@Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
@Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
Q: How was A Real Pain born? Did everything start with a trip to Poland a little more than 10 years ago?
Jesse Eisenberg: Sixteen years ago. The movie started basically from my curiosity about my family history. My wife and I took a trip in 2008 to see where my family was from, to visit the little town that they lived in, more specifically to visit the house that they all lived in up until 1939, when the war broke out in Poland. So we went to this house in 2008, I was struggling to feel something profound. It was something I always thought about: why didn’t I feel an immediate connection to my family history, even being in the place? This had stayed with me for a long time and when I started writing all those feelings flooded back, feelings of ambivalence about my family history, feelings of confusion, meaningless in my own privileged life in America, growing up middle class in New Jersey. A Real Pain was in some ways an exploration of me trying to understand my own modern life in relation to the trauma that my family experienced. That was the spiritual seed of it.
Q: Why was now, or at least the last couple years or so, the right time for you to turn this story into a feature film?.
Jesse Eisenberg: As soon as I arrived home from Poland, I wrote a play titled “The Revisionist” about a young man named David who flies to Poland to stay with his second cousin Maria, a survivor of the war. I performed the play in New York with Vanessa Redgrave. I always thought it would be so great to film a movie there, but I always had projects going at once that were on my mind that I was trying to finish. Finally, once I realized that the story of these two young men going to Poland to see where their family is from, this could have been a feature film because you can go on the road trip with them and it’ll feel like a full rich movie.
Q: This is your second feature as a director. What did inform your approach to directing the movie the way you did?
Jesse Eisenberg: Anything I write is character based. I wanted to tell a story that felt at once intimate and then also expansive. I wanted the audience equally comfortable dealing with the specific emotions and personality quirks of these two lead characters. I also wanted the audience to feel comfortable on this road trip, on seeing places that they’ve never seen before, major cities but also in the alleyways of small towns. I wanted the movie to feel like those two things in concert with each other.
Q: This is your second film as a director after When You Finish Saving the World. Both films were produced with Emma Stone, what makes Emma a great producer?
Jesse Eisenberg: I met Emma when she was about 20 years old, we were doing “Zombieland” and I remember thinking: “This is the smartest person I’ve ever met. She is so brilliant, so savvy. She’s such a great actress who lives in the moment, but at the same time, has this analytical mind for the entertainment business, for the way audiences react to things. She’s an uncanny ability to understand how to read an audience, understand how to make artists be the best version of themselves. She is good with notes, she’s good with casting, she’s amazing with marketing. She’s now producing movies she’s in and I see it as an extension of her understanding of this world and this industry.
@Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
Q: A Real Pain discusses not only grief but the different ways of processing grief. How did you work on creating Benji’s more participatory style of grief that demands attention from others?
Jesse Eisenberg: This character is basically somebody who just cannot hold anything in. He’s honest and appeals to the secretive part of all of us that is thinking something that we would never say. Sometimes it can appear as a kind burden, some indulgent need for him to express himself and demand that everybody feels the same. My character, David, doesn’t fully understand him. As a writer I myself don’t fully understand him either, it’s just somebody whose voice is in my unconscious. When I started to write I could write from his perspective even without fully understanding his motivation. I don’t know exactly how to explain that but he’s just my favorite character. I’m so glad that I had an unbelievable actor like Kieran Culkin embody it.
Q: What was the collaboration between you, and the casting director? How did you land on Kieran?
Jesse Eisenberg: One of the characters in the movie I wrote for my friend, Dan Oreskes, he’s an actor I’ve done a few plays with, and I love him. He plays his character Mark, who is kind of dismissive of Benji. Another character , Eloge, is based on my friend, who is a survivor of the Rwandan genocide and converted to Judaism. He allowed me to use his story and to represent him on film as a character. The real Eloge helped me cast Kurt Egyiawan. That was an unusual casting process for those two roles.
About Kieran’s character, I had written this funny scene where all the characters are guided by Kieran to come and take pictures on this big monument. A scene where Kieran begins as a little antagonistic and ultimately charms the group at David’s expense. After writing that I saw my sister that night and she said: “There’s only one person on the planet who could play this role and it’s Kieran Culkin.” I had met him a few times and he just struck me as this incredibly charming, very comfortable with himself, lovable person who also clearly is encumbered with a little bit of sadness and pain, his emotions are on the surface. I feel so lucky that he did this. It was a real gift.
Q: Was it an easy yes for him to do A Real Pain? Did he just say yes right away or was there something where he wanted to talk to him about playing Benji?
Jesse Eisenberg: He doesn’t like talking about the character at all. I tried to tell him a little bit about the character, but he wasn’t really interested. He had his own take on it. A year after he said yes, when we were actually starting to film it, I realized he had been trying to drop out of the movie several times because he didn’t want to leave his family. In the end he told his wife: “I’m so sorry but we’re going to Poland”. He’s just somebody who doesn’t have this driving ambition to be famous, he just wants to be home with his kids. I feel doubly lucky that he made this personal sacrifice.
