Rome’s Cinecittà Studios CEO Manuela Cacciamani announced that Mel Gibson’s The Resurrection of the Christ will being filming at the studio in August.
In an interview with Italian outlet Il Sole 24 Ore as translated by DeepL, Cacciamani shared, “I can confirm that the next film directed by Mel Gibson, produced by Icon Productions, “The Resurrection of Christ” will be entirely shot in Cinecittà starting in August and needs many theaters and stage constructions.”
Gibson and his partners including writer Randall Wallace have talked about creating The Resurrection of the Christ since at least 2016 when Wallace shared with The Hollywood Reporter that “he has begun to write a script for a story about the resurrection, telling THR that the project is becoming too difficult to keep under wraps.”
Wallace said at the time, “I always wanted to tell this story. The Passion is the beginning and there’s a lot more story to tell.”
Gibson has also spoken about the project throughout the years. In an interview with Greg Laurie he revealed the working title would be called The Resurrection.
He said, “Of course, that’s a huge undertaking, and it’s not The Passion 2 — it’s called The Resurrection.”
Gibson added, “Of course, that’s a very big subject. And it needs to be looked at, because we don’t wanna do just a simple rendering of it. We can all read what happened, but in order to really experience and explore probably deeper meanings of what it’s about is gonna take some doing.”
In November 2016, Gibson provided more information to Stephen Colbert telling him, “It’s more than a single event. It’s an amazing event. And to underpin it with the things around it is really the story, to sort of enlighten what that means.”
“It’s not just about the event,” he continued. “It’s not some kind of chronological telling of just that event. That could be boring and you think, ‘Well, we’ve read that.'”
He elaborated, “It’s predictable in that, okay, now we know what happens. Then this happens, then this happens, and this happens. But what are the other things around it that happen?”
Gibson continued, “You’re going all over the place. What happened in three days?” He then hinted that he might explore Christ’s descent into hell, “I’m not sure, but it’s worth thinking about, isn’t it. Get your imagination going, right?”
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In 2020, actor Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus Christ in The Passion of the Christ shared that Gibson was on his “fifth draft.”
He boasted to Fox News, “It’s going to be a masterpiece. It’s gonna be the biggest film in world history, I believe it will be based on what I feel in my heart.”
Furthermore, he emphasized, “It’s so imperative in this time. These films can’t be made now. The films they make are Marvel Comics movies. You’ll see Superman. You won’t see Jesus… I got to play the greatest superhero there ever was.”
More recently, Gibson provided significant details in an interview with Joe Rogan. He first confirmed that Caviezel will reprise his role as Jesus, “You use him, again.” Rogan then interjected, “Caviezel.” Gibson confirmed, “I know it’s 20 years later. It’s supposed to be three days later, but he got 20 years older. I think I have to use a few techniques that they’ve started to get really good… You can actually get some of the same people.”
“There’s a lot required because it’s an acid trip,” Gibson said. “When we wrote it, it is like-. I’ve never read anything like it. My brother and I and Randall [Wallace] all sort of congregated on this. So there’s some good heads put together, but there’s some crazy stuff. And I think in order to really tell the story properly you have to really start with the fall of the angels, which is you’re in another place, you’re in another realm. You need to go Hell. You need to go to Sheol.”
Rogan then asked, “So you’re going to have Hell? You’re going to have Satan all that?”
Gibson responded, “Yeah. Sure. You got to have his origin.”
When asked how he would depict, he said, “This is a good question and I think I have ideas about how to do that and ideas about how to evoke things and emotions in people from the way you depict it and the way you shoot it. So I’ve been thinking about it for a long term. It’s not going to be easy and it’s going to require a lot of planning and I’m not wholly sure I can pull it off to tell you the truth, it’s really super ambitious. But I’ll take a crack at it. ‘Cause that’s what you got to do, right, walk up to the plate, right?”
“I think I can get it,” he added. “But it’s not about me. It’s about something else.”
Gibson later stated, “It’s about trying to find the way in that’s not like cheesy or obvious, but actually-. It’s almost like a magic trick in a sense. It’s diversion. It’s obfuscate this, show that. Look over here.”
He then shared, “It’s very ambitious. That’s all I’ll say. It took a long time to write. It’s really ambitious and it goes from the fall of the angels to the death of the last Apostle.”
While he hopes to begin shooting next year, he did note he does not have a start date, “I don’t have a start date. I just have to begin pre-production and see what happens. It’s just going to roll in its own time. It’s taking its own time. I thought it was late. It’s taking too long. It’s taking too long. But it’s probably just right. It’s when it’s supposed to be.”
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Still later he shared, “It’s a massive thing. And theologically it’s something that you have to really look at and make correlations that ring true because it’s not all written.”
“Of course, there’s your own thing that comes into it from having read the Book a few times. You read the Book a few times and it’s amazing how your memory, how there’s these recessive files somewhere in the background how you can correlate this piece to that piece over there,” he relayed. “And that’s important because juxtaposition is everything with this story and what it means in a bigger picture.”
“So it’s hard to explain, but it’s quite involved,” Gibson said.
Are you looking forward to Gibson’s The Resurrection of the Christ?
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I hope it's done well and can lead him back to a more Church-ordered life. I'm convinced the Passion made him a target of the devil.
As far as I know, no one’s ever depicted the Harrowing of Hell on film. If Gibson and Wallace are planning that, I’ll probably see it just for that.