By Bailey Pennick
Growing up in New York City, Tory Kamen wasn’t sure what line of work she wanted to get into, but she knew she didn’t want to be bored. As she observed the people in her life, she noticed a pattern emerging among the working world adults. “They hated their jobs,” she says. “They were always bitching and moaning and all that. But my dad woke up every day and was excited to write.” She pauses, a smile lights up her face as she reveals her origin story. She’s undeniably funny, warm, and engaged. “He was just a writer — not a director, producer, or any of that. He wrote and he loved it.” Connecting with her father at the end of each day lit a spark in Kamen and continues to drive her as a screenwriter.
Even now, after getting her first feature-length script turned into a film directed by Scarlett Johansson — her directorial debut — which premiered at this spring’s Cannes Film Festival, Kamen refuses to get distracted from the work. Right as we were meeting, the 33-year-old writer was locked in on her laptop working at a table in the back of a cafe in Silver Lake, California. “There’s a lot of front facing stuff [right now] and that’s not really where I feel the most comfortable,” she reveals with a laugh. “Knowing that I’m really excited to get back to my computer when I touch down from France makes me feel so much better about the career path that I’ve chosen because if I were trying desperately to get to that moment of the premiere, or get to that moment of going to the fun party to justify all of the work that went into this, it wouldn’t be right for me.”
There’s a refreshing level of clarity and grounding to Kamen’s thought about her role in the film industry considering her father, Robert Kamen, has written some of the most well known action films of the last four decades including The Fifth Element and the Karate Kid and Taken franchises. While his passion for his work piqued her interest in the craft, it was her own discovery of independent films like Juno and Little Miss Sunshine and Sundance Institute’s artist programs that set her path. “Little Miss Sunshine is one of the most important independent films that came out when I was old enough to be watching movies and understanding them,” she recalls. “And from that moment, I was obsessed with Sundance and kind of thought it was like the pinnacle of taste and being…like, wow, there are a whole town of people coming together for these smaller stories that I adore.”
Connection through storytelling is essential to Kamen, and something that she has strived to create and nurture at every step of her career. “That just becomes the dream. You find other people that feel like you feel — like, want to be writing — and you realize that all of their dreams [are also] to go to one of these labs or go to Sundance, or just be affiliated with Sundance in general. From the moment I started writing [Eleanor the Great], I thought I would really love to send this over to [Sundance Institute] to see if maybe that could be something that I go through, like a lab or the intensive, you know?” She was accepted to the Institute’s 2018 Screenwriters Intensive in Los Angeles.
Eleanor the Great — originally titled Eleanor, Invisible — is the story of a 95-year-old woman who moves to New York City after her best friend/roommate passes away. She unexpectedly finds community and friendship in a Holocaust survivors group. The catch? She wasn’t a survivor, her best friend was. Very loosely inspired by her own grandmother’s move to New York, Kamen wanted to infuse what she loved about her grandma into her script, which focuses on the very thing she’s cultivating in her own life: community. As a fellow, Kamen found a likeminded group of artists as well as the confidence to trust her instincts with her personal and moving story.
“Sometimes I [have trouble] seeing myself as a writer clearly, but when you’re put into a cohort with other writers and you start reading each other’s scripts…I don’t know, I could finally see myself in a slightly different and better way,” Kamen grins. “It just gave me so much confidence.” As one of ten participants in the intensive (including Roger Ross Williams who was there working on Cassandro), Kamen was given the freedom to keep pushing on Eleanor’s story. “I had gotten a lot of feedback [before the intensive] on how to make it more commercial or how to make it more independent or how to make it this or that. And I knew there was a middle ground that I could take, and I felt very validated in meeting with the other [writers and] the mentors.”
The heart in Kamen’s story was undeniable and caught a hold of Johansson, who was so touched by its story of forgiveness she cried when she read it. The veteran actor had been wanting to step behind the camera ever since she worked with Sundance Institute’s founder, Robert Redford, on his 1988 film The Horse Whisperer. His generosity of time and advice on set inspired Johansson and that same selfless dedication to supporting artists shone through the creative advisors that Kamen interacted with 30 years later. It’s no surprise that this project came together with such care.
The final thread that connects Sundance Institute right at the core with Eleanor the Great is its tenacious lead, June Squibb. In 2024, Thelma premiered at the Sundance Film Festival with its 93-year-old action star, the iconic Squibb, making the rounds in Park City, Utah. It was a whirlwind for Josh Margolin and his crew, but no one was paying more attention to all the excitement than Kamen from afar. “I was following your socials obsessively,” she says with a laugh. “I’m watching all of your Instagram stories of June being carried around Sundance on ice and all I keep thinking is ‘Don’t trip! We shoot next month!’”
Kamen is joking, of course. However, she takes her career as a screenwriter and a storyteller very seriously. So when she says that she’s watching Margolin and co like a hawk through her phone, there’s some truth in there because her debut was on the line. And according to Kamen, there is no Eleanor without Squibb. “I just kept saying, ‘June Squibb!,’” she shouts, still slightly in disbelief that the 95-year-old actor is playing her grandmother in a film. “I had had a bunch of different names thrown at me… A lot of people were like, ‘That’s not a movie star.’ I was like, Well, I don’t really care… My dream came true the absolute moment she signed on. That was the most that I ever cried.”
True to her nature, Kamen is most thankful for the film getting made and being able to be part of that crew with Johansson at the helm. “This [film] is Scarlett,” she says. ‘This [story] is really personal to me. I love it. I worked so hard on the script and everything, but I watch this movie and I’m like, there’s Scarlett Johansson.’ She maintains a lot of what I loved about my script, and that was so lovely and great. But it’s the director’s medium.” Kamen’s understood the village mentality of filmmaking her entire life. Now she’s a part of it.
And with her first script out into the world, creating a community for all of those who engage with her story of belonging, starting over, and the power of kindness, Kamen’s back at the computer, doing what she loves.
