For Martin Scorsese, Season 2 of his Fox Nation series The Saints is a real family affair. The Oscar-winning filmmaker has become a late-in-life internet celebrity courtesy of his very online (in a good way) daughter, Francesca Scorsese who now makes the jump from directing hilarious Instagram reels to helming hour-long episodes of streaming television. The younger Scorsese stepped behind the camera for an episode that chronicles the story of Carlo Acutis who is known — appropriately enough — as the “Influencer Saint.”
As Scorsese explains in this exclusive clip, though, that designation is primarily “marketing language.” During his short life, Acutis — who died in 2006 at the age of 15 following a battle with lukaemia — harnessed the power of the emerging digital world to capture what he saw as the miracles of his faith. Officially canonized by the Catholic Church mere months ago in September, he’s one of the first individuals to achieve sainthood under new pontiff, Pope Leo XIV.
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“Here was someone that young people recognized as one of their own who led a life grounded in the Christian faith,” Scorsese notes. “How did that happen? We don’t know. We only know that, throughout his life, so short, he tried to do good for his family and his friends and his church. And he used the tool of the Internet, so he’s a very special figure in the world today.”
“And I’m also very happy with my daughter Francesca’s work as a director on this episode,” the proud father adds.
Francesca Scorsese on the set of The Saints (Courtesy Fox Nation)
Scorsese recently appeared alongside his daughter at the Season 2 premiere of The Saints in New York, and elaborated on his praise for her artistic choices in a post-screening Q&A. “I was very pleased to see how you were specifically framing the characters,” he observed. “It wasn’t frantic in any way; the pace was very spiritual, I felt.”
“I did a lot of preparation,” the younger Scorsese recalled, adding that the collaboration at times felt akin to a “homework assignment” given to her by her dad. “I remember showing him the cut for the first time. I kept looking at him. He sat in the back [of the screening room] in the shadows and then the lights turned on. I couldn’t look back, because then he’d look at me because I’m moving — and then he’d yell at me!”
Gold Derby is also debuting a clip of Scorsese discussing a different episode from The Saints’ sophomore year, which kicks off on Nov. 16 with four weekly episodes, followed by another batch in 2026. This installment explores the life of Jesus Christ’s mother Mary — a character he previously depicted in his 1988 masterwork, The Last Temptation of Christ, with the late Verna Bloom acting opposite Willem Dafoe. And as in that controversial movie, Scorsese wanted to explore the human side of an individual that’s long since been elevated to the divine.
“What was it like to be the mother of Jesus?” the filmmaker muses. “At every step, it must have been extraordinary, terrifying, wondrous, troubling, comforting, unfathomable. But, at the core of it, she’s always his mother, and he’s always her son.”
The Saints marks the culmination of a lifelong ambition for Scorsese. As revealed in Rebecca Miller‘s recent Apple TV docuseries, Mr. Scorsese, the director — who briefly flirted with becoming a priest before deciding that movies were his calling — had plans to make the series as far back as the 1980s when he was undergoing his own crisis of faith. To this day, he still finds inspiration in those stories he heard in his neighborhood church in Little Italy.
“When I was about 8 or 9, there was one particular priest who was really important [in my life],” he recalled at the post-premiere discussion. “He gave a good example. He said, ‘This is the way people should be.’ Around me, there were maybe not the best examples, which made for interesting storytelling, but they weren’t the best examples of how to live, I can tell you!”
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