."

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Why Martin Scorsese Put His Faith in Fox Nation

The Oscar-winning filmmaker's streaming series The Saints debuts Nov. 17

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