“It ended up blowing up more than we could have ever imagined,” she says of the video. “Now I feel like I’ve opened a Pandora’s box.”
There are an inordinate number of eyes on her videos now. A recent one, “The Muse,” features her father gushing over a new muse he had supposedly found to star in his next film—who turned out to be Francesca’s wholly unimpressed schnauzer, Oscar. “My dad adores him and he adores my dad,” she says. “It’s funny because he kind of looks like my dad too.”
Joe Russo, who has directed a number of Marvel films, made his own video in response; he cuts from footage of Scorcese and Oscar to himself holding a schnauzer, joking that his own dog was named “Box Office.” It was a reference to the years-long argument that began when Scorsese said in an interview that Marvel movies aren’t cinema.
Francesca says she hasn’t seen Russo’s response, though she has both trolled Marvel fans in the past and her own father, once wrapping all his Christmas gifts in Marvel wrapping paper.
“I don’t want to offend anybody or anything. I do very much stand with my dad, but I did educate myself,” she says. “Originally, when I was agreeing with him, I’d never seen a single Marvel film. And then during COVID, I finished all of them, but I still stand by it. I will say some of them are fun.”
Nor did she think the wrapping paper thing would blow up to the extent it did after she shared it on her Instagram stories. “People keep telling me to get him a Marvel cake,” she says. “I’m like, ‘He might kill me.’”
While in the midst of writing a new short and her first feature, Francesca recently collaborated with her dad by creative directing the behind-the-scenes footage of an ad he filmed for Blue de Chanel fragrance, starring Timothée Chalamet. “It was really cool seeing [Timothée] directed by my dad. They have such a fondness for each other,” she tells me. “He reminds me a lot of Leo in a sense.” A24 has also tapped the duo to write a book “about my film upbringing and how that shaped me as a person, as an artist.”
