Martin Scorsese followed up his three-and-a-half-hour epic “Killers of the Flower Moon” with a 30-second commercial. The Super Bowl spot, an ad for website builder Squarespace, stars the director as he gets stuck in traffic during an alien invasion.
As extraterrestrials descend upon the Earth in giant UFOs, everyone is too busy staring at their screens to even notice. One woman scrolls past a video captioned “Proof of Extraterrestrials” to a clip of a cat unraveling toilet paper, as she smiles while a UFO hovers overhead. A dog barks at the sky while its owners are glued to their phones eating a meal. A flying saucer visits a corporate board meeting, but the employees are too tapped into their laptops to realize.
The aliens catch people’s attention when they hijack their screens with a website titled “Hello Down There,” which prompts everyone to finally look up. That includes Scorsese, who is sitting in the back seat of a black car stuck in traffic. After he peers out the window and sees the giant UFOs circling New York City, he chastises his driver: “I told you to take Broadway, this always happens!”
“A website makes it real,” reads a card at the end of the ad.
Scorsese also directed an extended cut of the Squarespace spot, which clocks in at 90 seconds, and acted alongside his daughter, Francesca, in a featurette that follows Scorsese as he plans to direct a “really, really short film” about a website.
In a separate behind-the-scenes video capturing the filming of the commercial, Squarespace chief creative officer David Lee explains the inspiration for the ad, saying, “One of the most mind-boggling things I’ve seen this year is that there have definitely been UAPs and UFO sightings, but for some odd reason no one seems to be really talking about it. They’ve been trying to get our attention for decades now. But they haven’t been able to legitimize themselves. So we figured, ‘What better way to legitimize an alien race than to hit publish and put out a Squarespace website?'”
The video shows Scorsese directing himself in action, as he tells a crew member after delivering his line, “That’s the best one.”
Scorsese said in a statement, “At my age, it’s a stretch finding a directorial debut. When Squarespace first approached me to create a spot, I thought this was my shot. Let’s go big, let’s do something out of this world – space guys building a website. I’m a New Yorker. We’re busy, always on the move. Would we even notice extraterrestrials living among us? It’s going to launch on this show called Super Bowl? Supposed to be big!”
Watch the commercial below.
