Scarlett Johansson Says New Movie 'Lucy' Required 'Coming From A Place That Doesn't Really Exist'

In an interview with the Huffington Post, the 29-year-old actress said that while some projects are so dull they make her wonder “why am I doing this?” others make her realize “I love my job!”

“I think every artist has a career that sort of flows in that way. Mine, I’ve had those kind of moments of profound satisfaction at different points,” she said. “Certainly doing theater has excited me and fueled my drive, my passion and my curiosity for what I do. When I did ‘A View from the Bridge,’ it came at such a wonderful time and it was kind of perfectly placed in my life and in my career — I needed that challenge to help me understand myself better as an actor. And that’s happened at various times over 20 years.”
Johansson has undoubtedly become a better actress over the last 20 years, a progression aided by increasingly sophisticated mental technique. She can now turn nothing into something (emotionally), the ultimate feat for any actor.

“Sometimes you’re already kind of existing or free-floating in a story that you’ve constructed for yourself and the character,” she said. “I mean, it’s always nice to have the actual tangible thing to react to, but you’re already coming from a place that doesn’t really exist. Your emotions are there for what you created for the character, but it’s a ‘make believe world,’ in a sense — that’s a silly way of saying it, but it’s true. And I think the next step in that is [realizing] it doesn’t really matter what you have in front of you, or whether the things are real or not, because you’re in the reality of the emotion that you created.”
Creating organic emotion was particularly necessary for Johansson’s role in “Lucy,” as director Luc Besson (“Fifth Element”) apparently doesn’t like to write much of anything in his scripts. Plus, there was a lot of green-screening.

“Even reading the eventual script, it was pretty sparse,” Johannson said. “It was accompanied by a huge visual dictionary of sorts that he had put together because I needed those references to know exactly what he was imagining. This project is a conceptual one, maybe even more so than some of his previous work, it’s really coming from his visual kind of world that he’s known for and that he lives in.”

“Lucy” will hit theaters on Friday, July 25.