Filmmaker Jesse Eisenberg had a revelation during his first trip to Poland in 2007. Had his family not been displaced by World War II, he would have grown up there. Pondering what his life might have been like ultimately inspired his play The Revisionist, which debuted off-Broadway in 2013. Eisenberg starred as David, a young American novelist visiting Maria, his Polish cousin, played by Vanessa Redgrave. After much soul-searching and wrestling with complex questions about his family’s past—along with an online advertisement boasting “Holocaust tours (with lunch)”—Eisenberg developed the framework for his latest film.
A Real Pain follows odd-couple cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) on a heritage tour of Poland, where they plan to honor their late grandmother. The duo’s discord reaches a turning point as they attempt to reconcile their own struggles against the backdrop of family history and historical trauma. Comedic and deeply thought-provoking, Eisenberg based aspects of the film on his family’s own personal history, even filming a scene at the apartment his family fled in 1938. Many of the places Eisenberg visited during that initial trip ultimately became filming locations more than fifteen years later.
The Oscar-nominated actor made his directorial debut in 2022 with When You Finish Saving the World (based on his Audible original of the same name), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. A Real Pain brought him back to the festival this year, where his sophomore feature earned him the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. It’s not the first time a film starring Eisenberg received this honor; Noah Baumbach won the prize in 2005 for The Squid and the Whale, one of Eisenberg’s early breakthrough roles.
As A Real Pain arrives in theaters this fall from Searchlight Pictures, Boxoffice Pro sat down with Eisenberg to discuss the inspiration behind the story, the cameo appearance of his adopted town (Bloomington, Indiana), and how wearing multiple hats—as writer, director, actor, and producer—has given him a helpful way to approach his work.
The inspiration for the film and its themes have been on your mind for a long time. What was your experience like revisiting places specific to your own family history as filming locations?
I had this very anticlimactic, noncathartic experience. We were filming, literally, at the house that my grandparents, my great aunt, and cousins lived in, in this small town of Krasnystaw, Poland. I visited before on my own and was always kind of struck by these great, big thoughts. “Had things been slightly different, I would have lived here.” Kind of existential thoughts. When we were filming there, I had the exact opposite experience, which was just, “We have to make sure that we get the shot before it rains.” It was supposed to rain that day, and then before it rained, it was too sunny. Kieran couldn’t see because where he was standing, he was looking into the sun. So when I was actually filming there, instead of having this kind of great, coming home, cathartic moment, it was really just about, “How can we finish this day?” It taught me this strange lesson: a movie set is always going to feel like a movie set, regardless of the content.
This is the first time you’ve had the challenge of wearing both director and actor hats at the same time for a film. That seems like a hard gear shift back and forth between the two. How was that experience for you?
In a way, it was very helpful to not have any downtime. I’m somebody who gets caught up in my thoughts in ways that are not helpful. So for me to be able to move quickly from acting in the shot to setting up the next shot, or from acting in the shot to talking to the other actors about what they’ll be doing, was very helpful for me. I’m currently working on a movie called Now You See Me 3 and, as you can imagine, with a movie like this, a big Hollywood movie, I have a lot of downtime between scenes, because they’re setting up these massive sets and huge equipment. And I just start going into my own head about not doing a good job as an actor. So when I was directing the movie, I felt, at all times, busy in a more healthy way.
Things are being asked of you at all times in that situation.
Yeah, there’s really no time to even panic.
Speaking of wearing hats and panicking, there’s a moment in the film where your hat blows off. For those aware of your long-standing association with Indiana University and Bloomington, it makes for a great cameo moment.
Yeah, the truth of that scene is that we didn’t have access to the train or the train schedule. We were just standing there as a crew, praying for something to come, and when we heard something was coming, we just ran out and my hat flew off. We kept the take. It was just kismet.
It’s the Indiana Jones moment of this adventure I think.
Yes, yes, the Indiana University Jones moment, basically. It’s the most action there is in this.
In setting the tone for your sets, what have you brought with you from directors you’ve worked with and from your own experiences, knowing what you personally like and need as an actor on set?
I’ve worked with some amazing directors. I find that I’ve been taking quite a bit from the personal realm, rather than technical. For example, I worked with this amazing director named Greg Mottola, he did Adventureland, which I was in, and he also did Superbad. He has the most calming nature on set. One time I was having a little panic on set and he took me aside. I said, “I’m so sorry. I think I screwed up that scene.” And he said, “It’s amazing to me that actors are not panicking all the time. You’re so exposed and asked to perform on cue and emote. To me, it seems like you would be panicking all the time.” It just changed my entire perspective on my job, which told me that, “Oh yeah, it’s okay to have these kinds of feelings.” As an actor, you’re kind of manipulating your own emotions, and it’s normal to kind of feel really unsettled.
I feel now, I can pass along that spirit to other actors by saying, “It’s okay. Don’t worry.” Especially when we were doing scenes in this movie: We were doing scenes in very fraught places, and I felt comfortable being the stable person there who could give the right kind of encouragement and try to set a nice tone. The first day that we shot Kieran, he felt a little hemmed in by standing on the marks that we had set for him on the ground, and so it became immediately clear that we had to change the nature of the shooting to accommodate Kieran’s natural, incredible, spontaneous abilities. I was very comfortable doing that, because I’ve been on sets where I felt the director was perhaps too robotic in the design, and you feel hemmed in as an actor. Because I understood what Kieran was feeling, having been on the other side, it allowed me to know how to change the scene to accommodate both what I needed as a director and how Kieran would excel as an actor.
