Audiences enjoying the acclaimed new series, Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints on Fox Nation, would never guess that Scorsese’s co-creator on the show is a Jewish producer who grew up in Jerusalem.
Matti Leshem, whose credits as producer include the fact-based Holocaust drama, The Survivor, directed by Barry Levinson, and The Commandant’s Shadow, a documentary about the son of the man who ran Auschwitz, was happy to talk to The Jerusalem Post about working on the show with Scorsese.
In fact, Leshem still considers the Post his “hometown paper.”
It was Leshem, who has lived in the US for years, who came up with the idea for a television show that presents the lives of Christian saints by humanizing them and telling their stories in an earthy, realistic way. Scorsese and Leshem developed the series for Lionsgate Alternative Television.
A special episode that debuted just in time for the Easter season looked at the life of Saint Mary the Virgin, from the moment she was chosen to bring Jesus into the world to her sorrow at the end of her son’s life.
Israeli producer teams with Scorsese on 'The Saints'
Leshem directed the episode, which was written by Kent Jones (who wrote the entire series), and the producer even played King Herod after an actor dropped out at the last minute.
The series features episodes on some of the most famous saints, including Peter, Francis, and Joan of Arc, as well as more recently anointed saints, such as Maximilian Kolbe, a Pole who was killed at Auschwitz after he took the place of another man condemned to death.
Leshem said his idea for the series came out of a fascination with saints that he developed as a child when he attended Catholic schools in different parts of the world, where his father’s career as a diplomat for Israel’s Foreign Ministry took the family.
His father was Moshe Leshem, a Holocaust survivor who served as Israel’s ambassador to several countries and to the United Nations.
“My father, like many Israelis of his generation, was a pure atheist, you know? Labor Party atheist,” he said.
“But he prized education over anything else… When he was stationed in Copenhagen, the best school there was an Anglo-Catholic school, so he sent me there.”
While Leshem was not required to attend catechism class and chapel, he chose to go to be with his friends.
“So, I was exposed to those stories from a pretty early age, and I was always taken with them. I thought they were very interesting. There’s something very Jewish about those saint stories,” he said, noting that some of the saints were originally Jewish.
“It was just an interest that stayed with me. Having grown up around the world, I had a lot of access to different religions. And I also had my father’s aunt, my great-aunt, who was a convert to Catholicism. That was pretty unusual.”
Leshem’s great-aunt made a deep impression on him, and her life story could well be the subject of a movie. Born in what is today western Ukraine, she was the daughter of a rabbi.
His great-aunt was drawn to the Catholic faith as a teen and later converted, eventually becoming a successful singer in Austria.
She had to flee Austria during World War II, because no matter what religion she practiced, the Nazis still considered her a Jew, but she returned after the war and continued her career.
When she was 95, and Leshem was 15, she came to Jerusalem to visit her family, and he remembers being fascinated by how emotional she became when he accompanied her to the Via Dolorosa.
Remembering her devotion to Mary, he said, “I thought, these are great stories to tell: I wish I could tell them. And I found a way to do it,” he said.
When hecame up with the idea, he knew that he wanted to partner with Scorsese, one of the most distinguished directors of all time. He is best known for modern classics such as Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas, as well as more recent movies, including the 2023 film, Killers of the Flower Moon.
Scorsese was a sickly child who grew up in an Italian-American family in New York and dreamed of becoming a priest before realizing his true calling was as a movie director. Many of his greatest heroes are lapsed or tormented Catholics, and he made the controversial film, The Last Temptation of Christ, which, like The Saints, presented Jesus as a fallible man.
It took Leshem a year, but he finally got a meeting with Scorsese in Los Angeles, and although he felt pressured, it went so well that they ended up talking about saints for hours.
“He was by far the most educated, three-dimensional person I’ve ever met. He knew about everything, and we were having a very in-depth conversation about religion. There was nothing he didn’t know about. It was the perfect conversation to have,” Leshem recalled.
At the end of the meeting, Scorsese agreed to partner with him on the show, not only as a creator and producer, but also as narrator. In addition, at the end of each episode, Scorsese hosts a conversation with scholars on the lives of saints.
Despite having a great filmmaker as his collaborator, it took Leshem seven years to get the show off the ground. “I never gave up on it, and finally Fox Nation gave us the opportunity to do the show,” he said.
Working with Scorsese has been a thrill, he said. “Marty’s involvement is very specific. He loves the show. It’s really meaningful to him. He signs off on major casting decisions. He’s with me in the edit room. He edits the show with me, which is unbelievable… He knows when something works and when it doesn’t.
“There’s something experimental about him,” Leshem continued. “He always tries stuff you can’t imagine. Things you may have given up on. He comes up with unbelievable ideas that solve problems.”
Scorsese and Leshem shared the conviction that the human side of the saints must be at the core of the series. In the Mary episode, when she gives birth, the scene plays out realistically, making it the polar opposite of the greeting-card depiction usually seen of Mary.
“I thought, let’s really explore that. She’s still a woman. She’s still giving birth. What’s that like?” he said.
“And I realized we’ve never really seen that… For years, there’s been a kind of desexualization, a kind of sanitization, of that figure. But the beauty of Mary is that she is a real woman. She is a mother. So, she has to experience that.”
To bring Mary’s story to life, Leshem worked with a mainly Israeli cast. Bar Misochnik plays Mary as a young woman, and Ofri Prishkolnik portrays her at the time of Jesus’ death.
Dar Zuzovsky, who plays Mary Magdalene, appeared in The Survivor and has played many roles in Israel, including in The Malevolent Bride. Ariel Yagen, an actor from Jerusalem who plays Jesus as a young man in the Mary episode, portrayed him in other episodes of the series as well.
Twelve-year-old Jesus is played by Gur Eden, the son of Dana Eden, the co-creator of Tehran, who passed away in Athens earlier this year while preparing to shoot the fourth season of the spy series.
“When we were shooting in Italy last year, it was exactly during the last time the Iranians shut us down. I had six actors stuck in Tel Aviv with no airspace open… I had to figure out how to get them out,” Leshem recalled.
He turned to his cousins, who are in the Israeli navy, and they found a catamaran and a captain who would take Dana Eden, Gur Eden, and other Israeli cast members from Tel Aviv to Cyprus.
“Dana was with us in Italy, and I was so surprised when I later read about her [suicide], because you’ve never met anyone more vital or more supportive of her son. She was on set every day. She hung out with us.
“She was a force of nature. She also helped me organize the actors on the Israeli side. I was devastated by her loss. And Gur is such a talented young man.”
Leshem has two companies, one of which is Weimaraner Republic Pictures – he’s a proud dog owner – for “more general audience” projects like The Saints.
He runs the company with his wife, Lynn Harris; among their films are the popular action drama, The Shallows. He also runs the New Mandate company with Joel Greenberg, which focuses on stories from Jewish history, such as The Survivor and The Commandant’s Shadow.
“No matter what I do, whether it’s casting Israeli actors in The Saints and telling stories of important Jewish figures who also matter deeply to Christianity, or taking Israeli formats and trying to sell them in America, this is my own very active Zionism,” he said.
Looking back on the long, strange trip with Scorsese to make The Saints, Leshem said, “We didn’t really know what to expect, and then it turned out to be the most successful show Fox Nation has ever had.
“I actually just heard from an executive that our Mary episode was No. 1 again. We put out new episodes, and they immediately go to the top, because people love these stories. I think they speak both to people of faith and to complete atheists. They can all watch it and find it interesting.”