‘Manny & Lo’: The forgotten indie movie that led Sofia Coppola to Scarlett Johansson
Before Scarlett Johansson became the face of modern blockbusters or the voice of Spike Jonze’s Her, she was a kid with a heavy voice and a stillness that felt just slightly out of sync with her age. That distinct presence was already intact in her 1996 indie breakout Manny & Lo. A quiet, offbeat film by writer-director Lisa Krueger, in which Johansson played Amanda (nicknamed Manny), a runaway living out of model homes with her pregnant teenage sister. While the story doesn’t aim for grandeur, a feature most careers forget, it turned out to be a film that stuck out to Sofia Coppola.
As reported by Vanity Fair, it was Manny & Lo that first put Johansson on Coppola’s radar. No lightning bolt moment, no wide-eyed casting epiphany. “She always seemed confident about directing — since I met her, when she was 17,” Coppola said of Johansson.
Eventually, that spark led to Lost in Translation. At 17, Johansson took on the role of Charlotte, a recent college grad drifting through the soft alienation of a Tokyo hotel. The role required someone who could do everything by doing very little. Coppola wasn’t after a scene-stealer. She needed someone who could just exist onscreen: thoughtful, observant, and quiet. Johansson already had that quality. She didn’t need to push to be seen.
In Manny & Lo, there’s no hint of the career that’s coming. No prestige sheen. It’s lo-fi and awkward in places, yet Johansson holds the camera without needing to fight for it. She already has that strange, internal gravity, a performer who pulls focus without asking for it. That’s what stuck with Sofia Coppola.
When Lost in Translation finally came together, Coppola reached out. And the rest is indie film history. The film became a modern classic. However, it started years earlier, in that indie film that no one talks about.
What’s striking is how Sofia Coppola’s instincts proved right. Johansson’s performance in Lost in Translation is defined by restraint. She doesn’t deliver monologues, but instead, she observes. She allows Tokyo’s noise to fill the space around her. It works because we believe her, and even more so, because that quality Coppola spotted in Manny & Lo never left.
Today, Johansson reflects on that chapter of her life with a mix of pride and quiet defiance. “After Lost in Translation, every role I was offered for years was ‘the girlfriend,’ ‘the other woman,’ a sex object — I couldn’t get out of the cycle,” she told Vanity Fair. It took years to break free of that mould. Before the Marvel films and the Oscar nods, she was already carving out her identity.
Many people haven’t seen Manny & Lo, and maybe that’s the point. It doesn’t appear on best-of lists. It’s not a film that shows up in retrospectives, but for Sofia Coppola, it was enough to build a movie around and risk giving a lead role to someone still in their teens.
Some careers don’t start with explosions, and that’s how it happens sometimes. Not with auditions or studio hype, but with a forgotten tape, a strange voice, and a performance that doesn’t quite fit…until it does.
