Scarlett Johansson on becoming more comfortable with herself and why it would be "reductive" to politicise her directorial debut

At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, in the Un Certain Regard strand, three major actors made their directorial debuts. While Kristen Stewart and Britain’s Harris Dickinson went full arthouse with their films – respectively, addiction drama The Chronology of Water and homeless study Urchin – Scarlett Johansson took another path. Eleanor the Great is a comedy-drama about a 94-year-old Jewish widow who does something terrible. It’s funny, poignant and stars the wonderful June Squibb, whose late-career blossoming since films like Nebraska and Thelma has been a sheer delight.

“This film appeared to me to have a commerciality to it, which is important,” says Johansson, and she should know. Since she started acting three decades ago, her films have accumulated more than $15 billion at the box office. While this is chiefly down to her role as Black Widow in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, appearing in multiple films from Iron Man 2 to Avengers: Infinity War, this year saw her help relaunch Universal’s prestige dinosaur franchise with Jurassic World: Rebirth, grossing $868 million at the box office. Johansson knows a hit when she sees one.

Curiously, she’s been wanting to direct almost as long as she’s been acting. “When I was a teenager, I thought that I would direct and probably not act,” she tells me. “I mean, because I think I didn’t have an insane passion for acting when I was a teenager.” It’s an interesting answer to the question ‘How long have you wanted to direct?’ Most actors build their way gradually towards going behind the camera. But the precocious Johansson has always harboured those dreams, even as an adolescent growing up in New York.

It’s also intriguing to hear that acting was not her cultural North Star back then, despite making her debut opposite Bruce Willis in the 1994 comedy North and rising to prominence alongside Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer four years later, when she was 13. “I did [have a passion to act] when I was really young,” she continues, “and then it was so hard to find projects that were engaging, I was not as engaged in the process. I mean, I would find some projects here and there, but it was hard. Now there’s a lot more opportunity for young people to play very interesting roles. But it wasn’t the trend as much when I was a teenager.”

By the time she was in her teens, she established herself as an actress with indie credentials, thanks to films like the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There and Terry Zwigoff’s cult teen tale Ghost World. “I would find little things here and there,” she adds, “but I thought, ‘Well, I probably will end up directing.’ And then, when I got to be in my twenties, I became more interested in understanding my job as an actor better, and I was very focused on challenging myself in different kinds of ways.”

Long after establishing herself as an A-List star, in 2017, Johansson started her own production company, These Pictures, which she co-founded with partners Keenan Flynn and Jonathan Lia. Even then, the idea of stepping behind the camera to call the shots didn’t exactly thrill her. “I was like, ‘I definitely would never want to direct’ because that job is only problem solving, and it feels like a nightmare! But I think I just assumed at some point I could potentially direct. It was just hard...some projects at some point or another were compelling but weren’t [right].”

Then along came the script for Eleanor the Great, written by Tory Kamen, who was inspired by her own Jewish grandmother. With Squibb already attached, Johansson was immediately struck by this story of Eleanor Morgenstein, a shrewd and spiky nonagenarian who is living in Florida when the story starts. “I actually called my producing partners...I think I can actually direct this. And then we had to scramble to put it together. The scramble to put it together was very, very stressful. It was crazy.”

Of course it meant raising finances with her producer’s hat on. She’s produced before, notably the 2024 astronaut romance Fly Me To The Moon in which she starred with Channing Tatum. But now she was putting herself on the line as the number one creative. “When you’re making a film, you have to ask people to give you a lot of money. And even if it’s a small film, it’s still going to be a lot of money. It’s millions of dollars. It’s maybe not hundreds of millions of dollars, but it’s an important amount of money.”

To help, Johansson gathered an impressive cast around her, including British actors Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave) and Erin Kellyman (Raised By Wolves), who play a father and daughter who encounter Squibb’s Eleanor when she moves to New York to be near her family after bestie Bessie passes away in Florida. The crux – that terrible thing that Eleanor does – comes when she visits a Jewish Community Centre and stumbles upon a Holocaust Survivor’s Group. A convert to Judaism herself, Eleanor passes off the late Bessie’s history as her own, pretending she too survived the Holocaust.

Johansson identifies as Jewish (her mother is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, with family origins in both Poland and Russia) and calls Eleanor’s moment of madness “unforgivable” but she understands “this urgency to share the story that will disappear with this person”. The script has a deeper resonance, ensuring that – like Bessie’s story – those that survived the worst atrocity in the history of mankind are not forgotten. “So you can forgive it, hopefully. I mean, that’s the goal anyway, and I think that’s actually really important.”

While forgiveness and tolerance are two major themes of the film, Johansson doesn’t want it to be yanked into conversations around the Israel-Palestine conflict, at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise. “I mean, it’s such a complicated question. And I think it would be reductive to politicise this film,” she says.

Her French-born cinematographer Hélène Louvart (The Lost Daughter) was in Israel at the time of the October 7th attacks, as she was preparing to shoot another movie, just as Johansson convinced her to join the project. Johansson is particularly fond of Louvart, and the intimate relationship they fostered on set.

“Hélène and I spent a lot of time breaking the script down before we shot it...that’s when our work together really began. We understood we were talking, seeing the same thing, and she’s just amazing. She’s really the most observant woman. She’s always watching everything, and it just feels like she’s just observing the entire world around her all the time. She’s so present when you’re talking to her. She’s extraordinary.”

Although Johansson may be best known for her action heroine in the MCU, along the way, she’s worked with some of the most innovative filmmakers around, including Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin), Spike Jonze (Her) and Christopher Nolan (The Prestige). Was she influenced by any of her past collaborators when making Eleanor the Great? “Maybe inadvertently. I think sometimes directors have great references. And I’ve worked with directors that have great references. They’re making their version of an Antonioni film. Or it’s a Bergman moment. I didn’t have that as much.”

That’s Johansson’s commercial instincts speaking again; Bergman moments don’t tend to fly with the masses anymore. Instead, like her former collaborator Woody Allen, she ploughed a furrow of Jewish humour. “The script was very funny,” she adds. “I think the film’s hilarious! I hope that other people also find it funny.” She even found herself guffawing at Squibb’s performance in the cutting room, alongside editor Harry Jierjian, who previously cut Fly Me To The Moon. “I laughed so much…the whole room was laughing,” says Johansson, praising Squibb’s impeccable comic timing.

With Johansson now in the director’s chair, making artistic choices, it puts her in a position of strength that she maybe didn’t have as an actress. But Johansson has always been one of the Hollywood stars who was unafraid to speak her mind. In the past, she’s criticised the media’s obsession with body image and with objectifying her when she was younger. She’s also been an advocate for women issues, with everything from equal pay to reproductive rights.

Now, as a 41 year-old mother-of-two, has it been easy to continue to speak up in this way? “I think I usually speak in my own voice,” she says. “I’m pretty comfortable being myself and continue to become more comfortable with being myself as I get older. It’s great. It’s maybe the best thing about getting older. There’s other things that suck and continue to suck more, but that part’s great.”

The question remains, where does Johansson go next? This week, reports have circulated that she is close to signing on for an unspecified role in Matt Reeves’ blockbuster The Batman: Part II, opposite Robert Pattinson, which will only increase her box office clout. But what about directing? Could she ever see herself making a bigger film than Eleanor the Great?

“As long as I felt like it was a film that had a good shot of people going to see it…that’s important.” Spoken like someone who truly understands the movie industry.

Eleanor the Great is out now in UK cinemas.

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