Scarlett Johansson says she was pressed to remove Holocaust narrative from directing debut

Scarlett Johansson has said she was pressed to remove Holocaust references in her feature directing debut Eleanor the Great , which stars June Squibb as an elderly woman who pretends to be a Holocaust survivor.

Speaking to the Daily Telegraph , Johansson said that during the film’s pre-production phase, one of the film’s backers threatened to pull out unless the plot elements relating to the Holocaust were cut out.

“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. But they were objecting to what the film actually was .”

In the film, Squibb plays a retired Jewish widow who inadvertently joins a Holocaust survivors group, and subsequently plays along with the imposture after r