Scarlett Johansson on why now was the 'right time' to make her directorial debut

Scarlett Johnasson has been working in Hollywood since she was nine-years-old, but it wasn’t until now she was ready to make her directorial debut.

“I don’t think I could have made this movie 15 years ago. This feels like the right time and I have enough experience to do it,” she told us of “Eleanor the Great.”

Among the experience she brought with her behind the camera, Scarlett said it’s all about transparency.

“I mean so much is kept from the cast and crew when you’re shooting and you never know why information is not shared,” she said. “It makes everybody feel like they’re not going crazy, they’re not working in a vacuum and we all have a shared goal and are working towards the same thing. That’s so important.”

“Eleanor the Great” stars fellow Oscar-nominee June Squib as the titular Eleanor, a charming troublemaker who finds herself caught in a lie that spins out of her control.

June was excited to work with Scarlett as a director because, “the main thing is that she’s an actress and a beautiful actress and she knew where I was going, she knew what I needed, what time or how long, she just knew. So, we didn’t have to discuss it. And I also didn’t feel pushed because of that. I knew that she knew.”

The lie told by Eleanor is particularly fraught and emotional, as she tells a story of surviving the Holocaust, a story originally shared by her late friend.

For Scarlett, the key to making the story of Eleanor’s well-meaning deception work was to contact real-life survivors and cast them in the film.

“We were really lucky to be casting in New York because there were, we were able to identify a larger group of survivors here that would potentially want to participate or could participate,” she said. “It was such an amazing group of people, a lot of them were activists and they were sharing their own stories, some were meeting for the first time one another, and sharing their stories with one another, it just gave even another layer of depth to those scenes.”

“Eleanor the Great” is in theaters now.