Mel Gibson says he is hoping to start shooting Passion of the Christ 2 next year

Mel Gibson is back in the director’s chair for the upcoming Mark Wahlberg thriller Flight Risk. While it’s a different kind of film than the Mad Max star has helmed (his directing resume is dominated by historical epics), Gibson seems to be having a ball promoting the movie after a new featurette was released by Lionsgate. Additionally, he has recently showed up on the popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience. While on the show, he talks about a long-talked-about sequel to one of his biggest movies, The Passion of the Christ.

According to Deadline, Gibson says on the podcast that he is hoping to shoot the sequel, to be titled The Resurrection of the Christ, sometime next year. The Lethal Weapon star talked about the script he co-wrote with his brother and Braveheart scribe, Randall Wallace, that took seven years to write. He explained,

I’m hoping next year sometime. There’s a lot required because it’s an acid trip. I’ve never read anything like it.” 

He continued, “My brother and I and Randall 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 means you’re in another place, you’re in another realm. You need to go to hell. You need to go to Sheol.” Gibson also revealed that he would be using “a few techniques” to shoot the movie, including de-aging Jim Caviezel to keep his look in continuity with Passion, which was more than 20 years ago.

Gibson said that the film is “very ambitious,” and the story goes from “the fall of the angels to the death of the last apostle.” He explained, “It’s about finding the way in that’s not cheesy or too obvious. 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?”