James Gray wants to set the record straight about Scarlett Johansson declining his FaceTime call during the six-minute standing ovation at the premiere of his latest Cannes debut, Paper Tiger Saturday night. (The director dramatically shrugged as the call dropped while he and cast members Adam Driver and Miles Teller stood under spotlights in front of the entire Grand Theatre Lumiére audience — in one of the great comic moments of Cannes 2026.)
“I want to be fair to Scarlett, I didn’t tell her I was going to FaceTime her! I thought I’d get lucky, but she’s working and all that in New York.” Gray said, laughing, at Sunday’s press conference.
The absence of the film’s biggest stars, and arguably one of the biggest movie stars of this year’s muted festival, had been a sore disappointment to the screaming crowds outside the Palais, but Johansson is busy filming the reboot of The Exorcist.
In Gray’s 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’s non-streetwise suburban dad, who unwittingly puts a target on his family’s back.
Johansson, 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 “one of the great pleasures of my career.”
Cinema, she continued, in one of several references to the political climate at the press conference, “has this rare and remarkable power to connect us to one another through a shared experience… 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.”
Overall, though, the actors and Gray stayed away from controversy and overt political statements. Asked for a response to the claims in Lena Dunham’s memoir about his volatile on-set behavior on Girls, Driver responded, “I have no comment on any of that. I’m saving it all for my book.”
As the moderator moved on to the next question, Driver added, referring to the reporter, “I have no idea what she’s talking about.” The allegations that Driver was verbally aggressive have been the subject of numerous articles for the past month.
Asked why he set the movie in the 1980s, Gray cited a trip he’d taken to the “broken” 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.
“The reason I set the movie in this time period is… that it was the beginning of the moment in which the market became God,” he said.
“Now, I’m not advocating for socialist dictatorships,” he continued. But, he added, that moment led to our political climate today, and young people who feel like failures if they don’t have monetary success. “What happens is you get someone like the current American president, who is a symptom of what I’m talking about: totally transactional. You know, ‘How can I make the most money?’”
As for struggles on the movie, Teller cited shooting in an intense heat wave in New York with no shade. “James shot an entire movie in the Amazon and he said this was physically just as challenging,” he said. Driver recalled shooting the movie’s 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.
But mostly, the actors compared size. Height, that is. Asked how they felt about each other as scene partners, Teller replied, “Well, Adam’s taller.”
“I mean, I’m a pretty good size. I’m like 6’1,” 190 [pounds.] Usually, I’m the biggest person on set,” said Teller. “My hand felt very small when Adam shook it.”
Driver confirmed that he’s 6-foot-3: “Fitting in doorways is a challenge. Fitting shoes are a challenge.”
“You remember when you almost sent me to the hospital?” Teller asked, in a moment no one would elaborate on.
Driver said he didn’t and joked that they shouldn’t talk about it.
“Okay, I do have a scar,” Teller said, to laughter. And the matter was dropped. Guess it’ll have to go in Driver’s book.
