“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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.”
“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.
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