The director Scarlett Johansson called a “better actor than most”
Scarlett Johansson has never limited herself since the moment that she became a star.
Lost in Translation may have been one of her major breakout performances, but she didn’t want to ever be defined by being one kind of actor for the rest of her life. There was so much more out there, and even after becoming a mainstay in one of the biggest franchises of all time in the past few years, she’s still trying to see what else is out there when the right director gives her something new to play with.
Because when you look at the kind of movies that she has made outside of the MCU, everything that Johansson has done over the past few years has felt like a risk. She is an absolute natural working with someone like Sofia Coppola, but when you look at the way that she plays an emotionally drained wife in Marriage Story, she seems to be doing everything she can to move herself out of the traditional Hollywood framework.
A lot of the biggest roles that she’s ever taken on might be there for a reason, but some of her most underrated work usually comes in between the bigger spectacles. I mean, this is the same woman who could bring genuine pathos to a literal AI voice when working on Her, and yet when looking at the story, you can actually hear her trying her best to toe that line between being absolutely robotic and putting in that tiny little bit of pathos to work off of Joaquin Phoenix.
But sometimes the best directors that she’s ever worked with are the ones who have a singular vision for what they want to do. Some of the biggest directors in the world are the ones who look at the bigger picture 24/7, and even if there are some films that have tried to do the run-and-gun kind of operation, Johansson felt that there was no one who had a better idea for what movies were supposed to be than Wes Anderson.
Anderson has one of the best styles in modern cinema, and even if not all of his movies have the same kind of structure, you can tell his style just from the way that he frames some of his shots. Whether it’s the lighting or the beautiful way that everything is shot, Anderson knows exactly what he’s doing, and Johansson felt that she would have taken a few acting cues from what Anderson was doing as well.
When talking about Asteroid City, Johansson felt that Anderson was one of the few people in Hollywood who could do her job better than she could, saying, “He’s probably a better actor than most. Better actor than me anyway. He delivers my lines better than I do.” Which probably explains why some of the greatest actors of the modern age have found their way into his movies at some point or another.
Asteroid City is already stacked with some of the best actors of the time, but even when looking through his earlier films, having people like Willem Dafoe and Bill Murray in The Life Aquatic and especially juggling every single performance in a movie like The Grand Budapest Hotel isn’t done by accident. This was someone absolutely clinical about what his movies needed and was going to do everything he could to make them work.
Not everything turned out well, and even Anderson has had more than a few movies where he had some regrets about everything, but Johansson was only too happy to see a master at work every single time she worked with him. He was never going to settle for less than perfect on his films, and every one of her performances with him was a new learning opportunity every time she appeared onscreen.
