Going by description alone, Martin Scorsese’s upcoming priest drama Silence is one of our most anticipated movies of the year. The veteran director never disappoints, and the material he’s working with on the long-in-the-works project is simply too promising to believe he’ll start now. Though Paramount has yet to officially unveil any stills or clips from the film, a wrap party and press conference in Taiwan, where Silence recently finishing shooting, has provided us with some grainy first images of star Andrew Garfield in costume.
Garfield, newly released from his duties as Peter Parker/Spider-Man after Sony’s disappointing returns on The Amazing Spider-Man 2, stars as Father Rodrigues, a 17th-century Portuguese Jesuit who travels to Japan with another man of the cloth in order to get to the bottom of pervasive rumors that Rodrigues’ beloved mentor has abandoned the Church.
The young actor has commented on his attraction to the project, which he says grapples “with such deep and difficult material, timeless, huge in scope, huge in emotion.” He added:
“It’s a lifetime that the character of Father Rodrigues goes through that we witness. It’s such an agonizing lifetime that he has to live through and yet he wrestles with the greatest and most important and difficult questions that we all wrestle with, which is how to live and how does one live a life of meaning, a life of faith, and does that require you to live in doubt as well? That’s just scratching the surface of why I felt drawn to this story and this character.”
While it’s clear that Garfield doesn’t take his responsibilities in bringing the character of Father Rodrigues to life, Scorsese also didn’t take anything for granted with Silence. In fact, the helmer noted during the press conference that he received the source material for the film, a novel by Shûsaku Endô, way back in 1988, and when he tried to pen a script three years later, he failed. Scorsese said that he had to let the film “develop or evolve” for him on a personal level, or else any adaptation he mounted would be sure to disappoint.
Admitting that even a director of Scorsese’s caliber struggled with nailing this story is one hell of a way to hook us, but it’s certainly worked. You can be sure that every dutiful cinephile will be lining up this fall to see what Scorsese has managed to do, at long last, with Silence. In the meantime, be sure to check out the first images from the film (via Itn).
