Apple Original Films will develop Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels, with Martin Scorsese attached to write, direct, and produce, alongside filmmaker Todd Field, following a deal brokered by Ellen Levine of Trident Media Group and Susan Schulman of the eponymous literary agency.

To start, the Academy Award–winning director will write, direct, and produce Home as a feature film for Apple, with Leonardo DiCaprio attached to star. Field, a multi–Academy Award nominee, is slated to produce alongside Scorsese’s Sikelia Productions, DiCaprio’s Appian Way Productions, and LBI Entertainment, the firm run by Scorsese and DiCaprio’s talent manager, Rick Yorn. Details have not yet been released about plans to adapt the remaining books in the series.

Home is the second of four novels in Robinson’s Gilead series examining faith and rural life set in the fictional plains town of Gilead, Iowa, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux; it is preceded by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle award–winning Gilead and succeeded by Lila (also an NBCC award–winner) and Jack. In its starred review, PW called the 2008 novel “an elegant variation on the parable of the prodigal son's return” that “stakes a fierce claim to a divine recognition behind the rituals of home.”

The deal pairs two of the country’s preeminent artists, both of whose works often interrogate the nature of faith. Scorsese, a practicing Catholic, has previously adapted two influential novels rooted in Christian history: Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1955 novel The Last Temptation of Christ, in 1988, and Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel Silence, in 2016. Robinson’s own novels are deeply informed by her beliefs as a Congregationalist, a Calvinist tradition to which the characters of the Gilead cycle also subscribe.

Robinson is author of five novels and six works of nonfiction and a recipient of such prizes as the National Humanities Medal and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, Los Angeles Times Book Award, Orange Prize, and PEN/Hemingway Award. She was named among Time Magazine’s list of 100 Most Influential People in 2016.

Further details of the project are forthcoming.