Scarlett Johansson Lost in Translation (2003)

Scarlett Johansson was seventeen years old during principal photography on Lost in Translation in the fall of 2002 and turned eighteen during post-production. Sofia Coppola cast her on the strength of Manny & Lo (1996) and Ghost World (2001) and on the basis of her unusually adult speaking voice — a thing Coppola has described in many interviews as the practical reason Johansson could play Charlotte at all without the part feeling like a child playing a wife.

Born in New York, working since nine

Johansson was born in 1984 in Manhattan to a Danish father and a Bronx-born Polish-Jewish mother. She began auditioning at seven, made her feature debut at nine in North (1994), and broke through at eleven as the daughter in Manny & Lo (1996). The pre-Translation career — The Horse Whisperer (1998), Ghost World (2001), The Man Who Wasn't There (2001) — was already an art-house career; Translation was the picture that moved her into general critical conversation.

How Coppola cast her

Coppola has said she had Johansson in mind from early in the writing.

"I just thought she was so striking, and she had this husky voice and that kind of presence. I needed Charlotte to feel like a young woman, not a teenager — someone whose marriage you could believe in even if you weren't sure she did." — Sofia Coppola, IndieWire (2003)

Johansson was contacted in early 2002 and accepted without an audition. She has said she did not entirely understand the script when she first read it.

"I read it and I thought, where is the plot? Sofia explained it was a feeling. I trusted that, but I was seventeen, I was a kid, I had no idea what the movie was actually going to be until we were standing in the hotel." — Scarlett Johansson, The Hollywood Reporter (2019)

What the performance does

Charlotte is the film's structural center; her face carries the through-line. Johansson does almost everything with stillness — the opening shot of her at the window in pink underwear and a sweaterb2, the watching from across the New York Barb9, the long pauses on the phone with Laurenb5, the head-to-head conversation on Bob's bedb25. The Kyoto sequenceb23 is essentially a silent film carried by her face for several minutes at a time.

"Johansson is the picture's secret weapon — she gives Charlotte an interior heaviness that the script doesn't quite contain on the page. She's seventeen, and she's playing twenty-five, and she's doing it without any of the strain that age-gap casting usually involves." — Manohla Dargis, Los Angeles Times (2003)

The opening shot — sometimes credited to John Kacere's 1970s photorealist paintings — is the film's most-discussed image; Coppola has said she wanted a shot that announced interiority as the subject before any dialogue.

"It was important to me that the first thing you see is her, alone, looking out. You don't know who she is yet. But you know what the movie is about." — Sofia Coppola, The Criterion Collection commentary (2004)

After Lost in Translation

The post-Translation career was immediate and large. Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003), A Love Song for Bobby Long (2004), Match Point (2005) for Woody Allen, The Prestige (2006), and the franchise turn into Black Widow in Iron Man 2 (2010), reprised through the Marvel cycle to Black Widow (2021). She has been nominated for two Academy Awards, both in 2020, for Marriage Story and Jojo Rabbit.

She has spoken in interviews about Lost in Translation as the picture that changed how she was seen in the industry, and about the strangeness of having played a character several years older than herself in a way that became, retroactively, the version of herself the public first registered.

"Charlotte was older than I was. I had to imagine forward into being a married person who had just graduated from college. Sofia trusted me to do that. It was the first time anyone had really trusted me with the inside of a character." — Scarlett Johansson, Variety (2019)

Cross-Film Connections

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