In the film, Eleanor is a nonagenarian widow from Florida who relocates to New York following the death of Bessie, her lifelong best friend. As a child, Bessie endured the Nazi camps – and when the lonely Eleanor accidentally wanders into a support group for Holocaust survivors in an unfamiliar new city, she finds herself passing off Bessie’s memories as her own.
For a film which is ultimately an uplifting comedy, this is tough stuff, and is presented as such. It’s also close to home: Johansson, who is Jewish, learnt in 2017 that a great-uncle and his sons had perished in the Warsaw ghetto.
“If I wasn’t Jewish, would I have known how to do this?” she wonders. “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.” One was her own maternal grandmother, with whom she fondly recalls gallivanting through Manhattan as a child.
“She was tough and opinionated. She could be very kind, but sometimes very not-kind, too.” Her Jewishness was also “a big part of her identity”, says Johansson. “We were raised that way culturally on my mum’s side, and so I felt like I had an insight into that part of the story.”
Given the nature of Eleanor’s lies – which, smartly, are never actually shown; the camera always cuts back to Bessie’s own, truthful testimony – Johansson wanted to make sure she didn’t err in matters of taste, or worse. She seems especially proud that each member of the film’s support group is played by someone who, in real life, would have every right to be there, at a time when only around 245,000 survivors are still alive worldwide, and misinformation and outright denial is on the rise. They were, she says, “an amazing group. But it took work to identify people who were both willing and able to participate.”
The survivors’ dialogue was improvised, and inspired by their own experiences, Squibb explains. “There was nothing to learn for those scenes,” she says. “We just talked back and forth.”
Both director and star say they’ve long since learnt never to count their chickens in advance: indeed, it was only when they found themselves on set together in New York that it finally felt like Eleanor the Great might one day exist.
For Johansson, “even the bigger movies sometimes don’t feel like sure things. I always think, ‘This is not real until I’m having a bad coffee from craft services’”, she says, using the industry term for on-set catering. “Only then will it be real.”
“Until you’re having a bad coffee,” Squibb stresses. “She said it, not me.”
Johansson laughs and rolls her eyes. “Now craft services everywhere will be like” – she affects macho disgruntlement – “‘She gave us a bad name. Our coffee’s great!’”
One suspects she will weather the fallout just fine.
Eleanor the Great is in UK cinemas from Dec 12
