Martin Scorsese Celebrates The Saints In New Fox Nation Series Hatched By Matti Leshem

Sunday marks the start of Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints, a docudrama series starting Sunday on Fox Nation that is hosted, narrated and executive produced by the Oscar winner. Scorsese will tell the remarkable stories of eight men and women whose unshakeable faith led them to be canonized by the Catholic Church. Each episode focuses on a singular saint, starting with four over the next month, and the last four episodes will run in the lead-up to Easter.

The series focuses on Joan of Arc, John the Baptist, Sebastian, Maximilian Kolbe, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Becket, Mary Magdalene and Moses the Black. The series was the idea of Matti Leshem, the Hollywood producer who hails from Israel and is Jewish. They developed the series for Lionsgate Alternative Television. How did all this happen?

“I got to tell you, most people don’t think that a proud Jew like myself is going to come up with this idea about the Saints,” Leshem said. “My dad was an Israeli ambassador. Like many of his generation who survived the Holocaust, he was a s staunch atheist, which really helped me because he didn’t care where I went to school. So I went to Ramaz in New York, which was a yeshiva, and then when we moved to Denmark, the best school was a Catholic school and he was like, great, go there. And so he sent me to this Catholic school and while I was actually exempt from the catechism classes, I went anyway and I found that I liked the stories. I’ve always been interested in how people connect faith. And it’s complicated because many times religion gets in the way of faith. But these stories of these saints that I heard as a kid of about seven, they really stuck with me.”

He hatched the idea of an anthology series on saints, and there was one person in mind, and that was Scorsese, the former seminary student. Leshem got half an hour to plead his case.

“Marty’s like, look, I’m so sorry, but I can only see you for a half hour. I’m really busy. And I was like, great, I’m just going to start talking. And I literally just opened up my laptop and I talk for a half hour and then the guy comes in and is like, okay, your time’s up basically. Marty goes, no, no, wait a second. Wait a second. Two and a half hours later we were still talking.”

Scorsese was fascinated by the premise and Leshem fascinated by the director’s knowledge of the saints. “It was the most incredible in-depth conversation about the stories of these saints and what is the best that humanity has to offer, which is really what the show is about,” Leshem said. “At the end of the two and a half hours, he just looked at me and I looked at him and I said, well, Mr. Scorsese, what should we do? And he goes, I’m your partner. And he shook my hand.”