That’s really the work of a good director, isn’t it? Being able to understand where other artists excel, and then providing them the space and opportunity to do that.
Yes, exactly. But also having the bigger picture in your mind at all times, because I’ve also been on sets where the actors, in some way, took over the set and were changing shots. That’s the worst place you can get to, even though the actors—and I’ve been one of them—walk away with this great feeling of accomplishment during the day; that the scene was in some ways designed for you and your role. Those movies tend not to work as well, because there’s not the guiding hand of somebody telling a bigger story.
You need the moment to moment instinct and then you need the greater vision.
Yeah, exactly. That’s my assessment. In some ways, I think directors can occasionally be in opposition to what actors want, because what actors want is the reality of their characters constantly expressed, and a director understands that that’s not always the best way to tell a story—even a character-driven story. There should be bigger things happening. I think maybe having been an actor for most of my life allows me to take all that stuff into account, even when I’m writing the scripts. ‘What does an actor want to do here?’
When it comes to subject matter, there’s a real invitation here, because A Real Pain is reverent without being self-important. We don’t always see that in a film dealing with the Holocaust.
That was the precise goal: to make something that can be reverential to horrific historical events, while not being self-important, while not trying to make the movie seem like it’s doing the audience a favor by telling them this important story. I tend to recoil at movies that are about some political issue and when you can see that the movie is so proud of itself for teaching the audience its important message. As an actor, I hate that stuff too, because you feel like you’re a pawn for somebody’s self congratulatory project. So that was the exact goal with this.
It was designed quite specifically; if it’s going to be a movie about these cousins who go on a Holocaust tour, it also has to be about characters that are crass, characters that are ambivalent about every aspect of history, characters that are kind of ignorant of some of the history, characters that think about the history in ways that are quite self-centered, in a way that doesn’t seem noble, in a way that doesn’t seem constantly deferential, because that’s my reaction personally. I’ve been obsessed with World War II. As a suburban Jewish kid, you’re kind of obsessed with World War II, because it’s just the most shocking thing—once you realize what happened to your family, it’s that much more shocking. You go down every rabbit hole. Sometimes I find my curiosity about the war and the history to be coming from a place of more complicated feelings than just one of deep, somber, deference. So that was the goal of the movie.
Did the process of making this film provide any insights into the question of “pain”? It’s a multifaceted title.
In terms of the title, I am very interested in this idea (and have written a lot about this in the theater): How do I, in my incredibly lucky life, walk around with a feeling of emptiness and misery and self-pity, and yet, I come from people who survived the worst atrocities to happen to our species. How is it possible to reconcile that? How come I’m not walking around constantly with a huge smile on my face that I’m living this wonderful life and have access to antibiotics, and can have some self-actualization through my art and my job. It seems so dumbly lucky, but how come I’m not elated all day? So, in a way, that’s what the movie is touching on. We come from these people, yet we’re kind of miserable in different ways. My character is obsessive-compulsive, and my cousin’s character is going through something much more severe emotionally and yet we come from something that was far worse. People who came out of that far worse situation were living a life that they felt had more meaning. It’s about these complicated thoughts. And then, of course, the title also refers to the way I view my cousin, because he’s kind of a pain in the ass to me.
This is the kind of film that plays well in any cinema space, but one that art houses are going to be so happy to have. Art house cinemas, in particular, have the ability to really champion films that audiences might otherwise miss among all the blockbuster content that’s out there.
You’re right, which is why I kind of pinch myself. I’m feeling so lucky to be working with Searchlight. I mean, Searchlight is a company that cares more than anything about kind of indie, unusual movies, and yet they have the backbone and support of a big company. I feel very lucky to be at the very fortunate nexus of Searchlight, who I could not be more honored to be working with. Stuff like that is really helpful. When I started to get to know Searchlight, I was kind of frankly shocked that they even exist; because they make these very unusual movies and take real chances with real, artful films, yet they have the muscle to compete in the major film industry.
What does it mean as a director to have your work in a theater, on a big screen, and for audiences to see it that way?
My background as a writer is in theater, but what excited me more than anything as a writer and performer was to write a play, put it on live, and have that kind of communal experience. It just felt like the best place. I have written mostly transgressive comedy dramas, and it seemed like it was really a cool thing to have this story, which might have some warts, in a space that we’re all stuck in together where we have to grapple with those warts. That feels so exciting to me. So with a movie, the closest you can get to that feeling is playing a movie in a theater (as opposed to TV) where there’s kind of a communal feeling of being both attracted to and put off by various characters, story points, etc., and yet, you’re stuck together grappling with it. I feel so thrilled that this movie will have a theatrical release, especially at a time where that’s not a guarantee for movies, even like this one, which has an accessible story, known actors, and a tone that’s fairly transcendent, because it’s comedic and everything. So, yeah, I feel really thrilled.
Do you have a particularly memorable moviegoing experience?
I saw this movie Dirty Pretty Things when I was younger. I remember it was like, maybe one of the first times I went to an independent art house cinema: Sunshine Cinema in New York City on Houston Street and Second Avenue. It was tackling a very difficult subject, but in a really artful way. I remember just thinking like, “Oh, I didn’t realize they could do this. I didn’t know you’re allowed to do this kind of thing. This is fantastic.” I’ve since met actor Chiwetel Ejiofor several times, and each time I say the same thing to him and each time he reminds me that I told him that the previous time.
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