‘Lucy’ Star Scarlett Johansson Says Making The Movie Was An ‘Intense Experience’

Lucy star Scarlett Johansson isn’t afraid of a little action, but she admitted Luc Besson’s latest movie was a bit of a challenge.

After working her ways through indie cinema and a few Woody Allen endeavors, Johansson emerged as a butt-kicking action hero thanks to her role as Black Widow in Iron Man 2. Following stints in The Avengers and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, you’d think tackling something like Lucy wouldn’t pose much of a problem to the actress.

However, Scarlett recently told BBC News that working on Lucy was a pretty “intense experience.” Since the flick is loaded from top to bottom with high energy and plenty of action-packed set pieces, Besson certainly put Johansson through the paces.

“Even making it everyday, sort of, you know, brought on its own unique challenges because the character was losing the sense of her own humanity as she’s gaining all of these superhuman abilities. So there was kind of no guidelines for that. I never knew what I was going to be stepping into each day. The whole [‘Lucy’] shoot had a level of surrealism to it, I suppose.”

However, the Lucy star said she loved the challenge of working with Luc Besson on his latest movie. The actress told The Huffington Post that was deeply impressed with the filmmaker’s visual approach to the concept, and jumped at the chance to work with him.

“[H]e really came with this passion for [‘Lucy’] that he’s been developing for 10 years. I think he needed to meet with me to sort of describe the story and his vision for it because it’s pretty abstract. Even reading the eventual script, it was pretty sparse. 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.”

According to the number posted at Box Office Mojo, the collaboration between Johansson and Besson has worked out exceptionally well for the folks at Universal Pictures. The $40 million action-thriller has earned a modest $133 million worldwide. The movie will likely do well on the home video market as well.

While most people probably wouldn’t mind consuming a sequel to Lucy, Luc doesn’t have any plans for such an endeavor just yet. Of course, the filmmaker isn’t inherently opposed to the idea of sequel; just look at how many Taken and Transporter movies we have.

On the subject of Taken, Besson said:

“Every dad dreams about being Bryan Mills, and every daughter dreams of having Bryan Mills as a dad. After the first one, I couldn’t see how we could do a sequel. We decided to do a continuation of the first one. The first one the girl is taken, the second one they take vengeance. It’s one story. The third one is an original. It’s the same family, but nobody is taken. The dog is not taken.”

Did you catch Lucy in theaters? What did you think of the movie?

[Image via Universal Pictures]