James Gray was sure Scarlett Johansson would say no. “I didn’t think Scarlett Johansson had any interest in working with me on any level,” the acclaimed filmmaker says. “I don’t even know if she’s aware of this, but multiple times, I wanted to work with her. I’ve been kind of obsessed with working with Scarlett for a long time so I had total pessimism about it.” Listening in on an adjacent Zoom box, Johansson nods while holding her poker face like only great actors can. Then, when it’s her turn to respond, she smirks: “I won’t comment on the pessimism part…but James and I have met before to discuss different things, so he’s actually not being totally forthcoming. He did know that I was interested.” 

Gray clarifies: “I was extremely nervous. I was terrified that she was going to think it’s preposterous and silly.”

Then Johansson read the script for Paper Tiger, which debuts this weekend in Cannes. “I was like, ‘Oh, I know I can do this. I don’t necessarily know how I’m going to do it, but I know that there’s something here that I can do and that I can be additive,’” she says. “It had so many elements that I loved. It’s a big story inside of a small story.”

Johansson has made a habit of effortlessly mixing fizzy tentpole fare such as Jurassic World: Rebirth and Mike Flanagan’s upcoming take on The Exorcist — currently filming, and thereby preventing Johansson from attending the Paper Tiger premiere on the Croisette, she says — with challenging, chewy auteur-driven projects from the likes of Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson. Paper Tiger falls firmly in the latter category. 

The drama stars Johansson and Miles Teller as Hester and Irwin Pearl, parents to two boys in late ‘80s New York, holding tight to the flicker of dreams, new and old, for bigger lives, as well as the crushing weight of the sense that they might be fading away. Irwin gets drawn into a sketchy new moneymaking scheme with his suave brother Gary (Adam Driver), leading to an unsettling encounter that places the family in serious danger. 

Hester is the heart of this story: A stay-at-home mom determined to fight for more — and left to contend with a narrower set of options once tragic news sets in. “I liked the idea of Hester being feminine and soft and graceful because she has a lot of chutzpah inside her,” Johansson says. The star speaks with a movingly affectionate understanding of the character: “She loves fashion magazines and going to the movies — she loves romantic comedies and all things romantic — and window shopping. All of those things are such an important part of who she is and how she presents herself. She should be in the middle of her life and striving for more — vivacious and full of life. That’s how I envisioned her.” 

Her approach hits its most poignant register, then, as bad news piles up: “Women give up their dream for their husband and take a step back, and the dream becomes more of a dream for their family. It’s so common. I’ve seen it in my friends, I’ve seen it in my family. I just know in my bones what that is — there’s a sadness about it and a beauty about it. It’s such a bittersweet thing.”

Paper Tiger is rich with the texture of life, and even as its suspenseful crime-drama architecture harkens back to Gray’s earlier work, the vivid, period-specific family portraiture is the main attraction here, showcasing his evolution behind the camera. “To be very pretentious about it, the intention was to try to make a very classical drama. The bonds of the film are both marital and familial, father and mother and son, two brothers, mother and daughter — it’s about very elemental bonds of human relationships,” Gray says. “People sometimes shit on that idea, ‘classical’ — they equate it with ‘old-fashioned,’ but the two are not the same thing. Internal conflict, struggle, love, emotion — that is never old-fashioned. That’s beautiful, that’s what it means to be a human being, and the minute that gets old-fashioned, you may as well just raise the white flag.”

Gray has long advocated for supporting this scope of cinema for theaters — Neon acquired U.S. rights just as its Cannes selection was announced — and has only leaned in more as his career has progressed. He went into Paper Tiger with a crucial question for himself: “How do you make a movie where the whole point of it is the expression of love?” Johansson proved crucial in answering that through her performance. Long heralded for her naturalistic work in dramas like Marriage Story and Lost in Translation, the two-time Oscar nominee goes big and loud in Paper Tiger. The accent is thick, the curls are curling, the emotion runs hot in all directions. Yet every choice is fully rooted in the material — the “layers of history” within the script, as she puts it, and the memories and sounds and images of Johansson’s own family.

“The voice is so familiar to me — I grew up in New York and my mom was from the Bronx and my grandmother was from Brownsville and my grandfather was from Coney Island,” she says. “The neighborhoods, humor, irony, all of that, is fun to express because it’s part of the fabric of who I am culturally and where I come from. Even my grandmother, Dorothy, her mother spoke Yiddish only to her, and there’s a real musicality to the dialect that’s so specific.”

From day one, she embraced that quality — a handful of times, she admits, in excess: “James would sometimes say to me, ‘It’s too much: You’re not a yenta from Brownsville!’”

Gray puts up a finger, smiles and waits his turn to respond. “Scarlett would never do something that wasn’t real,” he explains. “You have to be careful because it can be totally real, but it will fall outside the realm of the language of the movie.” He and Johansson felt totally in sync as they modulated the tone. “You’re supposed to say this stuff, but I couldn’t be more sincere when I say one of the really great joys I’ve ever had as a director was working with Scarlett,” he says. “I don’t have to tell her how to come at a scene — she knows what to do.” Johansson adds of their process, “It’s not too studied. There’s room to play, and it’s such a joy to be able to work like that.”

Gray has worked with a ton of decorated actors over the years, including Oscar winners Joaquin Phoenix, Anthony Hopkins, Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow, Charlize Theron, Marion Cotillard and Anne Hathaway (who was originally supposed to star in Paper Tiger opposite Jeremy Strong, in a reunion from Gray’s previous feature Armageddon Time; scheduling problems led to the recastings). In these stacked ensembles, he has seen it all.

“I made a picture once with — well, I won’t say, but two actors who were competing over one another, in this phase of their careers, and it became completely ugly and ridiculous,” Gray teases. “I’ve had all kinds of weird circumstances, but Paper Tiger was very much a dream.” 

Johansson shares only a handful of scenes with her Marriage Story co-star Driver — “I would’ve loved to have had even more scenework with him, I love working with him,” she says — but grew close to Teller: “He’s so unexpectedly tender. I went away for a couple of weeks to do the press for Jurassic — I felt crazy to leave, but I had to go — and when I was gone, I’d get photographs of my makeup station from Miles and he’d be like, ‘Where’s Hester?’”

Teller was not alone. Johansson made her mark on that set, in large part through her indelible characterization. “Scarlett’s last day on set was just about one of the hardest days I’ve had — I was so sad,” Gray says. “When you make an emotional investment in something — and the major thread is to communicate love and sympathy, which is what we hoped that the film would convey — you feel yourself feeling the same thing as when you watch those actors on a daily basis…. It took me a long time to get over it. Maybe that’s too corny, I don’t know. But it is true. It took me a long time.”

**

Paper Tiger premieres May 16 at the Cannes Film Festival. Stay tuned for more Cannes 2026 first looks and exclusives.