{"id":802935,"date":"2026-05-17T13:36:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-17T13:36:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/802935\/"},"modified":"2026-05-17T13:36:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-17T13:36:13","slug":"james-gray-explains-why-scarlett-johansson-dodged-his-cannes-call","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/802935\/","title":{"rendered":"James Gray Explains Why Scarlett Johansson Dodged His Cannes Call"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tJames Gray<\/a> wants to set the record straight about Scarlett Johansson<\/a> declining his FaceTime call\u00a0during the six-minute standing ovation<\/a>\u00a0at the premiere of his latest Cannes debut, Paper Tiger<\/a> Saturday night. (The director dramatically shrugged as the call dropped while he and cast members Adam Driver<\/a> and Miles Teller<\/a> stood under spotlights in front of the entire Grand Theatre Lumi\u00e9re audience \u2014 in one of the great comic moments of Cannes 2026<\/a>.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI want to be fair to Scarlett, I didn\u2019t tell her I was going to FaceTime her! I thought I\u2019d get lucky, but she\u2019s working and all that in New York.\u201d Gray said, laughing, at Sunday\u2019s press conference.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe absence of the film\u2019s biggest stars, and arguably one of the biggest movie stars of this year\u2019s muted festival, had been a sore disappointment to the screaming crowds outside the Palais, but Johansson is busy filming the reboot of The Exorcist.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn Gray\u2019s taught thriller, set in 1980s Brighton Beach; the Gowanus area of Brooklyn; and Great Neck, Long Island, two brothers (Driver and Teller) fall afoul of Russian gangsters in a rapidly transforming city where high-stakes opportunities for riches also come with a high risk of life and limb. Johansson spends the movie in an unfortunate blonde wig and glasses, with a thick Long Island accent, as the wife to Teller\u2019s non-streetwise suburban dad, who unwittingly puts a target on his family\u2019s back.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tJohansson, having recovered from the FaceTime debacle, had sent a note for Gray to read at the start of the press conference, calling the experience of working with him and the cast \u201cone of the great pleasures of my career.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tCinema, she continued, in one of several references to the political climate at the press conference, \u201chas this rare and remarkable power to connect us to one another through a shared experience\u2026 That collective empathy is something we could certainly use more of right now, and my hope is that by making movies like this one, we can feel even for a couple of hours in the dark a part of the shared human experience.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOverall, though, the actors and Gray stayed away from controversy and overt political statements. Asked for a response to the claims in Lena Dunham<\/a>\u2019s memoir about his volatile on-set behavior on Girls, Driver responded, \u201cI have no comment on any of that. I\u2019m saving it all for my book.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAs the moderator moved on to the next question, Driver added, referring to the reporter, \u201cI have no idea what she\u2019s talking about.\u201d The allegations that Driver was verbally aggressive have been the subject of numerous articles for the past month.<\/p>\n

Asked why he set the movie in the 1980s, Gray cited a trip he\u2019d taken to the \u201cbroken\u201d former Soviet Union in 1984 and then seeing how the market became king there and in China soon afterwards, to what he believes is devastating effect on human integrity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe reason I set the movie in this time period is\u2026 that it was the beginning of the moment in which the market became God,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cNow, I\u2019m not advocating for socialist dictatorships,\u201d he continued. But, he added, that moment led to our political climate today, and young people who feel like failures if they don\u2019t have monetary success. \u201cWhat happens is you get someone like the current American president, who is a symptom of what I\u2019m talking about: totally transactional. You know, \u2018How can I make the most money?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs for struggles on the movie, Teller cited shooting in an intense heat wave in New York with no shade. \u201cJames shot an entire movie in the Amazon and he said this was physically just as challenging,\u201d he said. Driver recalled shooting the movie\u2019s best scene, a chase scene in a field of reeds outside of LaGuardia airport, during a lightning storm where they had to stop production every 30 minutes.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut mostly, the actors compared size. Height, that is. Asked how they felt about each other as scene partners, Teller replied, \u201cWell, Adam\u2019s taller.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI mean, I\u2019m a pretty good size. I\u2019m like 6\u20191,\u201d 190 [pounds.] Usually, I\u2019m the biggest person on set,\u201d said Teller. \u201cMy hand felt very small when Adam shook it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDriver confirmed that he\u2019s 6-foot-3: \u201cFitting in doorways is a challenge. Fitting shoes are a challenge.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou remember when you almost sent me to the hospital?\u201d Teller asked, in a moment no one would elaborate on.<\/p>\n

Driver said he didn\u2019t and joked that they shouldn\u2019t talk about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cOkay, I do have a scar,\u201d Teller said, to laughter. And the matter was dropped. Guess it\u2019ll have to go in Driver\u2019s book.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"James Gray wants to set the record straight about Scarlett Johansson declining his FaceTime call\u00a0during the six-minute standing…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":802936,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[76148,297566,185,171,1801,160307,33835,45567,63990,3390,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-802935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-adam-driver","tag-cannes-2026","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-international","tag-james-gray","tag-lena-dunham","tag-miles-teller","tag-paper-tiger","tag-scarlett-johansson","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116590188437209788","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=802935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802935\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/802936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=802935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=802935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=802935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}