After three decades in front of the camera, actress Scarlett Johansson is stepping behind the camera. Her directorial debut, Eleanor the Great, will premiere out of competition next month in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes.
The cast features nonagenarian actress June Squibb—who recently played the lead in Josh Margolin’s film, Thelma—as the titular character, a 90-year-old woman (Squibb) who moves from Florida to New York after her best friend's demise. The rest of the cast comprises Erin Kellyman, Jessica Hecht, Rita Zohar, and Chiwetel Ejiofor, among others.
Eleanor the Great has a script by Tory Kamen, who based the titular character on her late grandmother who moved from Flordia to Manhattan at age 95. In an interview with scriptmag.com, Kamen shared that despite the real-life inspiration, she didn't intend the script to feel like that of a documentary.
“She was 99 (at the time of passing) and had such a great, long life. That whole time since she moved to New York, she lived alone, was totally independent, and she was completely with it until the end,” said Kamen of her grandmother in the same interview.
For Kamen, it's the first script she ever wrote. She recalled thinking of June constantly as the right person to play Eleanor when she came up with the screenplay. "Over the six years or seven years that we tried to put this movie together, every producer I met with said, ‘Who did you imagine in the role?’ And I said, ‘June Squibb.” They’d kind of look at me and say, ‘What about X, Y or Z?’ And I just said, ‘No. June is the one that should do this. We got so lucky that she wanted to,” Kamen says. “I felt weirdly vindicated watching her. I was like, ‘Oh my God, all of those executives who told me that June Squibb wasn't going to be able to do this, or couldn't do it — I hope they see this. And I hope they saw Thelma.’ June can kind of do anything.”
