Mel Gibson will start shooting The Resurrection of the Christ at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios in August, CEO Manuela Cacciamani has announced.

The 68-year-old actor-and-director will head to Italy in the northern summer to begin production on his sequel to 2004’s biblical epic The Passion of The Christ.

The Braveheart actor has described The Resurrection Of The Christ as an “acid trip” and admitted he had “never read anything like” the script he has worked on with Randall Wallace.

“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,” Gibson told podcaster Joe Rogan.

“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.”

The sequel – in which Jim Caviezel will reprise his role as Jesus Christ – has been in development since 2016. Gibson previously said it would not have “a linear narrative”.

“You have to juxtapose the central event that I’m trying to tell with everything else around it in the future, in the past, and in other realms, and that’s kind of getting a little sci-fi out there,” he told the National Catholic Register in 2022.