Scarlett Johansson ‘Eleanor The Great’ Interview

Scarlett Johansson has wanted to direct since she was 12 years old. On the set of Robert Redford’s 1998 film The Horse Whisperer — her seventh movie as an actor — she saw the specific way he worked, the way he understood his actors, and she had a clear thought: I want to do that someday.

Obviously, in the almost 30 years since Johansson made that private wish, it’s not as though she’s been waiting for something to happen. Oscar-nominated twice and a Tony winner for her work on Broadway, she serves as executive producer and stars as Black Widow in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. She founded her production company These Pictures in 2017, and, along with Redford, her director collaborators over the years include Christopher Nolan, Sofia Coppola, Jonathan Glazer, the Coens, Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson. She’ll reconvene with the latter at Cannes, since she’s appearing in his latest — their third go-round together — The Phoenician Scheme.

Somehow, though, the right directing project never came along, until last year, when Johansson’s old friend Celine Rattray at Maven Screen Media gave her a script about an older, lonely woman named Eleanor who moves to New York after the death of her best friend. Attached to the film was 94-year-old June Squibb, the Oscar-nominated MVP of Alexander Payne’s 2013 film Nebraska.

When we sit down together in a New York photo studio, Johansson has just wrapped the shoot accompanying this article, and quick as a flash, she’s wiped off all the makeup and is back in her regular clothes — a chic but low-key jacket and pants. Her only adornment is a little jewelry, including her signature multiple earrings. She’ll shortly be off to another shoot, this time for QVC for The Outset — the clean, environmentally conscious skincare line she developed.

When I tell her I’ve seen the film, Eleanor the Great, she seems to feel something strangely novel, being a director putting her own feature out there, after so many years in the business. “It’s such a funny thing to have people seeing it, because I’ve lived with it for a long time,” she says. “I guess I’ve never had that experience of making something and not… It’s different. When you’re acting in something, it’s out of your hands, of course. Obviously, I’ve been working on this in such a bubble, that then to share it with everybody, it’s great.” She says this experience “initially felt a little nerve-wracking, but now I’m realizing, hopefully it will be widely shared. But it’s such a different feeling than waiting to see how a director cut your performance, or what their takeaway was from the work that you guys did together. It surprises me when people say they’ve seen the film.”

The Eleanor script had an immediate impact. “When I read it, I cried, and that almost never happens,” she says. “Sometimes you’ll read a script that’s really moving. When I read Jojo Rabbit, I cried. Sometimes a script will move you like that, which is extraordinary.”

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“I could see there was a great possibility in it,” she continues. “I thought, ‘Oh, actually, I think I could tell this story.’ It reminded me so much of independent film from the mid to late ’90s. I was a kid of the ’90s. I was working in independent film at that time, and I watched a lot of movies in that period of time that were throughout the ’90s into the early aughts, like Crossing Delancey and movies like that I loved as a kid. Richard LaGravenese made a great movie called Living Out Loud, and then certain Woody Allen movies from that period of time, too, that are films that I gravitate toward as just a fan.”

These Pictures co-producers Jonathan Lia and Keenan Flynn trusted implicitly her decision to both direct and produce. Flynn recalls: “From the word go, there was no doubt. That same day it was like, ‘OK, we’re making this.’ It was instant.”

Screenwriter Tory Kamen had been battling for eight years to get her script made and was surprised when Johansson enthusiastically came on board. “Scarlett, with all of her goodwill and her power and reputation in this industry, used that capital to make this type of movie where a 95-year-old woman is ambling in the city, and it’s a character piece,” she says. “It’s small and it’s not a very loud movie. That speaks volumes to the type of artist she is, and the type of person she is. These are really hard movies to get made: small, character-driven, independent movies where nobody kisses. And she committed to doing that. That’s the power of Scarlett Johansson. She saw a movie in my script that I didn’t even see as the writer, and I’d spent a long time living with it. And she elevated that movie to something that could be shown at Cannes.”

The film will premiere in Un Certain Regard, with Squibb appearing alongside relative newcomer Erin Kellyman, who plays Nina, a student who befriends Eleanor; Chiwetel Ejiofor, who co-stars as Nina’s dad; and Breaking Bad’s Jessica Hecht as Eleanor’s daughter. Johansson is, of course, no stranger to Cannes herself, having made her red-carpet debut there in 2005 at the world premiere of Match Point.

