Martin Scorsese and his daughter Francesca Scorsese are teaming up for something big…even if it is incredibly short.
The auteur and his filmmaker daughter are paired together for a Super Bowl 2024 Squarespace ad, during which Francesca teaches Martin how to build a website to inspire a faux short film with a meta twist of events.
“A 30-second film is much harder because each scene is like a second, maybe?” Martin says. “The main character happens to be a website. Now, the thing is, I don’t really know what a website is or what it thinks about, what it cares about, if it cares about anything at all.”
He asks Francesca, “I need to sort of get inside the sense of what a website is.”
Francesca’s TikTok videos featuring the “Killers of the Flower Moon” Oscar nominee have gone viral, with Scorsese even using modern slang to address former “flop” films like “The King of Comedy,” which now “hits different” decades later.
In the Squarespace ad, Martin tells Francesca, “The website slaps, kid, doesn’t it? Is that slapping or what?”
Martin also recently joined Letterboxd, with Francesca telling Vanity Fair that social media has been “beneficial in keeping [Martin] current with the younger generations.”
“I feel like it definitely helped. I didn’t know that until I think I did an interview, and was told that they called it the Francesca Scorsese Effect, which I was like, ‘What the hell is that?’” Francesca said, citing that almost half of “Killers of the Flower Moon” opening night theatergoers were under the age of 35. “It was because there was a very high percentage of much younger people going to see the film. I didn’t really plan on it. Then once our videos started blowing up, I realized that it was actually beneficial in keeping him current with the younger generations. I don’t want to toot my own horn, but I think it’s definitely helped a little bit in keeping him with fresh eyes.”
Francesca collaborated with her father on the upcoming Timothée Chalamet and Havana Liu Rose Chanel commercial, with Francesca serving as creative director. The father-daughter duo are set to release a book with A24.
However, Francesca’s own Letterboxd needs a Scorsese refresh: The actress/filmmaker admitted to Vanity Fair that she hasn’t seen all of her dad’s films and has yet to watch “After Hours” or “The Departed,” which she has a small role in.
“[My dad has] always shown me his films, but he gets nervous and so he runs away and I have to watch it by myself,” Francesca said. “But we’ve both been so busy that we’ve never really had time to sit down and watch films. We have, but it’s more like continuing with my film education versus him showing me his own. I just have a couple left that I have to see.”
She added, “Sometimes he talks me through some stuff, say a little thing in my ear while I’m watching. But he watches it again as though he’s never seen it before. Something will happen and he’l be like, ‘Ha! That’s great.’ And I’m like, ‘You literally made this.’ It’s funny because it’s almost like a first experience with him again, watching it with me.”
