Midway through the 2003 film Lost in Translation, Scarlett Johansson’s character, a young newlywed accompanying her photographer husband to Tokyo as he works on a movie’s international tour, wanders into a press conference for the film-within-a-film. As the airheaded lead actress of the faux blockbuster, a junky piece of Hollywood nothingness titled Midnight Velocity, yammers on about reincarnation and the joys of “working with Keanu,” Johansson’s character lets loose a wry, sad smile, and quickly exits in the hopes of finding a more spiritually fulfilling environment.
For a few years, it might have been tempting to view that scene as a cruelly prescient peek into the arc of Johansson’s own career. No longer the emerging starlet of such small, art-minded fare as Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation or Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World, Johansson has become the world’s biggest name brand.
With US$15-billion in box-office sales to her credit, the actress is now history’s highest-grossing movie star – and all thanks to such empty-calorie spectacles (Jurassic World Rebirth, eight separate Marvel movies) that are not all that far removed from the likes of Midnight Velocity. Today, there is nothing stopping the 40-year-old Johansson from spending the rest of her life counting cash and reminiscing about working with Keanu.
Johansson in a scene from 2025’s Jurassic World: RebirthJasin Boland/The Associated Press
Yet instead of playing it easy, the actress seems stubbornly determined to use her megawatt fame, and attendant paydays, to keep as much distance between herself and any Midnight Velocity-like fate. For every safe and easily franchisable tentpole that Johansson has headlined over the past decade and a half, the actress has also doubled down on her commitment to keeping more idiosyncratic, less comfortably profitable storytellers (Jonathan Glazer, the Coen brothers, Wes Anderson) in the good books of their bankrollers.
But next week, at the Toronto International Film Festival, Johansson will showcase her most unexpected – and most thoroughly anti-Midnight Velocity – project yet. In her feature directorial debut, Eleanor the Great, the actress goes behind the camera to tell a tender and unpredictable story about the travails of a 94-year-old woman who very likely hasn’t seen a Marvel movie in her entire gosh-darn life. Even more daring: Johansson didn’t try to find a role in it for herself, instead choosing to focus entirely on the filmmaking.
“Honestly, it probably would have made financing it so much easier to have my name and face on the poster, but it would have been very, very hard to do both,” the actress says in an interview a few weeks ahead of TIFF. “I look at other actors who also direct, like Bradley Cooper and Robert Redford, and I have so much more respect for that choice. Just the stamina of it. I don’t think I can be inside and outside like that at the same time.”
Johansson, pictured at TIFF in 2019, says she has a new respect for actors who also direct: ‘Just the stamina of it. I don’t think I can be inside and outside like that at the same time.’Tijana Martin/The Canadian Press
It would have been especially tricky given the duelling inside and outside layers of Eleanor the Great. During its first 20 minutes, the film could be mistaken for a soft-hearted generational comedy as the story traces the move of the nonagenarian title character (Thelma star June Squibb) from South Florida to Manhattan following the death of her best friend and roommate, Bessie (Rita Zohar).
But once Eleanor mistakenly attends a Holocaust survivors’ group at her local Jewish community centre, she falls into a rabbit hole of well-intentioned but damning deception, ultimately misappropriating Bessie’s history as a survivor as her own life story.
The drama that follows is deliberately messy and complex, its characters wrestling with grief, loneliness and, most of all, the lingering stains of history. So, not exactly the kind of box-office-friendly material that Johansson is used to. But for the filmmaker, whose star power helped lift Tory Kamen’s screenplay out of the development hell that it had been stuck in for years, Eleanor’s story spoke not only to her artistic ambitions, but her own personal history.
“I grew up with my grandmother, and her mother only spoke Yiddish to her, so then my grandmother understood more Yiddish than she spoke, but she did speak it to us. It was a part of her makeup, her character,” recalls Johansson, who grew up in Manhattan’s predominantly Jewish Upper East Side neighbourhood of Yorkville, the same area where Eleanor takes place.
On directing actor June Squibb (above) in Eleanor the Great, Johansson says: ‘June is incredible – she has so much energy and stamina.’Jojo Whilden/The Associated Press
“There’s certainly in that area, there are some remnants of the Ashkenazi community there. It’s like all of New York, it’s become a melting pot, which is wonderful. But these neighbourhoods that had real specific cultural imprints on them are not there any more.”
Indeed, Johansson’s film has one eye trained on contemporary Manhattan, with the other possessing nostalgic glint for the city’s Jewish cultural history, the resulting film at times feeling as if Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters was plunked down at the intersection of Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey. (The fact that both Delancey and Eleanor have scenes involving deep discussion regarding kosher dills is surely no coincidence.)