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Before Eleanor the Great was selected for the festival, Johansson had told Lia and Flynn, “If this comes together, my dream is to see June walk the red carpet at Cannes.” But at the time, she says, “That was just a pipe dream because obviously I was still processing our footage.”

Johansson has been behind the camera before, directing a 12-minute short called These Vagabond Shoes for the 2008 portmanteau film New York, I Love You — but this is the first feature she’s ever directed. And, on the face of it, an indie film about a nonagenarian might seem an unusual choice for the feature directorial debut of the highest-grossing actress of all time. But given a closer look at the way Johansson has moved through her career, perhaps her decision makes perfect sense.

“She’s one of the few people who’s been able to jump from genre to genre successfully,” says Lia. “She could go do a Marvel movie and then a Woody Allen movie. Nobody bats an eye. I don’t know anybody else who could really do that.”

“She’s a very decisive person,” Lia adds. “And that’s a really great quality to have as a director, and it makes our job very easy because we can go to her with anything and say, ‘What do you think? Do you like this?’ And immediately you’ll get the answer. I think that’s how she is in life, and also how she is as a director.”

That decisiveness has served her well thus far. Johansson could have allowed the industry to push her into the niche of “blonde bombshell” territory, but instead she has made choices that evaded specific definition. Among them, her deeply creepy role in Glazer’s 2013 sci-fi film Under the Skin, and her conflicted, imperfect character in Baumbach’s 2019 divorce drama Marriage Story.

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Then there’s the fact that she sued Disney. In 2021, Johansson cited the company for releasing Black Widow in both theaters and on streaming service Disney+. Their contract had determined an exclusive theatrical release, and without that, she would not receive her box office bonuses. The matter was eventually settled, but collectively, the world sat up and took notice. She had taken on an industry giant, sorted the issue, and would continue to work with them. She is an executive producer on the MCU May release Thunderbolts*.

Then came another example of resolve. In May of last year, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT 4.0’s new voice system named ‘Sky’, Johansson released a statement saying she was “shocked, angered and in disbelief” that the voice sounded “eerily similar” to her own. She said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had approached her multiple times asking her to be the voice for Sky and that she had declined. She also noted that Altman tweeted the word “her” when Sky was released — which she took to be a reference to Spike Jonze’s 2013 film in which she’d voiced a chat system. In response, OpenAI took down the Sky voice.

“She’s a f*cking boss,” says Lia. “She is fearless. She is uncompromising when it comes to her morals and what really drives her. She refuses to be pushed around and can’t be pushed around. It’s amazing because you’ll see these public instances where she’s gone after things or shut things down because they weren’t right. But then for every one of those, you’ll see five more where she could do it but chooses not to.”

At the time, Johansson told the New York Times that she had turned down being the ChatGPT voice because, “I just felt it went against my core values,” and she added, “I also felt for my children it would be strange. I try to be mindful of them.”

Now, asked if setting an example for them is what she has in mind when taking a stand and advocating for herself, she says, “My daughter, she’s 10, and she’s expressed to me before that she wants to be like me when she grows up. What a wonderful thing for your daughter to tell you… But I’m always so focused on my kids becoming themselves. That’s really important to me. Hopefully, I set some good examples.”

Kamen was in the middle of a West Elm store fighting with her mom when the call came that Johansson would direct. She collapsed on a couch and cried while her mom told everyone in the store the good news. “Then we immediately went back to fighting,” she says.

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Like Squibb’s character in the film, Kamen’s own grandmother Elinore had a best friend named Bessie who was a Holocaust survivor, and when Bessie died, Elinore moved to Manhattan and was desperately lonely. “She was learning in real time that nobody really wanted to make friends with a 95-year-old, not even another 95-year-old. She was looking to change her life, and she was met with silence.”

And that is where the story of the real Elinore and the fictional Eleanor firmly diverge, hence the differently spelled names. “I want to make that so clear,” says Kamen, “or I will be kicked out of the family.”

In the film, the fictional Eleanor goes to extreme lengths Kamen’s real grandmother would never have considered. Eleanor inadvertently joins a Holocaust survivors’ group, which reminds her of her beloved friend Bessie and her stories of her horrific childhood in Nazi-occupied Poland. Ultimately, those memories form a significant part of the film’s narrative.

Says Kamen, “We don’t have really too many films about what it looks like now, as these survivors are in the final chapter of their life, and what that looks like and what that means. It was an honor to be able to help tell some of these stories.”

Johansson herself is also Jewish, with family origins in Poland and Russia, and members of her extended family were lost in the Holocaust. Both Kamen and Johansson had been very close to their grandmothers. “We had a really natural rapport,” says Kamen, “both of us telling stories about our grandmothers who we grew up with, and how much they meant to us, and how it felt like that generation’s stories were slipping through the cracks as they were leaving us.”

“Eleanor, that character, it feels like there’s pieces of everyone’s grandma in there,” says Johansson.

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Kamen wrote the story with Squibb in mind as Eleanor, but at the time that was a mere dream. Then her script was found by Lucy Keith, VP of development at production company Pinky Promise. Pinky Promise founder and CEO Jessamine Burgum says, “We’re female-founded and run an all-women team, and we’re drawn towards this kind of story that’s around complex, multidimensional female characters.”

Squibb came on board just days after receiving the script and before Johansson joined the project. “I wasn’t looking to make the script without June,” Johansson says. “It had to be with June.”

The film’s financiers gave Johansson “full freedom,” says Pinky Promise president Kara Durr. “Everyone was on the same page of giving Scarlett full creative control of what movie she wanted to make, and she came in with such a vision and a very clear point of view. The DP that she wanted, Hélène Louvart, Scarlett was like, ‘That’s who I want to shoot this movie,’ from the beginning.”

Johansson felt it had to be shot in New York and she wanted to show her home city in a real way. But this wasn’t a simple task, and her lead actress was already 94 years old. “This is a particular film because it’s a complicated subject,” she says. “It’s a small film, but you’re still shooting it in New York.”

Looking back, Lia recalls one of the biggest challenges of that New York shoot was, in a roundabout way, Taylor Swift. “Funnily enough, one of our locations was right next to Taylor Swift’s house, so ironically, there would be paparazzi showing up when we were shooting. But they would show up and not pay us any attention, which was great, because they didn’t even realize Scarlett was directing.”

Johansson was conscious of the need for speed. “I had a clock because June is 94,” she says. “She was feeling up for making the movie, and I knew it would be a lot of work for her.” So, they moved at a lightning pace. “I got the script in August, and I was like, ‘We have to make it this winter.’ That was very stressful, like crazy, crazy stressful. It fell apart a thousand different times.” Then Sony Pictures Classics came in. “That was amazing,” she says. “I don’t want to say I’m a film snob, but I love Sony Pictures Classics.” And for the first time, Sony Pictures Classics and TriStar Pictures would partner. “The idea of working with TriStar was amazing, it was perfect,” she says. “I couldn’t have asked for better partners than Sony Pictures Classics and TriStar. Nicole Brown, our executive at TriStar, is incredible, a dream executive. I was lucky.”

When Squibb and Johansson met, Squibb immediately knew it would work. “Scarlett is so herself,” Squibb says. “She is who she is, take it or leave it, and I love that. I hope I carry myself the same way. I just think that she is so unafraid. She was very brave to say yes to it, and I immediately was taken with her and by her. I just felt, this woman and I will work well together.”

“Scarlett doesn’t ask for approval. She doesn’t, and she shouldn’t. None of us should. If we are working, we’re working, we’re where we are because we deserve to be where we are. And I think it is so important that she knows her worth as a person. It has nothing to do with being an actress, but she knows who she is. We talked about the mistakes we’ve made. God, everybody makes mistakes. But I just think she’s a brave, very strong woman, and I admire that. I think that’s what we are at our best.”

Squibb personally related to some of what Eleanor experiences with a move later in life. “I lived in New York for 65 years, and then I moved out here [to L.A.] about 20-some years ago,” she says. “And it was a big change. I didn’t come out here knowing no one, but it’s still different. It was all new and I was in my 80s when I did that.”

Despite her confidence, the New York shoot initially gave Squibb some pause. “There were things that made me think, wow, can you do this? But I always feel I can. I’m always that way. But I think I also questioned my physicality in the film, would I be able to do it?”

Squibb has a walking cane but says she doesn’t always need to use it. “I brought it to the first meeting with Scarlett. I had done [2024 comedy] Thelma without the cane, so I said, ‘I can do this without the cane, or I can use the cane.’ And Scarlett said, ‘Let me see you walk without it.’ And I walked a little bit away from her and she says, ‘Use the cane.’ And so that sort of set it all up from the beginning. This is what it was going to be. And it was great. I loved that. And using the cane was wonderful. I mean, I think, in a sense it gave her a bit of frailty that I don’t [have]. I mean, I’m always told, ‘You’re too fast.’ Even at my age, they’re telling me that. So, I think Scarlett saying, ‘Use the cane,’ it helped Eleanor.”

Johansson seems awed as she recalls Squibb’s energy levels. “She said to me that her friends, who are all around her age, some actors and people in the industry, are like, ‘Why are you still doing this? It’s so much work. Aren’t you over it?’ She said to me, ‘I always feel like I’m still trying to get it right. I’m still trying to figure it out.’ How amazing. That’s the curiosity of an actor, you’re still working on it.”

Johansson’s love for independent filmmaking is clearly a large part of her outlook. “Everyone that signed up for this film came to it because they loved the script, and they connected with the script,” she says. “That’s an amazing thing about making independent movies, it’s not like people are coming for this huge payday, but they’re really coming because they connect deeply to the material.”

The film’s action centers mainly around a friendship between Eleanor and an early-20s student, Nina. Kellyman — most recently seen in Blitz alongside Saoirse Ronan — was cast without first meeting Squibb. “I don’t really believe in chemistry reads,” Johansson says. “I don’t think they really need them. I feel like you know. Also, if you’ve got two actors that are great, they’re going to be great together. You know what I mean? Two actors that are great are going to have chemistry, because they’re good actors.”

Hecht, with whom Johansson had appeared on Broadway in a 2010 production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, would be Eleanor’s long-suffering daughter, while Ejiofor, who as Nina’s father is grieving the loss of his wife, immediately connected to the role. “I just found myself incredibly moved by this story,” he says. “And I think it’s rare for me to find myself engaged so much thematically. You can either get swept away in a plot, or you can get swept away in a single character’s journey, and that can move you and that can be an emotional experience. But really, I think for this there was something about what it was really pushing against and what it was really talking to in the human experience — that sense of isolation, of loneliness, of grief, and of hopefulness and the instinct to survive.”

From early on, the team was in touch with the USC Shoah Foundation, an organization founded by Steven Spielberg shortly after his 1993 film Schindler’s List. It’s dedicated to recording the experiences of Holocaust survivors — in Hebrew, the word “Shoah” refers to the Holocaust — and they helped to create an authentic representation of Bessie’s survival story for the film, and with the process of casting real survivors for the support group attended by Eleanor.

“Jessica Hecht helped us identify a couple of people, and Shoah helped us identify a couple of people,” says Johansson. “Rodeph Shalom, a temple we shot at, also helped us. Different people helped us do outreach to identify survivors living here in the city that would want to participate.”

“It was always very, very intentional that we wanted to find real survivors,” says Flynn. “And it took a lot of searching. People came from Long Island and all over and their kids drove them in, and it was multiple days.”

The group of survivors, now in their 80s and 90s, Johansson says, were “so incredibly patient. We’re sitting in this circle, and I have to say, one of the unifying characteristics of the group is that everyone there was such a good listener… They just continued to be present and listen to what everybody was saying in the group. I was really moved by that. Everybody was so still. Obviously, it comes from age, experience, and also empathy. The group had such collective empathy. It was really special.”

For Squibb, sitting among them, it felt, “probably as close to reality as we’re ever going to get on a film set, because they were who they said they were. And I walked into it.”

By the time of shooting, Squibb and Kellyman had become true friends offscreen. “It really felt like the line of where our characters started and where me and June ended, it was just completely blurred,” Kellyman says. “I feel like how we are in the film was how we were in real life, which I think just makes the film that much more special, because it is real, and I think you can see that it’s real too. Even in our downtime, we’d just be hanging out all the time because we lived in the same apartment building, and she would just leave the door open for me to come over and we’d have pizza parties.”

For Johansson, Squibb was a joy to work with. “She’s so capable in this way where she’d do one take, it was immediately great, and then she would make some adjustments and do the second. She would do maybe three or four takes, and then, every single part of her coverage would have a completely perfect take, which is crazy. But she would apply every note, continuity, any kind of dialogue change. It was just like, that’s how you do it. This is the only thing June ever wanted to do, it’s the only thing she pursued, and she worked at it for her entire lifetime. And you see that when you work with her. It has nothing to do with age. It has everything to do with experience. It was amazingly inspiring.”

Kellyman’s first scene was where Nina, upset, locks herself in a bathroom. “When I got onto set, honestly you could hear a pin drop,” says Kellyman. “It was so silent. And I was like, ‘What is going on?’ But obviously, Scarlett had just created that environment that was just very respectful to the scene that we were about to shoot. I came off set that day and was like, ‘Thank you so much,’ because she had created an environment that enabled me to do what I needed to do in that moment, and I felt safe to do so as well. The way that she handled that whole situation was just nothing like I’ve ever experienced before. She is someone who understands what it’s like to be an actor as well, I think it’s just a whole different experience.”

Squibb also observes that Johansson is 100% an actors’ director. “She would watch me, and she would say something to me that just opened up everything. Of course it was directing, but it came from the fact that she knew where I was, what I was going through at this point in my trajectory of trying to get somewhere. And I think that that is her strong point.”

Of course, almost 30 years ago, it was Redford that inspired Johansson to do this job her way. “He was so actor-focused,” she recalls. “He was so patient and would take the time to familiarize me with where my character was at that moment, what happened, where I was coming from in the story. He would tell me the story, the whole story, all the way up until that point. It was so helpful. It was so insightful, too, because I was also a young actor. I was working on a big film, and a lot was going on, and he would take the time. He created an intimate space in a big overwhelming production.

“I’ve worked with different directors that have different ways of working, of course, and that’s great. It’s great to work with all different types of people. Some people, you could talk forever about the work that you’re doing. Noah [Baumbach] is like that, or Spike [Jonze] is like that. I’ve worked with Jon Favreau, who’s an amazing, amazing artist, and is so both visually adept and then is so emotionally plugged in. I remember when we were doing Iron Man 2 and I was working with him for the first time, we had such a diverse cast as far as different types of actors. It’s like, Robert Downey’s work [is] very particular that way; Mickey Rourke is his own special animal, then I’m there and Gwyneth [Paltrow] and Sam Rockwell — very, very, very different kinds of actors — and the way they work are all so different. He was so flexible. I remember in a break, I said, ‘How do you do it? How do you know how to work with all these different people?’ He said it’s almost like being a therapist in a way where you understand the language that someone else is speaking and how they need to communicate to get what you need out of them. It’s about identifying that and adjusting yourself in that way.

“I think what I realized on this job is that, as an actor, that ability is innately in you, because my work has been with other actors for as long as I can remember. So, while you’re understanding some of the technical parts of it — I’ve never been in the process of sound editing, but that I can learn — but the other part, I think, as far as the acting, the sensitivity to actors, and what their process is, is something that I obviously have learned over 30 years. So that part is not necessarily absorbing how other directors do, but it’s kind of baked in because it’s a part of my DNA at this point.”

Ejiofor says, “If you told me this was her 50th film, I would’ve believed you. There was just nothing that was phasing her about the process in that way, and she felt very comfortable in her own style of directing, which is something that is not always easy to find. And I think that that translates into the film itself. It’s immediately clear that she’s very in control of this craft.”

Johansson’s care ultimately rubbed off on Kellyman in the best way. “I think she just gave me so much confidence in myself and in my capabilities that I can do this. I found that on my next job, I was like, ‘Wow, I actually feel OK.’” That next job? Danny Boyle’s hotly-awaited 28 Years Later, which Kellyman has seen only snippets of during ADR, but says is “insane. Holy sh*t, people are not going to be able… I just don’t feel like they’re ready for the storm that’s coming.”

Johansson has also recently been doing ADR on a much-anticipated sequel: Jurassic Rebirth, which was another of her dreams made real. “I’m a humongous Jurassic fan,” she says. “I have been trying to weasel my way into the Jurassic universe for a very long time, probably 15 years. The whole Jurassic piece came together while I was making Eleanor. It was the exact same time we were shooting.” She had a meeting with Spielberg and told him, “‘I don’t know how aware you are, but I’m a massive Jurassic fan,’ and he was like, ‘What?’ I’m like, ‘I am. I actually really am, and I want to be in any part of this film.’ It was so surreal.”

Johannson’s character is Zora Bennett. “She’s a member of the Armed Forces. She is privately contracted at this stage. She’s dedicated her life to helping other people, and she is worn down, to say the very least. We find her in a moment where she’s burnt out, and this opportunity comes up that’s impossible to pass up because it’s life-changing for her. I’ve had the good fortune to meet a lot of members of the Armed Forces. I’ve done several USO tours, and met with literally thousands of troops and met people that have incredible military careers… I created this character inspired by my time spent with people that have dedicated their lives to the military, and that ingredient is in there.”

In addition, she is executive producing and starring in her first major television project, Amazon’s limited series Just Cause. Based on John Katzenbach’s 1992 novel, it’s a reimagining of the 1995 film of the same name, in which Johansson played the daughter of Sean Connery’s character when she was just 10 years old. In this TV iteration, she is a Madison ‘Madi’ Cowart, a Florida newspaper reporter covering the final days of an inmate on death row.

And that’s not all. On May 17^th, she will host Saturday Night Live for the seventh time. Will she be getting her revenge on husband Colin Jost for his bawdy “roast beef sandwich” joke at her expense in SNL’s Christmas episode?

“Revenge?” she muses. “I don’t know if that’s the right word. Retribution? I have my sources. I’ve planted some seeds.”

At Cannes she will also appear in Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, an ensemble piece starring Benicio del Toro as a wealthy businessman of dubious means. “This is my third film with Wes,” she says. “He could talk about character stuff forever. He has the most incredible imagination, and he really loves all the nuance. And he’s so hilarious, he has such a great sense of humor. We just both laugh a lot together. It’s a different way of working than many other people that I work with, but it’s unique to Wes. It’s just great because you also have this wonderful camaraderie with all the cast, and he builds this whole world around the production. It feels like you’re doing black box theater or something.”

It seems likely that Eleanor the Great might be the beginning of a whole new directing career. “I would love the opportunity to direct again,” Johansson says. “I like the idea of doing all different scales of work. But I think the thing that I would have to be connected to would be this human element of characters that are complicated. I like the complications of human behavior. I’m interested in all the gray areas of that.”

For now, what better story to bring to the international community in the current climate than one of empathy and connection? 

“It’s complicated,” says Johansson, “because the film to me very much is a movie about grief, it’s about human connectivity, and it’s also about forgiveness. It’s also about the truth versus reality, and it’s also about who has the right to tell someone else’s story, or do we have the right to tell someone else’s story? There’s a lot in it. Certainly, Jewish identity is a part of that.”

Says Lia: “I think one of the things that drew us to this story in the first place is that it’s just a human story. It doesn’t matter what religion you are or what color you are… We felt it was a universal story. Even though it is so specifically New York and specifically about the Jewish experience.”

Of the Holocaust survivor stories within the film, Ejiofor says, “I think it’s always incredibly important to be reminded of periods in history where there has been a profound absence of humanity, and what the human cost of that is. I just think it’s necessary to keep talking and to keep communicating, to keep understanding that this is an idea of, when we talk about life, when we talk about loss, we’re talking about the experiences of a human family. And as a human family, we’ve gone through these extraordinary periods, horrific things have happened, horrific things continue to happen. And really, it’s reconnecting and understanding, and not losing sight of that. Understanding our human connection is something that I value in all my work, and it’s something that really sits in the heartbeat of this story.”

Now at last, Johansson’s hope for the film is about to come to fruition, as the prospect of Squibb walking that Cannes red carpet rolls near. “It really is a dream come true,” Johansson says. “She was there when she was 85. Now she was coming here at 95.” When she called Squibb to tell her the good news, Johansson told her, “You’ve got to make it an every-decade thing.”

It seems Squibb certainly has the energy for the trip. Ejiofor recalls attending her birthday party: “You think you’re going to go to a 95th birthday party and it’s going to be a slightly sedate affair, but it was an incredibly lively afternoon. We had to duck out and it was still going. She was right in the middle of it. It was tons of people, a completely crammed place.” He notes Squibb’s capacity for connection, her willingness to throw herself into new experiences. “She is just full of life and full of beans,” he says. “There’s just a great energy to her.”

As Johansson muses on her cast and the larger themes of her film, she stresses the importance of staying open. “We’re so affected by one another,” she says. “We can move through being stuck by connecting with one another. I hope that that’s how the audience feels when they see the movie… The world needs June now more than ever.”