During the promotional tour for Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese has been getting acquainted with the youths by joining Letterboxd, speaking with Timothée Chalamet, and—more frequently—making viral TikTok content with his 24-year-old daughter, Francesca. But whether he’s guessing Gen Z slang or anointing his dog Oscar as his next muse, Scorsese swears he had no idea the buzz his new hobby would generate.
“I was tricked into that,” Scorsese joked to the Los Angeles Times. “That was a trick. I didn’t know those things go viral. They say ‘viral.’ I didn’t know.” The octogenarian filmmaker said he’s typically “at home doing things” when Francesca approaches him in his pajamas and says, “Dad, look over here and tell me this.”
Scorsese said that his daughter doesn’t provide much explanation for the videos, including his most recent participation in the movie bracket challenge, where he chooses between random movies, such as Disney’s Frozen versus Inside Out. “That I didn’t know was going to go up,” Scorsese told the Times. “I was just doing it in the other room with her. I don’t know what they’re going to do. They always have those iPhone cameras in their hands. You’re not aware. I honestly did not know she was going to post it.” He then paused. “They use the words ‘post it,’ right?”
In the video, Scorsese makes some eyebrow-raising selections, including Birdman over The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (“I prefer Once Upon a Time in the West,” he said, naming another Sergio Leone film when asked about the choice) and a perceived pause when choosing between Dancer in the Dark and Twilight.
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Scorsese said he hasn’t watched the video and that “there were a couple of films, honestly, I didn’t know anything about,” but he holds firm to his final pick: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey over Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite. “Yes, we started yelling, ‘Yay, 2001!’ Somehow we chose that,” Scorsese said. Then he added: “Am I choosing the poster or am I choosing the film?” Either way, he maintained that “my daughter has a good eye.”
Speaking about the origins of their viral videos earlier this month, Francesca told GQ that they started around April 2021, when she asked her father to identify various feminine products. “He literally still comes to me and he’s like, ‘If we do another one, it has to be funny and interesting—it has to be a good idea like the feminine products one,’” she said, noting that he refuses to do any dance trends. “It ended up blowing up more than we could have ever imagined,” she said of their “Dad Guesses Slang” video in October. “Now I feel like I’ve opened a Pandora’s box.”
