‘Eleanor the Great’ Screenwriter Tory Kamen on the Beauty of Older Characters

Tory Kamen’s film Eleanor the Great may have been inspired by her actual grandmother Eleanor’s move from Florida to Manhattan at age 95, but it’s not a documentary.

“I don't want people walking into the theater like, ‘Wait, was the writer's Grandma a psychopath?’ because [the character] does some terrible things,” Kamen says.

Along with independent spirits and a shared name, another thing the character and Kamen’s real-life grandmother share: both had trouble making friends after moving to Manhattan.

“We would end up Skyping for hours, talking about aging and connection and feeling like a novelty. She found that people were really only interested in hearing what she had to say when she was talking about the past. What do you do when it feels like nobody cares about you, present tense, and what happens when you feel invisible? What lengths would you go to in order to change that? That was really the jumping off point. That was a years’ long conversation that I had with my grandma, and a lot of that is in the script,” says Kamen.

Those conversations led Kamen to pursue writing.

“Around the time my mother's mom passed, I realized I should have recorded more of her. But I had the opportunity to do it with my other grandma, Eleanor, and I have like a hundred hours of tape, which I didn't tell my family about until she had passed. We all got together recently and watched a bunch of it, and it was like she was there. It's just so lovely.”

She also realized how incredibly different her two grandmothers were. Her maternal grandmother was fine letting people help her with things, while Eleanor was stubbornly independent.

“We would go to like, Russ & Daughters [café] in New York. Her apartment was maybe 10 blocks away, so I would get us a cab, and she'd say, ‘I'm not getting in that. It's 10 blocks.’ And I was like, ‘I don't want to walk 10 blocks,’” Kamen recalls. “But she literally refused to get in the cab.”

Sadly, the real Eleanor was an early casualty of the COVID 19 pandemic.

“She was 99 she had such a great, long life,” Kamen says. “That whole time since she moved to New York, she lived alone, was totally independent, and she was completely with it until the end.”

Now, Eleanor’s spirit and legacy live on in Eleanor the Great, in a role Kamen wrote with nonagenarian actress June Squibb—who recently played the lead in Josh Margolin’s film, Thelma—in mind.

“All that crossed my mind when I was writing it was, ‘Will a 90-something-year-old be able to do it? But I watched my grandma do much more than June is doing in this script. I knew what somebody of that age in good health is capable of. I don't think that I had any doubt in my mind that she'd be able to pull it off.” Kamen says.

“First of all, this was the first script I ever wrote. So for me to say ‘I wrote this role for June,’ I don't mean it like I thought June was going to star in it. That's insane. But the moment I thought of the idea, June's voice was the one in my head. Over the six years or seven years that we tried to put this movie together, every producer I met with said, ‘Who did you imagine in the role?’ And I said, ‘June Squibb.” They’d kind of look at me and say, ‘What about X, Y or Z?’ And I just said, ‘No. June is the one that should do this. We got so lucky that she wanted to,” Kamen says. “I felt weirdly vindicated watching her. I was like, ‘Oh my God, all of those executives who told me that June Squibb wasn't going to be able to do this, or couldn't do it — I hope they see this. And I hope they saw Thelma.’ June can kind of do anything.”

Kamen also hopes seeing older actors delivering breakout performances will stop entertainment executives and audiences from underestimating older people.

“I love Hacks. Obviously, Jean Smart isn’t as old as June Squibb, but I love Hacks. What network is saying yes to five seasons of a show where the star is a 70-something-year-old? Yeah, that's a risk, but I would like to see more movies about people of that generation. We have such a wealth of amazing actors that we should really be using.”

That said, she doesn’t want to see movies and series that infantilize older people.

“I noticed that people would talk to my extremely smart grandmother like a child, and it made me so angry,” Kamen says. “I really didn't like when people would call her cute. I was like, ‘Oh, shut up. She's beautiful. She's not cute. She's 97 and she's taking the f-ing subway.’ That isn't cute. She lived through New York winters as a 90-something-year-old living by herself. This isn't cute behavior. This is really real and kind of brave.”

Kamen is currently working on a project she sold to Apple earlier this year.

Eleanor the Great, which completed filming this spring, marks Scarlett Johansson's feature film directorial debut. The film stars June Squibb, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Jessica Hecht. TriStar Pictures and Sony Pictures Classics will handle its theatrical release.