The landmark movie that left Scarlett Johansson feeling “out of her element”
Scarlett Johansson has become a real sensation over the years, and having been acting since she was a child, she’s racked up quite the filmography. Most well-known for her portrayal of Black Widow in the Avengers series, Johansson has plenty of indie and less-known films under her belt, including the landmark Lost in Translation, The Horse Whisperer, Match Point and Under the Skin.
Her turn in more creative, off-the-wall productions by Wes Anderson and Spike Jonze and foray into the rom-com genre with He’s Just Not That Into You follow her landmark performance in the iconic Sofia Coppola flick Lost in Translation in 2003, which earned cult status not just for itself but also for Johansson.
The film, often cited as the reason for many people getting into the art form, sees Johansson star as Charlotte alongside the legendary Bill Murray as Bob, a fading movie star decades her senior. Bob is in Tokyo to film a personal endorsement Suntory whiskey ad solely for the Japanese market, and staying at the same upscale hotel is fellow American, 20-something recent Yale Philosophy graduate Charlotte, and her husband John, an entertainment still photographer, who is on assignment in Japan.
Charlotte is largely left to her own devices in the city, especially when John’s job takes him out of Tokyo. Both Bob and Charlotte are feeling lost by their current situations, which are not helped by the cultural barriers they feel in Tokyo, and after a few chance encounters in the hotel, they end up spending much of their time hanging out together, each helping the other deal with their feelings of loss in their current lives. The friendship that develops between the two may be just for this specific place and time, but it may also have long-lasting implications.
In an interview with Variety, Johansson said: “That set was the Park Hyatt in Tokyo, it was a fully functioning hotel. It felt like very much we were doing kind of guerilla-style filmmaking because we were a small crew, we just were capturing what we could wherever we could get it, and it was a really quick shoot.”
Johansson was very young when shooting the film, too, and she found obvious parallels between herself and Charlotte. She continued: “My experience shooting it sort of mirrored my experience in the film because I felt so out of my element. I was also 17 when we made it, the character, Charlotte, is kind of in that headspace too.”
While it is easy to see a face up on the screen and assume that, to get there, certain emotional and personal stability has been gained. However, any teenager thrust into stardom would have felt uncomfortable, but for Johansson, having only worked in big studio lots, being suddenly crammed into a working hotel in a culture she had never experienced before, it is easy to see how things could have gotten on top of her.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that Johansson felt this way, but going off her performance in the film, all of this seems forgotten. There are many reasons why film lovers still dote over Lost in Translation to this day, and Johansson’s effortless characterisation of Charlotte is surely one of them.
