Scarlett Johansson says she was asked to change her film’s plot away from Holocaust

Jewish Hollywood star says financier pulled out of backing her directorial debut, ‘Eleanor the Great,’ after she refused to rewrite story to something non-Holocaust related

Scarlett Johansson said in an interview published Saturday that she was asked by a financial backer of her directorial debut, “Eleanor the Great,” if the main character could be caught in a lie about something other than the Holocaust.

“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,” she told The Telegraph.

“But they were objecting to what the film actually was,” she said. “It had to be about what happens when someone gets caught in the worst lie imaginable; if not the Holocaust, then what could it be? They offered no alternative. It was just, ‘This is an issue.’”

Johansson said the unnamed backer pulled out, taking a significant chunk of the budget.

“We’d been talking about the film for so many months, and then this was the outcome?” she told the British newspaper. “It was really shocking, and I was so disappointed.”

Johansson said Sony Pictures Classics came on board as distributors, and the studio made up the shortfall.

“If I wasn’t Jewish, would I have known how to do this [movie]?” she said. “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.”

“Eleanor the Great” stars 95-year-old Jewish actress June Squibb as she seeks connection in New York City following the death of her best friend Bessie.

Feeling isolated, Squibb’s character, Eleanor Morgenstein, winds up joining a support group for Holocaust survivors at the local Jewish community center.

There, when pressed by the group’s members to share her story, Morgenstein tells Bessie’s story as her own.

The film opened in cinemas in September, and is available for viewing in theatrers across Israel and the world.

Reviews of the film were mixed, with The Guardian giving the film two out of five stars for seriously misjudging the seriousness of the story’s premise, while Variety called the movie, which received a five-minute ovation at its premiere, an “unconvincing crowd-pleaser.”

JTA contributed to this report.