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It’s a passion project that Martin Scorsese has been wanting to make for years, a film of the Japanese novel ‘Silence’, in which two idealistic young Portuguese priests set sail to Japan in 1640 on a mission to find their mentor, Father Ferreira. He is rumoured to have betrayed his faith under torture.
Now Scorsese has finally turned the book into a film. It's in cinemas on New Year's Day and stars Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver as the young priests, with Liam Neeson playing Father Ferreira (in a return to proper acting after running around punching baddies).
‘I picked up this novel for the first time almost 20 years ago,’ Scorsese recently wrote in an introduction to a new edition of ‘Silence’, written by Shusaku Endo and published in 1996. ‘I’ve reread it countless times since. It has given me a kind of sustenance that I have found in only a few works of art.’ All of which is a massive departure from the drug-fuelled shenanigans of his last film 'The Wolf of Wall Street', starring Leonardo DiCaprio as crooked banker Jordan Belfort.
'Silence' is out in cinemas on January 1