Scarlett Johansson Reveals Strange Note on Her Directorial Debut: “Make the Lie About Something Other Than the Holocaust”
Scarlett Johansson has opened up about a surprising challenge she faced while making her first movie as a director, Eleanor the Great. She told The Telegraph that a financial backer questioned a key part of the story, asking if the main character could lie about something other than the Holocaust.
Johansson said the request was shocking. “I mean, if they’d said ‘I’ll only back this if you shoot in New Jersey,’ or ‘We need to get this done by the spring,’ then that would have been one thing,” she explained.
“But they were objecting to what the film actually was. It had to be about what happens when someone gets caught in the worst lie imaginable; if not the Holocaust, then what could it be? They offered no alternative. It was just, ‘This is an issue.’”
After the backer withdrew, a large part of the movie’s budget disappeared. Johansson said she felt disappointed after months of planning.
“We’d been talking about the film for so many months, and then this was the outcome? It was really shocking, and I was so disappointed.” She added that Sony Pictures Classics later joined as the distributor and covered the missing funds.
Johansson also shared why the story was important to her personally. “If I wasn’t Jewish, would I have known how to do this [movie]? I don’t know. But that was a factor in me wanting to do it: I knew this world, and I knew versions of Eleanor.”
Eleanor the Great stars 95-year-old June Squibb as Eleanor Morgenstein, a woman trying to find connection in New York City after losing her best friend. Feeling lonely, Eleanor joins a support group for Holocaust survivors.
When the group asks her to share her story, she ends up telling her late friend’s story as if it were her own. The film also features Erin Kellyman, Jessica Hecht, and Chiwetel Ejiofor. It explores themes like aging, friendship, Jewish identity, and grief.
First trailer for Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut ‘ELEANOR THE GREAT’, starring June Squibb and Erin Kellyman
— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) August 12, 2025
The film follows an elderly woman who makes an unlikely friendship with a young student in NYC
In theaters on September 26. pic.twitter.com/xpIhtwfyf1
The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 20, and was released in North America on September 26, by Sony Pictures Classics, with TriStar Pictures handling international distribution. Critics gave mixed reviews: Rotten Tomatoes reported that 66% of 134 critics liked the film, noting that June Squibb’s performance stood out, while Metacritic gave it a score of 51 out of 100, indicating average reviews.
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