Martin Scorsese on His Tour of Catholic Saints

The director Martin Scorsese’s filmography teems with troubled protagonists struggling with moral codes. With his new project, that canon now includes the canonized.

“Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints,” premiering Sunday on the Fox Nation streaming service, is hosted and narrated by the filmmaker and dramatizes the lives of eight Catholic saints.

The series is premiering in two parts, with the first four episodes rolling out weekly and featuring well-known saints, including Joan of Arc and John the Baptist, as well as more obscure ones like Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest who volunteered to die in place of another man at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The second part, scheduled to premiere in April, will include episodes about the Italian friar Francis of Assisi and Mary Magdalene, a follower of Jesus Christ, among others.

The series was created by Matti Leshem, a founder of New Mandate Films, a production company that focuses on storytelling rooted in Jewish history and culture. Scorsese is an executive producer. Kent Jones, a frequent collaborator of the filmmaker’s, wrote the scripts, which were informed by lengthy discussions on theology he had with Scorsese.

Catholic saints, who are people recognized by the church after death for their virtue as models for holiness, have long interested Scorsese. “I was always fascinated by the idea of a saint and what a saint could be,” he said earlier this week, recalling how he found respite in St. Patrick’s Cathedral as a child growing up in 1950s New York City.

In an interview at a hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Scorsese discussed the show, his relationship to Catholicism and why he thinks faith-based entertainment needs to have depth. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.