Fifty years after fighting for his life, the 74-year-old director talks overcoming an epic lawsuit, starving actors and a death on set to bring his passion project — a Japanese novelist’s masterpiece — to the screen: “I was blind, and now I can see.”

In 1978, Martin Scorsese nearly died. Years of hard living and drug abuse finally had caught up with the filmmaker, and yet he continued to push himself, until one day, he collapsed. “After finishing New York, New York, I took chances,” he says. “[I was] out of time and out of place and also in turmoil in my own life and embracing the other world, so to speak, with a kind of attraction to the dangerous side of existence. Then on Labour Day weekend, I found myself in a hospital, surprised that I was near death.”

At age 35, he was fighting for his life. “A number of things had happened,” he continues. “Misuse of normal medications in combinations [to which] my body reacted in strange ways. I was down to about 109 pounds. It wasn’t only drug-induced — asthma had a lot to do with it. I was kept in a hospital for 10 days and nights, and they took care of me, these doctors, and I became aware of not wanting to die and not wasting [my life].”

Alone in that hospital, occasionally visited by such friends as Robert De Niro, the director thought back to his roots as a Catholic growing up in New York’s Little Italy, the son of two garment workers, a boy who had fallen under the influence of a charismatic priest and at one point considered becoming a seminarian, only to be thrown out of the preparatory seminary because he never could make it to Mass on time. All these years later, “I was stunned by the realization of my naiveté and denial,” he says. “I prayed. But if I prayed, it was just to get through those 10 days and nights. I felt [if I was saved] it was for some reason. And even if it wasn’t for a reason, I had to make good use of it.”

When Scorsese emerged from that dark night of the soul, like the blind man in the Bible, he felt the scales were removed from his eyes. “[In the New Testament], they were all complaining about Jesus, that he hangs out with publicans and tax men and whores,” explains the director, “and the man says, ‘All I know is, I was blind and now I can see.’”

Half a lifetime later, Scorsese, 74, has returned to that spiritual crisis and used it as the underpinning of another story, of men facing their own such challenge in a very different time and place, 17th century Japan.

Based on Shusaku Endo’s 1966 novel and starring Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver and Liam Neeson, Silence charts the physical and emotional journeys of two Jesuit priests who travel from Portugal to Japan in an attempt to win converts — only to be persecuted for their beliefs.

Twenty-eight years in the making, the $46.5 million film (which opens Dec. 23) has gone through multiple script drafts; has seen various stars come and go, including Daniel Day-Lewis, Benicio Del Toro and Gael Garcia Bernal; and has faced challenges that nearly killed it on several occasions, “an extraordinary Gordian knot of legal problems and issues,” says Scorsese.

The resulting film will test Paramount’s marketing skills as it seeks to persuade audiences to embrace a two-hour-and-40-minute tale that centers on the human capacity for suffering and redemption and asks viewers to enter not only Scorsese’s imaginative realm but also his spiritual one.

“I’m a believer with some doubts,” he says. “But the doubts push me to find a purer sense of the other, a purer sense, if you want, of the word ‘God.’”

Silence came to Scorsese in the midst of the cacophony surrounding 1988’s The Last Temptation of Christ, his adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ controversial novel, which posits that Jesus was tempted to come down from the cross and live as an ordinary man.

Whatever the director had hoped to achieve with that picture — a spiritual dialogue, perhaps — faded amid the barrage of criticism and even death threats from religious hardliners. And yet it was through this movie that he received an unexpected gift.

“We screened a rough cut of Last Temptation to the religious groups and others who were complaining about the film but hadn’t seen it,” he recalls. “We went to a hotel here [in New York] and had a little private dinner, and Archbishop Paul Moore Jr of the Episcopal Church was there with his wife. And as he was leaving, he says, ‘There’s a book I want to send to you.’”

The book was Endo’s novel, which blended real-life figures with loosely fictionalized ones in its account of missionaries Sebastiao Rodrigues (Garfield) and Francisco Garrpe (Driver), who come to Japan in 1639, searching for their predecessor, Father Cristovao Ferreira (Neeson), who is rumoured to have “apostatized.”

Scorsese was too drained by Last Temptation to finish the novel then, but he returned to it in August 1989 and decided to buy the rights, even though its meaning proved elusive to him. “I was taken by the moment of apostasy,” he says, “but I didn’t quite understand the epilogue,” when the book follows Rodrigues over many years after he has been tortured and freed. “I thought it would be interesting to write a script.”

“In 2009, we came close,” says Scorsese. “[The Departed producer] Graham King paid for a location scout in Japan, and we went to Nagasaki [and] met some ‘hidden Christians’ — there’s maybe 200 or 300 left, and they practice Christianity based on what the hidden Christians from the 17th century left them, and their language is a combination of Portuguese, Japanese and Latin.”

Despite this, the movie seemed doomed until September 2010, when Goodfellas producer Irwin Winkler visited Scorsese on the Hugo set and asked about Silence.

“I said, ‘What did you ever do about that script you had for so many years?’ “ recalls Winkler. “And he said: ‘I haven’t been able to get it done. Why don’t we do this together?’ “ More than anything, it was an affirmation for Scorsese of why he had tackled the material in the first place. “The act of working out these themes rekindled in him certain very deep seeds of his own faith that he very seldom articulates,” says Cocks. “He found not only a certain challenge in this: He found a separate peace.” “I saw Silence as a story where there was grace throughout. Grace through other people. Grace through the landscape. Those things in life are incalculable” said, Martin Scorsese.

Although “Silence” was not nearly as controversial as his 1988 film, “The Last Temptation of Christ,” Scorsese said the two films are connected and not just because an Episcopalian bishop gave him Endo’s book after seeing the 1988 film.

Even before filming began on “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which is based on a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis and explores the human side of Jesus, people were writing letters to the studio and producers complaining about plans to bring it to the big screen.

Recounting the story, Scorsese said a studio executive asked him why he wanted so badly to make the film.

“To get to know Jesus better,” Scorsese said he blurted out. “That was the answer that came to mind. I didn’t know what else to say.”

If one affirms that Jesus is fully divine and fully human, he said, people should be able to look at his humanity.

But Scorsese told his Quebec City audience that his explorations of who Jesus is and what faith really means were by no means exhausted by “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

“The journey is much more involved,” Scorsese said. “It’s just not finished.”

In reading Endo’s novel, working on and off for two decades to make the film and in finally bringing it to completion, Scorsese said he was “looking for the core of faith.”

The climax of the film is when one of the Jesuits gives in and, in order to save his faithful who are being tortured, he tramples a religious image. However, the character believes that act of official apostasy is, in reality, a higher form of faith because, by sacrificing his own soul, he is saving the lives of others.

“It’s almost like a special gift to be called on to face that challenge, because he is given an opportunity to really go beyond and to really get to the core of faith and Christianity,” Scorsese said.

In the end, the priest “has nothing left to be proud of” – not his faith or his courage – and “it’s just pure selflessness,” the director said. “It’s like a gift for him.”

“I think there is no doubt it is a believer’s movie,” he said. “At least for me.”