Scarlett Johansson debuts as a director in Cannes with a comic tale of grief and empathy

CANNES, France (AP) — Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, “Eleanor the Great,” stars June Squibb as a 94-year-old woman who, out of grief and loneliness, does a terrible thing.

After her best friend (Rita Zohar) dies, Eleanor (Squibb) moves to New York and, after accidentally joining the wrong meeting at the Jewish Community Center, adopts her friend’s story of Holocaust survival. The film builds toward a moment where Eleanor could be harshly condemned in a public forum, or not.

For Johansson, her movie speaks to the moment.

“There’s a lack of empathy in the zeitgeist. It’s obviously a reaction to a lot of things,” says Johansson. “It feels to me like forgiveness feels less possible in the environment we’re in.”

Johansson brought “Eleanor the Great” to the Un Certain Regard sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival this week, unveiling a funny and tender, character-driven, New York-set indie that launches her as a filmmaker. For the 40-year-old star, it’s the humble culmination of a dream that’s always bounced around in her mind.

“It has been for most of my career,” Johansson says, meeting at a hotel on the Croisette after a day of junket interviews. “Whether it was reading something and thinking, ‘I can envision this in my mind,’ or even being on a production and thinking, ‘I am directing some elements of this out of necessity.’”

Johansson came to Cannes just days after hosting the season finale of “Saturday Night Live,” making for a fairly head-spinning week. “It’s adding to the surrealistic element of the experience,” Johansson says with a smile.

In just over a month’s time, she’ll be back in a big summer movie, “Jurassic World Rebirth.” But even that gig is a product of her own interests. Johansson had been a fan of the “Jurassic Park” movies for years, and simply wanted to be a part of it.

Following her own instincts, and her willingness to fight for them, has been a regular feature of her career recently. She confronted The Walt Disney Co. over pay during the pandemic release of “Black Widow,” and won a settlement. When OpenAI launched a voice system called “Sky” for ChatGPT 4.0 that sounded eerily similar to her own, she got the company to take it down.

She’s increasingly produced films, including “Eleanor the Great,” “Black Widow” and “Fly Me to the Moon.” After working with an enviable string of directors such as Jonathan Glazer (“Under the Skin”), Spike Jonze (“Her”), the Coen brothers (“Hail, Caesar!”) and Noah Baumbach (“Marriage Story”), she’s become a part of Wes Anderson’s troupe. After a standout performance in “Asteroid City,” she appears in “The Phoenician Scheme,” which premiered shortly before “Eleanor the Great” in Cannes.

“At some point, I worked enough that I stopped worrying about not working, or not being relevant — which is very liberating,” Johansson says. “I think it’s something all actors feel for a long time until they don’t. I would not have had the confidence to direct this film 10 years ago.”

“Which isn’t to say that I don’t often think many times: What the hell am I doing?” she adds. “I have that feeling, still. Certainly doing ‘Jurassic,’ I had many moments where I was like: Am I the right person for this? Is this working? But I just recently saw it and the movie works.”

So does “Eleanor the Great,” which Sony Pictures Classics will release at some future date. That’s owed significantly to the performance of Squibb, who, at 95, experienced a Cannes standing ovation alongside Johansson.

“Something I’ll never forget is holding June in that moment,” says Johansson. “The pureness of her joy and her presence in that moment was very touching, I think for everyone in theater. Maybe my way of processing it, too, is through June. It makes it less personal because it’s hard for me to absorb it all.”

Some parts of “Eleanor the Great” have personal touches, though. After one character says he lives in Staten Island, Squibb’s character retorts, “My condolences.”

“Yeah, I had to apologize to my in-laws for that,” Johansson, who is married to Staten Island native Colin Jost, said laughing. “I was like: Believe it not, I didn’t write that line.”

A poster for the 1999 documentary about underground cartoonist R. Crumb, “Crumb,” also hangs on the wall in one scene, a vague reference, Johansson acknowledges, to her loosely connected 2001 breakthrough film “Ghost World.”

“I was very young when I made that movie. I think I was 15, and the character is supposed to be 18 or 19. When I was a teenager, I often played characters who were a bit older than myself,” Johansson says. “Even doing ‘Lost in Translation,’ I think I was 17 when I made it. I think I was playing someone in their mid-20s.”

“It’s a funny thing,” she says. “I wonder sometimes if it then feels like I’ve been around so long, that people expect me to be in my 70s now.”