Scarlett Johansson: Movie backer asked if character could lie about something other than Holocaust

Scarlett Johansson says she was asked by a financial backer to her directorial debut “Eleanor the Great,” if the main character could be caught in a lie about something other than the Holocaust.

“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 tells The Telegraph.

“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.’”

Johansson says the backer pulled out, taking a significant chunk of the budget.

“We’d been talking about the film for so many months, and then this was the outcome?” she tells the British newspaper. “It was really shocking, and I was so disappointed.” Johansson says Sony Pictures Classics came on board as distributors, and the studio made up the shortfall.

“If I wasn’t Jewish, would I have known how to do this [movie]?” she says. “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 Jewish actress June Squibb as she seeks connection in New York City following the death of her best friend Bessie.

Feeling isolated, Squibb’s character, Eleanor Morgenstein, winds up joining a support group for Holocaust survivors at the local Jewish community center.

There, when pressed by the group’s members to share her story, Morgenstein tells Bessie’s story as her own.

JTA contributed to this report.