The actor and filmmaker opens up her archive to&nbsp;L’OFFICIEL and discusses her latest projects.

Filmmaking is quite literally in Francesca Scorsese’s blood. Her father, legendary director Martin Scorsese, screened movies for her with near-academic precision. “He kept a log of every film he showed me—what day it was, how old I was, where we were,” says the actor and filmmaker, 26. “We have huge packets of information.” While countless films shaped her childhood, two left a particularly lasting impression: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and F.W. Murnau’s silent classic Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. After watching the latter at age 12, Scorsese immediately went home and made her own silent film. “That was the first time I grasped how a film can truly affect you, even without words.”
Since graduating from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2023, Scorsese has directed the short films Crimson Ties and Fish Out of Water. Next up is Adults Only, a dark comedy inspired by the upbringing of her mother, Helen Morris, before her Parkinson’s diagnosis in 1990. “This is me honoring her and that side of her life,” says Scorsese, who previously paid tribute to her mom through a college film project using archival home videos. “It was one of the first times that people came up to me and said my work impacted them.”&nbsp;Most recently, Scorsese directed an episode of&nbsp;The Saints for Fox Nation about Carlos Acutis, the first Millennial saint, who died of leukemia at 15 in 2006. The project marked her first formal directing collaboration with her father. “I wanted to get the story right and also felt like I was turning in homework to my dad,” she says. “I was nervous to show him what I’d captured, but when the lights turned up in the screening room, he was like, Wow.”
Although she briefly appeared in her father’s films The Aviator, The Departed, and Hugo as a child, “I was focused on how the shots came together and my dad, who was my inspiration,” she says. “When I eventually did get into acting, my inspiration came from Grace Kelly.” Scorsese’s first major role was in Luca Guadagnino’s 2019 coming-of-age HBO series We Are Who We Are; she recently appeared in the Netflix comedy Roommates and will star in Season 2 of Prime Video’s Mr. &amp; Mrs. Smith. “I play Mrs. Smith, [a character who is] the polar opposite of who I am,” she says. “But I’m drawn to roles that scare me a little.” Still, Scorsese feels most confident directing. “I like to storyboard and picture shots as I’m reading a script,” she says. “It’s really cool to see something from the depths of my imagination play out onscreen.”
Outside of Hollywood, Scorsese has long loved film photography. One of her most prized possessions, her Contax T2 film camera, rarely leaves her side. Though her “documentary-style” photography remains a hobby, she dreams of sharing it in a gallery someday. “There are so many sentimental photos of my parents,” she says. “Just quiet moments people normally wouldn’t see.”

Francesca Scorsese’s Contax T2 film camera. Courtesy of Francesca Scorsese.

Family continues to shape nearly every aspect of Scorsese’s creative life. She and her father are working on a book with A24 about the films they’ve watched together, and their Southampton Playhouse Series, Scorsese Presents: Family Films, celebrates those same classic movies. “There was so much magic in older films, and I don’t want people to think of them as boring,” she says. “I’m thrilled my dad showed me so many black-and-white films, and I hope to show them to my own future kids.”

Carrying on one of cinema’s most iconic family legacies does come with its complexities. “I feel like I have this shadow over me, but in the best way,” she says. “There’s a lot of pressure, and while my name opens doors for me, it also closes a lot of them. It’s a bit of a mindfuck, but it’s something I can’t escape—and I’m very blessed to have the life and opportunities that I do.”

Francesca Scorsese on Cinema, Family Legacy, and the Magic of Classic Films

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