Q: How did working with Kieran surprise you in a way that you pivoted to something a little different from what you wrote? How did that relationship inspire you to go off script, to improvise with him in ways that surprised you as a writer-director?
Jesse Eisenberg: We didn’t go off script. Kieran is incredibly good at memorizing lines, he didn’t want to think too much about it, because his character is so spontaneous. His method was basically like: I’m going to live in the moment. I’m not gonna overthink this man. It’s what makes the performance so brilliant. The thing we changed for Kieran was the way we shot the movie. I had listed this movie with my cinematographer, Michał Dymek, one of the most talented cinematographers of his generation. We had listed this elegant, classic, way to shoot the movie. But then when we got to set the first day, Kieran was questioning why we wanted him to stand in this certain place. So we took the camera off the dolly and just let him run around and we followed him. The shots weren’t as elegant, but the movie’s better for it because we were just following this spontaneous firecracker around the set.
@Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
Q: What was it like for you to intensify your relationship with Kieran during the filming of the movie?
Jesse Eisenberg: The relationship was something that I had been living with in my mind for two years since I had written the script two years prior. I love him and I hate him and I want to kill him and I want to be him. Seeing Kieran playing this character so lovingly, even when he’s being a pest, you want to slap him in the face and hug him and ask if his cheek is okay. All of those feelings I felt times a million. This is a movie that I wrote about my family. I was the director. I had hired everybody and yet I still felt so intimidated by Kieran. In the movie, he kind of bullies me and my character is in awe of him. It always felt like he was in control. It was a really surreal experience. I feel indebted to Kieran. He’s not so interested in acting. I don’t feel I did him a favor by giving him a role that he’s being celebrated for because he doesn’t care. I feel I owe him so much that he brought this thing to life so beautifully. It’s a character that, one notch too comic, becomes ridiculous and absurd. One notch too melodramatic is just boring. I just feel so lucky and I admire him so much. Our relationship in some ways still mirrors the character’s relationship.
Q: When you started to direct, did you draw attention from filmmakers you worked with before? What did inform your approach?
Jesse Eisenberg: Yeah. My favorite director I’ve worked with on a personal level was Richard Ayoade, who directed in The Double. He did a wonderful movie before that called Submarine. We were on set one day, I was playing two characters in it and the brilliant Sally Hawkins came in with a three-line role. Richard went up to her talking about her very small role. I was amazed by the conversation. He had thought about this character so much that she was playing. And I remember just thinking, oh, this is what a director does. This is what a director does. The director thinks of all this stuff to make everybody feel like they can do their best on set. I guess I tried to do the same thing. I cast this pretty specifically. I hired the crew pretty specifically. I wanted to make sure everybody felt like they were part of it.
Q: How did you come to shoot at that concentration camp instead of one that was more well known? How did you choose to shoot the scene that way?
Jesse Eisenberg: The question you just asked me is literally the conversation I had with myself every day. It is the camp that I visited when my wife and I traveled through Poland in 2008. It’s five minutes away from where my family lived. It’s literally four minutes and 59 seconds away from the center of this town by car. Those scene deserved its own universe, the sequence exists separate from the rest of the movie in many ways. There’s no underscore of Chopin, unlike every other sequence in the movie. There’s no interpersonal dialogue. You hear some descriptors of the rooms that they’re entering. Here we have the characters looking down the middle of the lens, trying to just bring the viewer, the audience, into their world, rather than observing them as characters. We shot it in that austere way. We got a lot of footage and used very little of it. The rest of the movie can feel emotional and weird, but this scene feels like it has to be done with the appropriate reverence that it deserves.
Q: How did you find the balance between comedy and drama?
Jesse Eisenberg: I’ve been writing plays for 20 years before A Real pain. This is just my taste. The tone of this movie is just my taste in fiction. It’s the novels I like, the movies I like. It’s this kind of tone where there’s some humor that is transgressive or edgy, I’m trying to explore bigger questions. I have had many things that had this exact same tone and for whatever reason didn’t connect with an audience.
Q: What was the most rewarding part to write or create with this movie?
Jesse eisenberg: The easy answer is that it was rewarding to visit the house my family lived in up until 1939. But it wouldn’t be an honest answer. The honest answer would be writing some of my character’s monologues about how I feel about my relationships with other people, talking about my relationship with my cousin, how much I envy him and how much he hurts me. It’s stuff that I didn’t think about since I was a little kid. The sad part for me in the movie is my character’s feeling of inadequacy. That was the most fulfilling part because I guess it was therapeutic.
Q: How do you direct yourself?
Jesse Eisenberg: I don’t watch myself in movies. I don’t look at the dailies, I don’t watch the final product. I sneak out of the premiere before the movie starts. Basically, we didn’t have enough time, it was a really quick schedule. What we did have enough time for was, instead of watching playback, doing a second take. I always chose another take. In a way, it was self -protecting, so I didn’t have to look at myself and feel self-conscious. I had producers and my wonderful cinematographer, I would just ask them. When I was editing the movie there were sometimes temptations where I was like: “I look ugly there. I don’t want to put that in”. Every time I had that thought I ignored it. I was making a movie. This is a movie. No room for self-consciousness.
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