Martin Scorsese to Write & Direct Adaptations of GILEAD with Leonardo DiCaprio For Apple TV+

Academy Award winning filmmaker Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Killers of the Flower Moon) has signed on to writer, direct and produce adaptations of author Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead” novel series, starting with Home for Apple TV+.

Scorsese will create the first film alongside director Todd Field (In the Bedroom, Little Children, Tár), following a deal brokered by Ellen Levine of Trident Media Group and Susan Schulman of the eponymous literary agency.

The first film, Home, is in the works at Apple with Leonardo DiCaprio attached to star. Field, a multi–Academy Award nominee, is slated to produce alongside Scorsese’s Sikelia Productions, DiCaprio’s Appian Way Productions, and LBI Entertainment, the firm run by Scorsese and DiCaprio’s talent manager, Rick Yorn. Details have not yet been released about plans to adapt the remaining books in the series.

Home is the second of four novels in Robinson’s Gilead series examining faith and rural life set in the fictional plains town of Gilead, Iowa. It is preceded by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle award–winning Gilead and succeeded by Lila (also an NBCC award–winner) and Jack.

In its starred review, PW called the 2008 novel “an elegant variation on the parable of the prodigal son's return” that “stakes a fierce claim to a divine recognition behind the rituals of home.”

Scorsese, a practicing Catholic, has previously adapted two influential novels rooted in Christian history: Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1955 novel The Last Temptation of Christ, in 1988, and Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel Silence, in 2016. Robinson’s own novels are deeply informed by her beliefs as a Congregationalist, a Calvinist tradition to which the characters of the Gilead cycle also subscribe.

Stay tuned for updates on the project as it develops.

via: PW