Watch The Journey, the New Ridley Scott Short Film Teased During the Super Bowl

Estab­lished in 1933, Turk­ish Air­lines cel­e­brat­ed its 85th anniver­sary last year with a high­er pro­file than ever before. Born in 1937, Rid­ley Scott turned 81 last year and has shown no decline what­so­ev­er in his enthu­si­asm for film­mak­ing. This year found those two insti­tu­tions brought togeth­er by anoth­er, the Super Bowl, which offered the occa­sion to air a thir­ty-sec­ond teas­er for The Jour­ney, a six-minute film com­mis­sioned by Turk­ish Air­lines and direct­ed by Scott. (The same game also, Open Cul­ture read­ers will have noticed, fea­tured a Burg­er King com­mer­cial with Andy Warhol eat­ing a Whop­per.) The visu­al­ly rich sto­ry of one woman pur­su­ing anoth­er to and through Istan­bul, the short marks the first com­mer­cial the Alien, Blade Run­ner, and Glad­i­a­tor direc­tor has made in well over a decade.

“I decid­ed to go back and click into adver­tis­ing,” Scott says in the behind-the-scenes video below. “I love the chase and the speed of the job.” And in this case the job was to show off the lux­u­ry of Turk­ish Air­lines’ first-class cab­ins and also the city of Istan­bul itself, which Scott had nev­er vis­it­ed before.

But on his first trip there, Istan­bul impressed him with its har­bor, its mosques, and sure­ly many oth­er of the ele­ments of which The Jour­ney makes use, includ­ing the air­port. “The Istan­bul air­port was mod­ern and effi­cient, Euro­pean, and what first struck me is how for­eign it did not feel,” writes Amer­i­can reporter Suzy Hansen in Notes on a For­eign Coun­try of her own first vis­it to Istan­bul, draw­ing a stark con­trast with “the decrepit air­port in New York I had just left.”

And Hansen had flown into Istan­bul’s old air­port, not the new one opened just last year and designed as the largest in the world. Whether The Jour­ney will bring more busi­ness to Turk­ish Air­lines’ flights into and out of it (the final shot finds our hero­ine en route to Bali) remains to be seen, espe­cial­ly since the Super Bowl teas­er seemed to cause con­fu­sion about what was being sold. It nev­er­the­less fits nice­ly into Scot­t’s acclaimed body of adver­tis­ing work. In its ear­ly peri­od came a 1974 bread com­mer­cial vot­ed Eng­land’s favorite adver­tise­ment of all time; in its mid­dle peri­od, of course, came the 1984 Super Bowl spot that intro­duced the Apple Mac­in­tosh to the world. Giv­en the ener­gy Scot­t’s work in com­mer­cials and fea­tures still exudes, it feels some­how unsuit­able to use the term “late peri­od” at all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rid­ley Scott Talks About Mak­ing Apple’s Land­mark “1984” Com­mer­cial, Aired on Super Bowl Sun­day in 1984

Rid­ley Scott Demys­ti­fies the Art of Sto­ry­board­ing (and How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Project)

See Rid­ley Scott’s 1973 Bread Commercial—Voted England’s Favorite Adver­tise­ment of All Time

Rid­ley Scott Walks You Through His Favorite Scene from Blade Run­ner

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.