NEW YORK – As a born-and-raised Manhattanite, Scarlett Johansson knows there are some questions you should just never answer.
“ ‘Where is the best steak in New York?’ ” Johansson declares with a laugh, seated with her “Paper Tiger” co-star Adam Driver at a Midtown hotel. “Are you trying to get us canceled? I’m skipping that question!”
Listen, it’s an apt query: A porterhouse dinner becomes the point of no return in “Paper Tiger” (in select theaters Nov. 13, nationwide Nov. 20), filmmaker James Gray’s slow-burn mob drama about a Jewish family living in Queens in 1986.
Late one night, crafty ex-cop Gary (Driver) shows up at the doorstep of his brother Irwin (Miles Teller) and sister-in-law Hester (Johansson), wooing them with exorbitant takeout from
Brooklyn’s legendary steakhouse Peter Luger.
"Our props department brought actual Peter Luger in," Driver says of the low-budget thriller. "That's where all the money went! We spent it all on steak!”
After a laid-back family feast, Gary pulls Irwin aside to rope him in on what he promises will be a low-risk, high-reward business opportunity involving a canal cleanup project and the Russian mafia. But wires get crossed and the deal goes south, putting Irwin, Hester and their two teenage sons in mortal danger.
Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver didn't know 'Paper Tiger' is a true story
“Paper Tiger” is frequently nerve-racking, from a bloody shootout in tall grass by the side of a highway to a chilling home invasion in which gangsters snap pictures of a sleeping Irwin and his family. At one point, mobsters hold the boys captive by knifepoint in a car, and later, Hester wrestles with going to the FBI as she secretly battles a terminal cancer diagnosis.
Perhaps most shocking of all: It’s based on the childhood of Gray (“Ad Astra”), who didn’t tell his cast just how personal it was while making the film.
“James never approached me and said explicitly that I was playing his mom, which was good, because then I didn’t have the burden of that,” Johansson, 41, says.
“He was very good about letting you take ownership and bring what you related to the character to the table,” adds Driver, 42, who plays an amalgam of Gray’s uncle and a family friend.
For Gray, it was important that the actors didn’t approach it like “some docudrama version” of his life.
“It would be very weird to do that,” Gray says. “I want something better and more magical than my own childhood – I want something transcendent. I didn’t want them to imitate my parents at all. Alfred Hitchcock once said that movies are life with the boring parts cut out. What you really want is these beautiful actors to be themselves.”
As a result, the film’s A-list stars infused their characters with their own family histories: Teller, for instance, says that he based “the physicality of Irwin” on his own dad, who hails from a Jewish family in eastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey. Johansson, meanwhile, shares that Hester’s thick Queens accent was pulled in large part from her maternal grandmother.
“It lives within me all the time; it's right at the tip of my tongue,” Johansson says. “Between Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, there’s not a crazy variation [of accents]. My grandmother was from Brooklyn and her mother spoke Yiddish, so she had all these Yiddish words that made it into her everyday dialogue. So that’s also a part of the accent: the cadence and the little ornamental things that go into it.”
Gray’s mother died of brain cancer while he was in college, and his father died in early 2022 of COVID. But filming “Paper Tiger,” the director says that he “repeatedly” felt like he was watching his own parents through Teller and Johansson. There’s one particular scene where Hester sends Irwin crashing through a table, after she discovers that Russian mobsters have snuck into their house and put their sons in danger.
“The fight that my parents had where my mother hit my father – these guys did it almost exactly as it occurred. It was eerie,” Gray says. "It was literally the exact behavior patterns of my parents, which was very strange.”
Reading the script, “it was one of those scenes that’s really the boiling point of everything tipping over,” Teller, 39, says. “You circle that knowing it’s this volcanic moment but also making sure that it feels earned.”
Why James Gray feels it's his 'job' to air out 'family dirty laundry'
Last month, “Paper Tiger” received two Gotham Awards nominations for best feature and outstanding supporting performance for Driver, who is considered a dark-horse Oscar contender. To celebrate, Johansson offers to host a party aboard husband Colin Jost's decommissioned Staten Island ferry, which he bought with comedian Pete Davidson.
"Any way to generate income for the ferry would be great," Johansson deadpans. "As long as someone's paying for it, that sounds fantastic. The docking fees are high!"
On a more serious note, Gray says that he was excited to share the movie with his older brother Edward, an intensive-care physician, at New York Film Festival in late September. Although his other films "Little Odessa" and "Armageddon Time" have autobiographical elements, "Paper Tiger" is the closest he's ever gotten to the truth.
"Our relationship is very important to me, and he's very supportive," Gray says. "I air a lot of family dirty laundry in my films, but I feel that it's my job to be honest about it. He understands that it's my job as a creative person to use what's at my disposal, even if it means sometimes exposing some of the family's ugliness.
"But it must be very odd for him," Gray adds. "My films have been shot sometimes within 90 feet of where I grew up. It must be like seeing a Beatles tribute cover band of your own life."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Scarlett Johansson wants a 'Paper Tiger' party on Colin Jost's ferry
