Hollywood star Scarlett Johansson cast Holocaust survivors for her feature directorial debut, entertainment website People reported on Tuesday.
The actress-turned-director said that the survivors were selected to “share their stories.”
Titled “Eleanor the Great,” the movie features June Squibb in the leading role as a 94-year-old woman who moves to New York City after suffering a loss.
Jessica Hecht, who stars in the film, and the USC Shoah Foundation helped Johnson find the Holocaust survivors, according to People.
“It wasn’t really ever a question of whether we would cast real survivors,” Johansson told People on Sept. 7 ahead of the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival the following day. “It was more of how can we identify people that would want to participate, could participate.”
She was quoted as saying, “So, we got really lucky. Every time we would find someone who could participate, it was like, ‘Yes, we got another survivor.’ I think at the time, there was like 250,000 survivors living. Of course, every year it’s much less. So, we were able to identify it’s a community.”
Speaking about the film’s cast, Johansson noted that nobody in the group “had really done a film like that before. They really were just engaged and listening.”
The survivors were eager to share their stories, Johansson continued.
The renowned actress moreover referenced her Jewish identity, saying that when she had read the script by Tory Kamen, “It had elements in it that were familiar to me, like New York being a character in the film in a way, and the Jewish identity piece, the intergenerational relationships.
“That was something very appealing to me there. So, it had so many elements that I was felt very connected to. I felt I could film it. ‘Actually, I think I can direct this,’” Johansson told People.
Alongside Squibb, 95, the movie features Hecht, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Erin Kellyman.
According to People, “Eleanor the Great” received a five-minute standing ovation in its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
The film will hit American theaters on Sept. 26.
In February, an AI-generated video slamming Kanye West over antisemitic remarks of his featured deep fakes of 20 Jewish celebrities, including Johansson. Johansson sued to block the use of her AI-generated likeness in video content.
