Scarlett Johansson on Her Directorial Debut “Eleanor the Great”: “I Don’t Think I Could Have Done It 10 Years Ago”

Grief makes people do crazy things. 

And sometimes that includes moving across the country after the death of your closest friend, befriending a 19-year-old college student, and lying about your identity.

Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, Eleanor the Great, stars June Squibb as Eleanor, a 95-year-old woman who moves to New York after the passing of her dear friend. The film explores how grief spans generations, both isolating and connecting us. 

Squibb delivers a performance as Eleanor that portrays the all-consuming nature of grief, as she begins to lose parts of herself while trying desperately to keep her late friend’s memories alive. The film works to create a sympathetic version of Eleanor, while also showing how “tough” she can be on those around her.

“She’s a hard person to like,” Johansson says, describing Eleanor. “She’s very hard [on] her daughter, and she’s bossy, dismissive, and opinionated.”

Eleanor’s actions throughout the film are also morally questionable, but Johansson says she hopes audiences can understand “why she does what she does…that it comes out of love and loneliness,” she says.

Johansson says Squibb spent a lot of time thinking about Eleanor — “what she wanted out of life, her expectations, her disappointments” — to create a wholly complex character that becomes neither a hero nor a victim, but a realistic portrayal of a woman dealing with a painful loss.

“All that work that an actor puts into the backstory to make something rich, June did all of that stuff,” Johansson says. “So I knew that my job was just to capture it, and that actually, if you could see that side of Eleanor, then you could have compassion for what she was experiencing.” 

Johansson trusts her actors to allow their faces to tell the story. With tight camera shots on furrowed brows and tear-stained cheeks, lingering looks on a portrait on the wall or a hand stretched out of a car window, she allows the audience to experience the grief alongside the characters. 

“It’s plot-driven in some ways, but it’s a real character study,” Johansson says. “I wanted to spend time with the characters in intimate moments in the natural light.”

Eleanor the Great is minimalist in creation. Johansson allows the audience to spend necessary time with the character’s emotions in an easily digestible format that is both simple and beautiful.

“I think because the emotion is so complicated…I wanted [the film] to look uncomplicated,” she explains of her creative style.  Johansson says that she and her team had a shot list, but ended up just going “in and in and in” on tighter shots, because the actors were so “nuanced” in their performances. “It really feels like you’re inside their mind,” she says of the close-ups. 

Johansson has had a career in acting since she was eight years old, starring in her breakout role at 17 alongside then-52-year-old Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, and becoming a household name before she turned 20. 

“When I was really young, a teenager, I thought that I would act until I was an adult, and then I would direct, you know, that seemed like the most interesting job,” she recalls. “But then, as I got older, I think just figuring out how to get better at my job as an actor and understand it on a deeper level — that took precedence forever.”

It wasn’t until the founding of her own production company, These Pictures, in 2022, that she started toying with the idea of directing again.

“It felt like it happened at the right time in my life, and it happened at the time where I could read a script like this and know that this is something I think I could actually pull off,” she says thoughtfully.

As a first-time director, Johansson says there were some surprisingly unexpected aspects of the job. 

“Directing is a funny — it’s kind of a weird, lonely gig sometimes,” she says, reflecting. “I never realized that. As an actor, it always seemed like the director was…you’ve got the crew, and you guys are kind of doing your whole other thing, and the actors are kind of isolated from that experience. But the reality is, as a director, it’s like everyone is having fun doing fun stuff and getting together, and you’re not doing any at all. You’re just working all the time.”

But despite her occasional feelings of loneliness, she says she loved her cast and crew, and the overall experience was very “warm” and “positive.” 

“I also thought, ‘Oh, directing, you have all this extra time because you’re not in hair and makeup for two hours,’” she laughs. “But that’s not true either. You’re the first one there and the last one to leave.” 

Johansson’s hard work is reflected in the beauty of her storytelling style. Eleanor the Great is a sincere, heartwarming first step into the world of directing.

“I don’t think that I could have done it 10 years ago — I wouldn’t have had the confidence,” she says candidly. 

Johansson has long ago proven herself as an actor—her confidence as a director should only build after this debut.  

Eleanor the Great is in select theaters on September 26.

Featured image: SCARLETT JOHANSSON on the set of ‘Eleanor the Great’. Image: Anne Joyce. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics