Jesse Eisenberg’s ‘great ambivalence’ about his own pain inspired ‘A Real Pain’
Jesse Eisenberg had a bad case of writer’s block. The Oscar nominee was penning a script about two friends who take a trip to Mongolia. The characters were pulled from two plays he had written: one about a guy named David, who stays with a cousin in Poland, and another about a guy named Benji, a “maladaptive person.” But something wasn’t working, and he didn’t know how to fix it. Then an online ad popped up with four immortal words: “Auschwitz tours (with lunch).”
“I saw an ad for Holocaust tours on the internet — with lunch — and changed the characters out of that Mongolian not-working screenplay and put them on this Polish tour,” Eisenberg tells Gold Derby. “Once that kind of unlocked, then it just flowed very freely and enjoyably because I knew who these characters were so well, having written variations on them in my life.”
More from GoldDerby
The result was “A Real Pain,” Eisenberg’s second directorial feature, after 2022’s “When You Finish Saving the World,” and the first in which he also stars. It’s a film with such personal ties to Eisenberg that one might wonder how this wasn’t his original idea. The dramedy, which won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the Sundance Film Festival, follows David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), once inseparable cousins who reunite for a Holocaust tour through Poland after the death of their beloved grandmother with their ancestral home as their final destination. Grandma Dory is named after Eisenberg’s aunt Doris, who fled Poland in 1939. In 2008, Eisenberg and his wife went to Poland and visited his aunt’s home.
The additional element of a Holocaust tour gave Eisenberg a “great superstructure” for his script. Learning about and reconnecting with one’s roots is common and well-intentioned, but modern privileges — just “(with lunch)” alone — can make it feel distancing and inelegant. “There’s no great way to tour Holocaust sites. I don’t have a cynicism toward Holocaust tourism [but] there’s an absurdism, though, to touring sites of great historical trauma because you still, as a modern person, are trying to main the creature comforts,” Eisenberg notes. “You wanna stay in a hotel and do all the practical things that are required when doing a tour — but just the awkwardness of the juxtaposition between tragedy tourism and maintaining a modern middle-class lifestyle.”
That duality is vocalized by Benji, a loose-cannon stoner who has charisma for days and no filter. If he thinks it, he says it, charming and discomfiting their tour companions in equal measure. In contrast, David is high-strung, neurotic, and both envies and bristles at his cousin’s behavior, which masks deeper wounds. David used to cry more and has changed, Benji tells him late in the film. David takes medication for his OCD now, again lifted from Eisenberg’s own life. “I have terrible anxiety, OCD, but I medicate it away and am able to live a functioning life,” he shares. “I used to cry about everything the way David used to cry about everything. I now don’t and I sometimes wonder, ‘Did I lose something? Am I detached in a way that’s more sustainable but less engaged with the world?'”
Eisenberg had “great ambivalence” about his own personal struggles against the larger context of the trauma his family endured in the Holocaust.
“My pain just seemed so insignificant,” he says. “The movie is really kind of an attempt at me working through these questions of: What pain is valid? My character’s pain is so meaningless on the scale of historical trauma, and [Benji’s] pain is darker and deeper than mine, and yet on the grand scale of mass genocide, it’s meaningless as well. I was just trying to pose these questions to the audience without being so explicit and dogmatic. You can take these two characters and put them at the forefront of this tour and these questions are just implicitly asked in a way that feels like it has kind of a light touch.”
“A Real Pain” is not the kind of plot-heavy movie you can spoil, so it’s not really a spoiler to say that David and Benji make it to their grandmother’s home, which was Eisenberg’s aunt’s home. It’s the film’s climax, but it feels anticlimactic, as the two stand before a nondescript building, anticipating a rush of big emotions that never come.
“In 2008, I wound up in front of the house. I kind of was expecting to feel some profound, cathartic thing, like my life had come full circle and I could kneel down and put the dirt on my face and feel history alive in my body. And I just didn’t. I was just standing in front of this three-story apartment building, and after several minutes, I was just loitering in front of this three-story apartment building. That disconnect stayed with me for a long time,” Eisenberg recalls. “It just slowly started to occur to me that, well, I don’t belong there anymore. History moves on and there was no place for me there anymore. And what I wanted to do in the movie was depict that feeling of looking for catharsis and not finding it where you thought you might.”
SEE Kieran Culkin tried to drop out of ‘A Real Pain,’ but producer Emma Stone cleverly kept him in
“I guess,” he continues, “I was just trying to show that the way we try to connect to history can be awkward and clumsy and don’t give us the answers that we’re hoping they give us, but the way we connect to other people can give us those answers.”
Eisenberg had initially planned on playing Benji until he was advised by Emma Stone, who produced the film, not to play such a frantic character while directing. He cast Culkin after his sister suggested him but had never seen any of the “Succession” star’s work. Or so he thought. “I saw ‘Home Alone.’ Truth be told, I can’t exactly remember. I’m sure it was a memorable turn.” He also forgot they auditioned together for “Adventureland,” during which Culkin “was actually manhandling me and kind of aggressive with me” when the scene called for him to attack Eisenberg.
“It was so funny. And that was in 2009. And now I’m writing this in 2022 and I think it stayed in the back of my mind because when my sister suggested Kieran Culkin for this part, the image that kind of came to me was this aggressive, charming, blunt, funny, incredibly confident but also feeling person. And that clicked,” he says. “It had to be really somebody really living in that spirit and giving the essence of this character, so the character’s turns — and there are a million different turns. He’s gleeful in one moment, he’s aggrieved the next moment, he’s aggressive but then he’s lovable. It just required the spirit of somebody, and Kieran just has this unusual, otherworldly charm and spirit and a deep, deep well of emotions.”
Culkin has been very up-front about how he tried to drop out of the film weeks before production was set to begin because he didn’t want to be away from his family. Eisenberg “fell in love” with Culkin during production and would be “honored” to work with him again, and he knows exactly how to prevent him from being a flight risk next time. “I’ll set it in the floor above his apartment so he can go down on lunch breaks.”
Best of GoldDerby
Sign up for Gold Derby's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
