As an actress, Scarlett Johansson has starred in films such as “Lost in Translation,” “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” and “Under the Skin.” She’s also appeared in 10 Marvel superhero movies as Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow.
Her films have earned more than $15 billion, making her the biggest moneymaker of any lead actor – ever. In 2019, she was nominated for two Academy Awards in the same year as best actress and best supporting actress for “Marriage Story” and “Jojo Rabbit”
But it’s watching Robert Redford direct “The Horse Whisperer” when she was his 13-year-old costar that led her to this new chapter in her career.
“Eleanor the Great” stars June Squibb as a feisty 94-year-old who returns to New York City from Florida after the death of her best friend Bessie, a Holocaust survivor. Living in Manhattan, Eleanor accidentally joins a group of Holocaust survivors at the neighborhood temple. When they ask about her story, she impulsively tells Bessie’s, setting in motion events that escape her control.
In a recent video call that also included Squibb, Johansson talked about how her experience as a teen on “The Horse Whisperer” led to her directing debut with “Eleanor the Great.”
“When I was a kid, I was working with Bob Redford, and just observing him on the set,” Johansson says. “Just seeing his command of the set, blocking scenes, working with Bob Richardson, our director of photography, Joe Reidy, our assistant director, and just watching him in action, on his feet, doing that work.
“Then he could switch over and have these very intimate conversations with me, where he would spend the time to recount all that had happened to my character up until that moment, and help me get to where I needed to go.
“I mean, the fact that he could bounce back and forth like that to me seemed like a really interesting job,” she says.
Still, she was just a teenager then, and the idea of directing movies seemed far off in the distance.
“I thought, Well, I’ll do this acting thing until I’m, whatever, a grown up, and then I’ll direct,” Johansson says, laughing. “Then as I got older, I would say in my mid-20s, I became more interested in getting better at the acting part of the job, and understanding it on a deeper level and challenging myself in different ways.”
She didn’t think about directing much in those years, she says, and when she did, it no longer seemed quite as magical as it had when she was working with Redford. The filmmaker died just six days after the conversation with Johansson and Squibb.
“At some point I thought, ‘Who would ever want a job like that?’” she says, laughing once more. “You’re fixing all the problems and answering all the questions, and it feels so tedious, you know. It just seemed impossible to me, like a whole different brain.”
It wasn’t until after she founded her These Pictures production company in 2017 that the old spark reignited. When screenwriter Tory Kamen’s script for “Eleanor the Great” landed on her desk, with Squibb already attached to play the title role, Johansson took the leap.
June Squibb, left, and Erin Kellyman in “Eleanor the Great,” the directing debut of actress Scarlett Johansson. (Anne Joyce/Sony Pictures Classics/TNS)
Now it was time, Johansson decided, to find out what she could do behind the camera for the first time.
“Eleanor the Great” opens on Friday, Sept. 26. In an interview edited for length and clarity, Johansson and Squibb talked about what drew them to “Eleanor,” how the subject of the Holocaust was woven into a story that mixes drama with comedy, and the importance of making movies about older characters such like this.
Q: Tell me about the initial appeal of the screenplay when it reached you.
June Squibb: I read the script and knew immediately. Just a few pages, and I felt I really have to do this. I told them yes almost right away.
Q: What made it such a quick yes?
Squibb: It was well written, and it was written for film, which is a certain thing. And it just told me so much right away about this woman, and who she was, what she felt, and how the playing of it, the being her for so many weeks, would be. I felt, Yes, this is something for me to do.
Q: How about you, Scarlett? I read that you weren’t looking for a project to direct, but then this showed up.
Johansson: It did. I mean, June was attached to star in it, so I was really interested in what June Squibb was excited to star in. And it was pretty apparent. Echoing what June is saying, I could tell when I read it that it was a real showcase for June’s talent, because the character is this sort of impossible person.
But then we see her. She has these moments also of real introspective, intimate moments built into the structure of the script that allow the audience to have a better understanding of what’s going on internally for her, even without dialogue. So there are great moments there.
And, of course, once we are introduced to the Nina character [a college journalism student working on a story about Holocaust survivors], we see another side of Eleanor. That perhaps we were judging her in one way, and now there’s this other part of her. I thought that’ll be exciting to work with an actor of June’s caliber and help discover what could be a showcase performance for her.
Q: Eleanor is kind of feisty; she can be little sharp, and now she’s starting over at 94. How did you wrap yourself into the character, June?
Squibb: Well, I lived in New York, and I know New York fairly well. And I think in New York, you could do what you want to do. But at 94, how much do you want to do? [She laughs] Bessie’s death is what makes the change in her life. If she hadn’t died, I think they would have been continuing their lives in Florida, and I think she would have been happy with that.
You know, she lived in the Bronx rather than Manhattan, and I think there was probably a bit of, ‘Oh, this will be different. This might be fun. I can imagine that this is what Eleanor was thinking, because it’s a very different part of the city. I think she was probably very excited about it and yet very angry that she had to do it. It’s like her life; it was very mixed up, a lot of different emotions going through it.
Q: Angry because of her loss of Bessie?
Squibb: Yeah, for one thing. I mean, I think she’s angry about a lot of things in her life. That’s just her.
Q: Scarlett, you touched on this a moment ago, how the film has a lot of different tones in it – anger, loss and grief, but also funny moments. How do you balance all those?
