Hollywood star Scarlett Johansson discusses the road ahead in acting

Hollywood star Scarlett Johansson said she remains committed to acting in projects she’d personally enjoy watching, even as she makes her directorial debut with the new drama film “Eleanor the Great.”

The 40-year-old actress stepped behind the camera for the first time on the drama film which follows 94-year-old Eleanor Morgenstein who moves to New York after years living with her late best friend many States away to live with her daughter and forms an unlikely friendship with a 19-year-old journalism student. Johansson will be seen on screen in the upcoming film “Jurassic World Rebirth” as covert operative Zora Bennett and, although she found directing to be creatively rewarding, she still is up for roles in the right movies, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

The actress specifically wants to star in films that have the potential to attract audiences to the cinema.

In an interview with Collider, she said: “My intention is to work on projects I would go and see, whether they’re like ‘Jurassic World’ or this film.

“The commerciality of things is also important to me, too. Would audiences want to see this, too? Is this generally interesting? Those are things I look for and focus on and care about. So, we’ll see, I guess. I’m certainly still an actor for hire — I want that to be widely printed.”

Johansson screened ‘Eleanor the Great’ at the Cannes Film Festival and she has said she shed many tears when directing on set because of the movie’s emotional story.

The ‘Black Widow’ star hopes the film will have the same effect on audiences as she learned long ago that it is a powerful thing to be able to cry over a movie in public.

Scarlett said: “The script made me cry, and so I knew there would be potential for tears, of course. Then, to cut it together - I’ve seen it a bajillion times, and it still makes me cry. It touches me in different moments. I love to cry in movies. When I was younger, I was a teenager, I used to stop myself from crying, and it was so painful. I think the greatest physical pain is holding in a cry. It hurts so much. Then, at some point in my life, I was like, ‘What am I doing? I’m just going to let loose and cry in this theatre.’ It was so liberating.

“It feels so good to cry in a theatre with a whole bunch of people.”

For Scarlett, humour is a huge part of her life, and said that she couldn’t imagine “being with somebody who wasn’t funny”. The Hollywood star, who is married to comedian Colin Jost, told Collider: “My husband’s a comedy writer, and I couldn’t imagine ever being with somebody who wasn’t funny. I grew up in a very funny household.”

Indo-Asian News Service