Fresh off landing 10 Oscar nominations for Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese shows no signs of slowing down. He has two long-running projects he’d like to cross off his to-do list, one of them being a biodrama about the tumultuous private life of legendary crooner Frank Sinatra. The film, assuming everything comes together, would star the director’s current top collaborator Leonardo DiCaprio as Sinatra, with Jennifer Lawrence as the first choice to play his second wife, Ava Gardner.
You might think that Scorsese can just press a button at this point to indicate that he wants to make a movie and everything will fall into place, but it’s nowhere near that simple. Sinatra’s daughter Tina controls her father’s estate and has yet to give her blessing to the film. Which isn’t terribly surprising since it’s meant to cover the period when Sinatra’s affair with Gardner broke up his marriage to Nancy Barbato, Tina’s mother.
Still, having one of the most accomplished directors and two of the biggest movie stars in the world will surely allow him to at least consider giving a thumbs up. It will also depend on finding a studio, with Sony seen as the favorite despite support from Apple and Paramount. Flower Moon.
In Scorsese’s film news, the other project he wants to pursue is a drama about Jesus, based on Silence 1973 book by writer Shūsaku Endō. Scorsese, of course, adapted Silence with Andrew Garfield among the protagonists, and the director wants him to also appear in this film. Whether or not the actor would play Jesus has not yet been revealed.
Still short of independent financing for the film, Scorsese wants cameras rolling later this year for filming in Israel, Italy and Egypt. Of course, the situation in Israel is complicated by the country’s conflict in Gaza with Hamas and a change of location could still take place.