Why a Jew made a series about Catholic saints

Matti Leshem is a Jew who created a series about Catholic saints with Academy Award-winning director Martin Scorsese.
In a phone interview, Leshem joked that he wasn’t “the most obvious person to come up with a series about the saints.” The series Leshem created is called “Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints.” It comes out on Sunday and it is an eight-part series about the lives of Catholic saints.
Each episode follows a saint like Mary Magdalene or Joan of Arc. Ahead of the premiere on Fox Nation, Leshem spoke with the Deseret News about how he decided to create the series and also the national conversation he thinks we should be having about belief.
When Leshem was growing up, his father served as an Israeli ambassador. While stationed in Copenhagen, Leshem said his father sent him to a Catholic school because it was the best school in the area. Though he was exempt from going to some of the religious events, he went anyway to spend time with his friends.
It was there he heard about saints.
“I heard these incredible stories about the lives of the saints and I was really taken with them,” said Leshem. “And they never really left me.”
Those stories stayed with Leshem his entire life and then it came time to create the docudrama series. Picking the saints was a lengthly process, he said, adding Scorsese was a big part of this process.
“It was really a combination of finding incredible stories that are really inspirational, covering different eras,” said Leshem. Joan of Arc is one of the most well-known saints, he said, so she was an obvious choice.
They also wanted to tell a story of a modern saint and landed on Maximilian Kolbe.
The saints span two thousand years and Leshem thinks people should care because of a universal theme running through the stories of all the saints.
“It’s actually the thing that I responded to as a child,” said Leshem. “It doesn’t matter if you’re an atheist or a staunch believer, we all look to believe in something, right?”
Leshem explained seeing stories about people who were willing to face really difficult times and even death for their beliefs is relevant to our modern age.
Faith is a spectrum, he said, adding he lives in Los Angeles and knows a lot of atheists. He considers atheists on that same spectrum. His pitch to atheists is the same as to believers: “Hey, you want to see an incredible story about real people that lived?”
Instead of seeing the docudrama series as faith-based entertainment, Leshem said they are trying to tell great stories about people who have faith. The stories are accompanied by Scorsese and his close friends talking about the themes from the episode.
“There’s nothing scripted about the conversation,” said Leshem.
Leshem said they are not trying to fit into a mold or copy an already existing format. Each of the episodes are narrated by Scorsese and they are different stylistically. They didn’t want to have a bunch of talking heads. Instead, they decided Scorsese would carry viewers through.
The docudrama series and the conversation about faith and entertainment brought up a national conversation Leshem thinks we should be having: What do people believe in?
“Just what do you believe in? Not in a negative way, not in a partisan way, but what are the things that unite us that we can believe in?” said Leshem.
He believes the stories in the docudrama series can be a way into those conversations.