After last year’s triumphant return of Todd Field after a 16-year absence behind the camera, all eyes have been on what the Tár director may do next. He teased a collaboration with Adam Sandler but also said his Cate Blanchett-led drama is “highly likely” his final film. Now, we have the most concrete news yet on what Field is currently developing, thanks to Martin Scorsese himself.
A few months ago the Killers of the Flower Moon director revealed he is developing an adaptation of Home, part of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novel series, also including Gilead, Lila, and Jack. While Scorsese recently confirmed The Wager is next on the docket, he’s now revealed rather ambitious plans for the Robinson adaptations, which includes Field.
“I’d like to try and make another picture if I can. I’d like to move on. Well, we’ve come up with a script on Home, Marilynne Robinson’s book. It’s one of the four novels: Gilead, Home, Lila, and Jack,” Scorsese tells Sight & Sound. “[Tár writer-director] Todd Field and I started on Home, and did a version before the writers’ [WGA] strike, with Kent Jones, a year ago. And we’re about to go into another, once the strike is over, a script on Jack. And Gilead, I think Todd might be doing. And so there’s that.”
It would be quite a fascinating project to see different directors take on each novel with Scorsese having a hand in each of the scripts. Jones, the former critic and NYFF director who has a long history collaborating with Scorsese, made his narrative directorial debut with the acclaimed Diana and this material seems like a perfect fit for his follow-up as well.
As we await more details, see a synopsis of the four novels below and you can pick them up here. Scorsese also recently took part in a conversation with Timothée Chalamet for GQ, embedded below.
Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series—Gilead, Home, Lila, and Jack—is an intergenerational story about faith, race, and love radiating out from the interwoven histories of two families in a small Iowa town to encompass all of American life: our ideals and beliefs, our contradictions, failings, and hopes.
Over the past sixteen years, Marilynne Robinson’s now-mythical world of Gilead, Iowa, and the beloved characters who inhabit it, have illuminated and interrogated the complexities of American history, the power of our emotions, and the wonders of a sacred world.
These four novels, which have won one Pulitzer Prize and two National Book Critics Circle Awards, among many other honors, are a vital contribution to contemporary American literature and a revelation of our national character and humanity. Robinson’s meditation on the paradoxes of American life has given us “something we only occasionally find in the vastness of existence: a glimpse of eternity” (Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal).