The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Eleanor the Great.

Scarlett, how long have you been thinking about directing?

Scarlett Johansson: I’ve been thinking about directing since I was a kid, really, but the first time was when I was doing The Horse Whisperer, and I was working with Bob Redford and watching him command the set. He was blocking a complicated scene with our DP Bob Richardson and our first AD, and then alternately working with the actors in this really intimate way that I had never encountered before. I thought, that seems like a pretty interesting job. At that time, I figured that I would grow, and I would act until I was an adult and then I would become a director. But then as I got older, I became more interested in getting better at my job as an actor. Or at least trying to understand it in a different way and take on different challenges. Then I sort of abandoned the idea of directing because it seemed like, who would want that job? It’s problem-solving all day! But then as I began absorbing different experiences and moved into production and development, the idea of directing became more interesting again.

I just wanted to make her human

How did you get lucky enough to work with June Squibb for the lead role?

SJ: Well, June came with the script actually! Lucky for me.

June, what made you want to do this film and how did you approach the role of Eleanor?

June Squibb: I was sent the script and I immediately wanted to do it. It was something I felt was very important. Also, [screenwriter] Tory Kamen said she was going to write me a letter, but I said yes before she could give the letter to me! I immediately knew this was for me and this was a project I wanted to do. And then I was told that Scarlett was going to direct. We had a Zoom meeting and that went beautifully. I loved her. She’s very honest about everything and it was great. I knew we could do this together. I also knew it wasn’t going to be an easy thing for me to do, but I wanted to do it anyway.  

As far as approaching the character, well, in my own life I don’t like rules. So if you tell me I’m supposed to do this because I’m this age, then I say no, that’s not going to work! To me, Eleanor is extremely open with everybody. That’s how she can have that relationship with Nina. Erin [Kellyman] and I had met each other and really liked each other, so that part was easy.

You two have a wonderful chemistry on screen. How did you work to create that bond?

Erin Kellyman: Um, I think it helped that we lived in the same apartment building. I would be at June’s all the time. I would just let myself in. We had about two weeks before we started shooting, and we just hung out all the time. Then when you get to set, there’s a lot of downtime and I think in those moments you can really bond with each other.

SJ: Not that much down time! It was very efficient [laughs].

Nina sometimes seems like the most emotionally mature person in the film. What was your take on her?

EK: Initially, I could see that she had so many things that she wanted to get off her chest, and so many feelings that she really wanted to connect with somebody. She wasn’t finding that in her home life. When she met Eleanor, she saw her as a distraction that she could really focus her energy on. It was someplace to put her mind. When she meets Eleanor she’s extremely anxious and very insecure and she bottles so much up. By the end of the movie, she finds her voice. Reading that journey, it was very attractive to me to dig my teeth into this character.

She bottles a lot up, but not as much as her father does. Chiwetel, how did you approach the role of Roger?

Chiwetel Ejiofor: I felt there was something very truthful about Roger when I read the script. A lot of his issues that you see in the film kind of predate the death of his wife. I thought it might have been centered around watching a bond between a mother and daughter grow and feeling a little outside of that relationship. And then when this tragedy happens within the family, and he must step into the role of providing emotional support for his daughter, and that terrifies him. He doesn’t feel equipped to do that and hasn’t really built the strength of that bond. In a way, this experience of what happens in the film allows not only for him to explore his grief, but also to try to connect to something that’s deeper that was never fully there, the emotion between him and his daughter. All of that felt very honest to me. Those family dynamics felt very plausible without the grief, but if you then add the grief on top of that along with the ways people process that grief, it all felt truthful.  

There was almost a throwaway line about how much he used to fight with her mother when she was alive, and I feel like that’s pretty illuminating for the character.

CE: Absolutely. I think there are clues in there as to the nature of that family relationship. Although it’s not irrevocably broken, Roger does take a lot of responsibility for the failings in his family dynamics. He is empathetic, and he does care. The Fabric of New York segment is important to him because it does look into people’s lives and their connections and their family and responsibilities in a way that is positive. But I think it’s only through this circumstance that he’s able to find himself in an area where he is comfortable, which is sort of saving the day for his daughter when everything collapses. He wants to help his daughter by separating her from Eleanor and the lies. And it’s only in that space that he’s able to reconnect to something a bit more emotionally.

June, how did you reconcile Eleanor’s lies with making her sympathetic? 

JS: I just wanted to make her human. If the audience understands her, they’ll forgive her. We really have that sense of forgiveness at the end. We played around with different endings, but that sense of forgiveness was always there. There were so many positive things about this character that the audience was able to root for her.  

I read that you hired real Holocaust survivors to portray survivors in the film. What was it like working with them?

SJ: From the very beginning, it felt like it would be so weird to cast actors in those roles. Too thin or something. So then I thought, do you just cast people because they look a certain way? I don’t know how to do that. The challenge was to identify survivors that wanted to participate or felt they could participate in these long days. Luckily, because we were shooting in New York, there’s a community of survivors, a higher population than in most other places. Every time one more person joined the group, we would be so excited. Jessica Hecht, who’s extraordinary in the film, is very involved in the Jewish community here in New York, and she was able to identify a couple of people through her temple. The temple we shot at on the Upper West Side was able to identify a few people. Ellen Lewis, who cast the movie, was also able to find a few people that wanted to participate.

It was amazing. This group of people didn’t know one another, and a lot of them were activists, as you can imagine. They were sharing their stories with one another and making connections. On those days, it was so magnificent to be on set. Now you think, okay, I’m going to be in the presence of one person who had this experience, but now we have a whole group of people that have had difference experiences, and it was moving. We felt so honored to be able to have them. And everybody was so patient. Making a film means long days. They were all such patient listeners and actively participated in the scene work. I think it showed on screen. The portrayals of them, I think it cut deeper. There’s another layer of depth to those scenes because of their participation.