Gibson told Rogan he’s hoping to begin production “next year sometime” (via Deadline). The director, who collaborated on the script with his brother and Randall Wallace (who penned Braveheart and Passion). Gibson went on to say he wants to cast his Passion star Jim Caviezel (recently of Sound Of Freedom) as Jesus, though he acknowledges that he’ll have to do some CGI de-aging since Caviezel is, of course, 20 years older than he was when last he played the role.
“There’s a lot required because it’s an acid trip. I’ve never read anything like it,” Gibson said. He added that “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 means you’re in another place, you’re in another realm. You need to go to hell.”
Gibson said the challenge of the script, which will chart everything from “the fall of the angels to the death of the last apostle,” is “finding the way in that’s not cheesy or too obvious.” He went on, “I think I have ideas about how to do that and 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 time. 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 super ambitious. But I’ll take a crack at it because that’s what you got to do, right, walk up to the plate, right?”