“I watched Crossing Delancey about 100 times growing up, but I love so many New York movies – Moonstruck, Living out Loud – where the city is not quite a character but there’s just such specificity to the neighbourhoods and the characters,” Johansson says. “This movie is very much like my version of New York.”
More than any shared cultural geography, though, Johansson’s family tree suggests deep roots in the heart of Kamen’s screenplay. While Johansson’s maternal great-grandfather, Saul Szlamberg, had moved to the United States before the start of the Second World War, his brother and two nieces had died in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust.
These losses seem to reverberate deeply for Johansson, who has noted that she rarely cries while reading scripts – with the exception of this project, and Taika Waititi’s screenplay for Jojo Rabbit, which also pivoted around the persecution of Jews in the Second World War (a film that earned the star an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress).
Thea Traff/The Globe and Mail
Telling Eleanor’s story, and what the world today looks like for actual Holocaust survivors, “was definitely some part of” the attraction to the story, says Johansson. “But I also found the theme of forgiveness to be incredibly touching. And certainly Bessie’s survivor story is raw and shocking.”
To that end, Johansson and her creative partners sought collaboration with the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation, which Steven Spielberg founded following the production of 1993’s Schindler’s List to preserve and share Holocaust survivor stories.
“They helped us craft Bessie’s story so that it was plausible and in a respectful way, and they gave us so much information about all the movement of people in that horrible time, like just physically moving and separating families from one another,” Johansson says, noting that she also cast real-life Jewish survivors to play members of Eleanor’s support group.
“It was important to get their input and feel like we were honouring the survivor stories. They were an amazing resource.”
Any and all support was needed given that – unlike the months, sometimes years of preparation that one Johansson’s Marvel movies receives – the director had to get Eleanor the Great up and running in a narrow window of time. That might be a typical challenge for any lower-budget production, but it wasn’t especially easy when the star of your film was on the cusp of turning 95 years old.
“June is incredible – she has so much energy and stamina. It never was an issue of her willingness to do the work. Even with some of her mobility issues, she was completely prepared, dedicated, passionate. I never thought to ask, ‘Is June up for making it?’” Johansson says.
“One time I remarked to her that every single angle or shot, you always have one absolutely perfect take. Usually it’s the third or fourth take for people. But for her, it’s the first that’s fantastic. The second, the third. And she said to me, ‘You know, I’ve been doing this for such a long time that if I hadn’t figured this out by now, I’m in the wrong job.’”
However Eleanor the Great’s TIFF launch goes next week – its world premiere at Cannes this past spring was one of the film festival’s most sought-after tickets, with a horde of hopeful, soggy moviegoers being turned away from the door during one rainy afternoon – it feels clear that Johansson won’t be asking herself whether she’s pursued the wrong line of work.
Unless her next inevitable sequel is titled something like Jurassic World: Midnight Velocity. Keanu, don’t get any smart ideas here.
Eleanor the Great premieres at TIFF on Sept. 8, with additional screenings Sept. 9 and 12. It opens across Canada Sept. 26.
ScarJo’s top 5 performances
5. Her (2013)
Warner Bros. Pictures/Supplied
It’s tempting to include Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World, another film in which Johansson is more supporting than lead, but her haunting, auditory-only performance in Spike Jonze’s eerie AI romantic drama is its own sort of spectral presence, lost in a world not of its making.
4. Lucy (2014)
Universal Pictures/Supplied
One of French filmmaker Luc Besson’s last great gifts to cinema before he became semi-cancelled is this truly unpredictable riff on Johansson’s Black Widow work in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
3. Marriage Story (2019)
More than the millions of memes it inspired, Johansson’s standout scene with Adam Driver in which their unhappy couple trade insults contains so many raw truths that it feels like the cinematic equivalent of an open scab. Given that she earned a best actress Oscar nomination for the role, this is of course a compliment.
2. Under the Skin (2013)
Only an outsider director such as Jonathan Glazer could fully grasp and then weaponize Johansson’s magazine-cover-ready beauty in such a terrifying, entrancing manner.
1. Lost in Translation (2003)
We might never know what Bill Murray’s movie star Bob whispers to Johansson’s deeply unhappy college grad Charlotte in the final moments of Coppola’s now-certified classic. But that won’t stop us from thinking about just how the two got to such a poignant point, and why its emotional potency still lingers today.
