Amna Nawaz:
Academy Award nominee Scarlett Johansson is known the world over for major roles in close to 40 films over the past three decades. Recently, she became the highest-grossing lead Actor in Hollywood.
She’s now taking on a new role as director. Her debut film, “Eleanor the Great,” hits theaters tonight. I met up with her in New York earlier this week to discuss this latest chapter in her career. It’s for our arts and culture series, Canvas.
June Squibb, Actress:
Because we have been coming here every Friday for the last 16 years. Can you count to 16, Charlie?
Amna Nawaz:
It’s a celebration of deep devotion, a friendship for the ages…
(Laughter)
Amna Nawaz:
… paired with the grief that stems from sudden loss and a lie that ties it all together.
Actress June Squibb, who turns 96 this November, stars as Eleanor, who one day accidentally walks into the wrong room at her New York Jewish community center and ends up adopting her late friend’s Holocaust story as her own.
Erin Kellyman, Actress:
I was wondering if I could feature you in my article.
Scarlett Johansson, Director:
I have to approach my job with empathy and then let the audience, let them have their own feelings about the characters and what they do.
Amna Nawaz:
It’s the feature directorial debut for Scarlett Johansson.
Scarlett Johansson:
I hope that, at the end of the film, the audience has empathy for Eleanor. I certainly do. I think people are complicated.
Amna Nawaz:
Eleanor can be bawdy and brash.
June Squibb:
Say goodbye to Melvin for me. Oh, we had such a wonderful time the other night. He’s very strong.
Actress:
You’re so full of (expletive deleted) Eleanor.
June Squibb:
Yes.
Amna Nawaz:
And an imposing often grading presence on the daughter and grandson she’s staying with.
Actor:
She’s going to live forever.
Amna Nawaz:
There is in Eleanor this main character who is not there to compliment anyone else or play off of someone else. You don’t see women like that a lot on the big screen. Why don’t we?
Scarlett Johansson:
Characters like Eleanor in real life are often invisible in communities. Why? I don’t know. I think people are afraid of their own mortality and people that are aging are a reminder of that potentially for people. You know, and it’s like — I don’t know. I think we live in an aging society, and so there’s more interest, I think, in aging now than that has been in the past.
And I think movies like this film and Actors like June help to move that cause forward.
Amna Nawaz:
After the devastating loss of her best friend Bessie, Eleanor fills the void with an unlikely new bond, a college student reporter played by Erin Kellyman…
Erin Kellyman:
What’s it like being 94?
June Squibb:
I feel the same way I did when I was 16.
Amna Nawaz:
… who turns to Eleanor and other stories of survival from a Holocaust support group to help her wrestle with her own grief after her mother’s death.
June Squibb:
You have to talk about the things that make you sad. Jews fled Poland and never talked about what they went through. They just kept it moving. And there’s some good in that, but it can just eat you alive.
Amna Nawaz:
Central to the story and to the character of Eleanor is her Jewish faith, right, her relationship to her faith. And your decision in key parts of the movie to — as I understand it, to cast real Holocaust survivors playing themselves in some of those scenes, why was that important to you to do?
Scarlett Johansson:
You know, I never even questioned it. I just never thought about casting Actors for those roles. Part of it, again, was just the desire to ground the story in even a deeper emotional significance.
Several years ago, I participated in “Finding Your Roots,” and I discovered that I — I knew that I had relatives that died in the Warsaw ghetto, but I didn’t know the whole story of it.
It makes me feel more deeply connected to that side of myself, that side of my family.
He presented me with a paper that had — it was essentially like a death certificate for all of the people in my family that I’d lost there.
Amna Nawaz:
How much did you think about your own family story as you were telling this family story?
Scarlett Johansson:
It was impossible not to think about my own family story, because it lives within me. That’s sort of all in my own DNA, and all in all my memories, and so the film is infused with that.
Amna Nawaz:
It’s also informed by Johansson’s own relationship with her grandmother, Dorothy Sloan, a kindergarten teacher, arts lover, and inspiration.
Scarlett Johansson:
We had such a deep friendship and feeling a sense of, like, sisterhood between us. We talked about everything. We talked about our bodies. We talked about our family. We talked about our fantasies, our — we talked about sex. We talked about politics. Like, we really…
Amna Nawaz:
With your grandmother?
Scarlett Johansson:
Yes, with my grandmother. We had such a deep friendship.
Reading this script and seeing this intergenerational friendship celebrated and out in the open, it was so unique. It felt like something I wanted to explore artistically and something I feel like we should see more of.
Amna Nawaz:
That uniqueness is being well received. At the Cannes Film Festival premiere, “Eleanor the Great” received a five-minute standing ovation.
(Cheering)
Scarlett Johansson:
I felt like the ovation was, it was for the film, and it was also for June, I think. She’s so extraordinary in the film. And it felt like — this really feels like a legacy performance for her.
Amna Nawaz:
Tell me about working with her, what that was like, and directing her in particular. Does she take direction well?
Scarlett Johansson:
June is — I mean, she’s such a sharp, very sinewy Actor. She’s just — she comes to set, she’s been preparing for months, she has an idea of what she wants to do, and her first take is fantastic, and then just keeps getting better from there.
Amna Nawaz:
The 40-year-old Johansson’s evolution and dexterity have built a career most Actors only dream of, from child star in “The Horse Whisperer” with mentor Robert Redford…
Robert Redford, Actor:
What, do you have a problem with that?
Scarlett Johansson:
Isn’t it, like, obvious?
Amna Nawaz:
… to films like “Lost in Translation”…
Scarlett Johansson:
How dare you compare my mothering to my mother?
Amna Nawaz:
… “Marriage Story” and “Jojo Rabbit,” even extending to action films like “Jurassic World” and across the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
But directing was a dream she carried for years.
Scarlett Johansson:
Part of my work is, I read a lot of scripts. And I think, having done it for such a long time, when I read a script, like, I see I see the entire film in my mind. You know this film inside and out, and it’s my own perspective on storytelling.
June Squibb:
Me?
Amna Nawaz:
Johansson says she hopes the connective tissue in Eleanor’s story offers a window into her life and a mirror for the audience watching.
Scarlett Johansson:
You know, we’re all human. And I think I would hope that this story allows the audience to let go of whatever judgment that they may have of Eleanor initially and be able to reflect on themselves.
Amna Nawaz:
And, remember, there’s a lot more online, including a lightning round of questions with Scarlett Johansson, covering everything from her real-life superpowers to her latest Google search. That is on our YouTube page.