Johansson: Part of it was working on the script and refining the script so that there were moments of both comic relief and then the balance of that, these really profound moments that could be quite surprising. You know, there’s a heaviness, of course, to the material, and so I think you have to balance it with levity.
I wanted it to feel that the movie had hopefulness to it as well, and that it could move through these different moments like stages of grieving – that there was movement in the film, and it doesn’t get stuck in one place for too long.
I think it’s just a sensitivity to the audience experience, or in my interpretation of that. Obviously, I made the film because I love it, but I really made it for the audience. I thought about them a lot.
Q: Another element is the role that the Holocaust plays in the story, which is a tricky topic to touch upon. Both of you share the Jewish faith, and I read that the Shoah Foundation was consulted and helped out.
Johansson: Yeah, I mean I don’t know that I could have made the film if I didn’t identify as Jewish. The Jewish identity, there’s a texture of it throughout the film. It’s just the humor of it and the spirit of it, too, not just the fact that it deals with the Holocaust story.
We were very lucky to have the Shoah Foundation [a non-profit based at the University of Southern California established by director Steven Spielberg to preserve the stories of Holocaust survivors and witnesses]. I sent them the script right away, partly because I just wanted their opinion about it, you know, see what they thought, and also to be able to refine the Bessie survivor story so that we were doing an accurate portrayal of what this woman could have experienced.
And then Rita Zohar, who plays Bessie, is also a survivor herself, which is extraordinary. That was just a crazy discovery. I mean, she’s an amazing actor and an accomplished actor, but it was just extraordinary that there was this even deeper layer of meaning to her portrayal.
Q: Some of the actors in the survivors group in the film were also actual Holocaust survivors?
Johannson: Yes, we were able to work with the survivors in the group that we identified through Shoah. Even Jessica Hecht [who plays Eleanor’s daughter] is very connected in the Jewish community in New York, and also that temple that we were using was very helpful in identifying people that could participate or wanted to participate.
If we didn’t have all of those elements that are really authentic, then there would be a shallowness to it, or it wouldn’t have the same nuance that I think the film does.
Q: June, what was it like working with Rita? And I’m guessing you might have met other survivors over time, too?
Squibb: I have, but I also was alive during World War II, and I remember we had Life and Look magazines and the pictures of the camps as they were found there. I just couldn’t believe it. I was about 10, I think, something like that, and I just feel that this cannot be forgotten.
And when Rita and I talked, we just sort of got like girls, you know; we didn’t have any deep conversations. I didn’t even know she was a survivor until Scarlett was saying it today. We weren’t talking about our characters at all. I just felt it’s important to tell the story, to have this alive in whatever way we did.
Johansson: Also, Rita, she’s a very private person, I think actually similar to the character. It’s true, talking with others about this. There’s almost a shame in sharing your story. Not wanting to go back there, not wanting to revisit this horror of your past is actually not uncommon of survivors who experienced unimaginable trauma like that.
You could feel she was so moved on the days that we were working with her. She had so much difficult work to do and you felt almost like it was a cathartic experience for her. I mean, she said it was.
Q: I’d like to ask you both about working as, or with, a director who is an actor.
Johansson: I don’t think I could have done this job 15 years ago. It’s all the experience that’s led me up to this point that made it possible. And also that I had the confidence to do it. It requires that confidence; otherwise, if the director’s not confident, everybody feels it on the set and it’s awful. [She laughs]
And I would never want to recreate that. So it was until I felt, ‘Oh, this is a story I can tell. This is a movie I can make. This is a cast I believe in.’ It came out of this particular project that ignited that.
Q: And for you, June? You’ve worked with lots of different directors in your career. What’s it like when the director is an actor?
Squibb: Well, it’s great because you feel that they know what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and what you need timewise. Do you need to do it again or do you not? I just always felt that Scarlett was there and knew immediately what I needed and where I was going.
And you do not get that – I’ve worked with some wonderful directors, but they have no sense of what an actor does ever. I think it surprises them sometimes. So it was great, and I loved the experience of not being pushed, of just letting it happen, and that’s what it was.
Q: Scarlett, I read that you were very close to your grandmother, and June, this comes right after your starring role in “Thelma” last year. How do you see the importance of stories about and starring older people?
Squibb: I truly believe that the audience is now interested in aging. We’re an aging population and I think people want to know about it.
Johansson: I was very close to my grandmother, and certainly, there are a lot of things in this film (inspired by her); I observed so many. I think children also have such close relations with older people because the pace of life is kind of more similar in a way. You become an adult, and then you’re building your own life and having your own children. The pace can be very chaotic.
My grandmother, I remember spending so much time just observing her. I remember all the qualities of her body and her wardrobe and her habits. Her fragrance in her apartment and all the textures of her life so well because we spent so much time in each other’s company, just enjoying each other’s company the way that Erin and Eleanor do, you know.
We talked about all kinds of stuff. We talked about relationships, we talked about sex, we talked about our bodies, we talked about our family, we talked about our dreams and our worries and all of that stuff. She had a very full life, and her days were full of thought and awareness. I think this film celebrates that and highlights that.
I think Eleanor in this film, when you see her relationship with Erin, she talks about the person that she feels that is. And she says, ‘I’m the same way I was when I was 16 years old.’ I mean, my grandmother used to say things like that to me all the time.
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