Time Moves On: Jesse Eisenberg on “A Real Pain” | Interviews

In Jesse Eisenberg’s “A Real Pain,” now in theaters, two cousins reunite for a tour through Poland in honor of their recently deceased grandmother, who lived there before the Holocaust. Hoping that the experience will allow them to reconnect with their family’s past and grapple with their own sense of guilt and obligation toward the legacy of pain that lies there, the pair instead find that visiting concentration camps and historic cemeteries with a group, as part of a Holocaust heritage tour, leaves them twice as conflicted. 

How should we remember? What must we learn? Is it possible to comprehend what happened? How can we reconcile our existential angst with historical trauma? To what degree is such an effort even productive? In a world where we’re so often insulated from the suffering of others, what would it take—and what would it mean, what would it matter—to truly feel someone else’s pain? David (Eisenberg, who wrote and directed in addition to starring) has managed to suppress intense anxiety while balancing professional obligations and a home life with his wife and son. For him, the trip is both an opportunity to wrestle with such weighty questions and an excuse to spend time with Benji (Kieran Culkin), who’s become concerningly adrift and unpredictable since her passing.

As traveling companions, the two are polar opposites. David’s committed to a quiet, solitary contemplation that Benji finds intolerable. The secondhand embarrassment that David feels at Benji’s emotional outbursts, meanwhile, is rivaled only by his shock at how his cousin’s displays of vulnerability deepen the tenor of their dialogue with tour guide James (Will Sharpe) and their fellow tourists: divorcée Marcia (Jennifer Grey); Rwandan genocide survivor (Kurt Egyiawan), and older couple Diane (Liza Sadovy) and Mark (Daniel Oreskes).

Best known as an Oscar-nominated actor—for “The Social Network,” in which he played Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg—Eisenberg is also an accomplished playwright and author. Having last branched out into directing with his feature debut, “When You Finish Saving the World,” this sophomore effort (now in theaters) reflects Eisenberg’s long-documented fascination with his family history. 

In 2013, he wrote and starred in “The Revisionist,” an off-Broadway play about a young American visiting his elderly Jewish cousin in Poland; this was inspired by a trip Eisenberg had taken there with his now-wife to the city of Krasnystaw, where his great-aunt had lived until the Nazis forced her to flee. Later, Eisenberg wrote a short story for Tablet about two guys vacationing in Mongolia, which he’d struggled to adapt until he came across an online ad that instantly clarified the story he’d been grasping to tell. It read: “Holocaust tours (with lunch).” 

The absurdity of such a statement, and what it said about the coexistence of modern comforts and historical horrors, gave Eisenberg a way in. “A Real Pain” confronts the legacy of the Holocaust without sanctimony; it’s a funny, sad, humane film about the difficulty of coming to grips with personal and collective trauma — and the mortifying spectacle of attempting to work through all your emotional baggage without becoming closed off from the world around you. 

Ahead of the film’s wide release, Eisenberg spoke briefly with RogerEbert.com about setting this personal story in conversation with history, the strange phenomenon of Holocaust tourism, what his film has to say about the relative significance of homecoming, and the experience of sharing the characters in his head with the actors on his set.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

You’ve mentioned in the past that all of your plays start as little monologues that you write from a particular character’s voice that you find interesting. Given that this film grew out of a play, The Revisionist, and a short story, Mongolia, that you wrote for Tablet magazine, what were the major considerations of adapting it to screen?

My background is playwriting, and all my plays have been set on a single set, which is to say, if it takes place in a living room, all the characters are coming in and out of the living room. They’re very typical off-Broadway styles of plays, where there’s a couch in the middle of the stage. When I was thinking about movies — because predominantly what I do is act in movies — what I’ve taken from those movies is that, cinematically, they all need a reason to exist. And that doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be special effects and superheroes, but it has to have some reason to justify it being on screen, not in the theater. 

With this, I just felt like I had hit upon almost a loophole, a little trick, which is that you can take a movie that’s intimate like this, about these two characters who are quite specific and dealing with something very intimate and personal, but set it against the backdrop of Poland. Suddenly, it becomes not only a movie worthy of being on camera but a story that can actually be enriched by the scenery because what these characters are going through on a very personal level is reflected in the broader history. You have these two characters who are dealing with pain internally, with pain between each other, but you set it against the backdrop of something so horrific as World War II. Suddenly, the characters’ lives are in conversation with history.

“A Real Pain” explores anxieties of emotional connection, this fear that we don’t feel as we should feel—or don’t know what to feel—toward our relatives, our ancestors, and our histories as a whole. You’ve explored this territory before, but tell me more about addressing that anxiety within a larger frame of Jewish, cultural, and familial history.

I come from a place of feeling a lack of meaning in modern life. When I think about what I think about what’s happening in other parts of the world or think about what happened historically with my family, it makes me feel more grounded in the human experience. I became interested in my family’s history as a vehicle for feeling greater meaning in my life. Feeling connected to something bigger than myself made my modern, daily comforts make a little more sense, you know? 

With this movie in particular, I wanted to show these two guys who, if you were to meet them on their own, you might have some pity for them. My character has anxiety and OCD, as I personally have, and he medicates it away; he jogs, and lives a normal life, but you feel he’s struggling at least a little bit. And then, Kieran’s character is dealing with demons which are far darker, so one would feel pity for him, too. But you set these two characters against the backdrop of real, historical trauma, and suddenly, their problems are contextualized in a way that’s a little more complicated. 

What I was trying to do was to try to show these various forms of grief and pain interacting with each other in a way that raises questions about how we value pain. Are we meant as a society to feel bad for the guy who has OCD when there are hurricanes in the south, when there are two huge wars in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe? How are we supposed to reconcile these things? That’s what the movie is trying to ask.

This irony of wanting to connect to your ancestors’ pain without wanting to experience any pain yourself emerges as your characters tour Poland. You don’t, hopefully, visit a concentration camp with the belief you’ll feel even a fraction of what your ancestors felt. Still, you also want to bear witness and experience the pain that brings about  — but then there’s the mortifying self-involvement of that desire to suffer even slightly in a place of such great evil. 

Yes, exactly.

Tell me about that tension and how making the film evolved your thinking on this subject.

I mean, you bring up Holocaust tourism, a really fascinating phenomenon, which is that, for the most part, middle-class people are choosing to go on tourism trips of horrific historical sites. For me, I think it’s a really noble thing to do. To go to a place like that necessarily opens people up to feelings of empathy, to understanding history and their place in it. Still, there’s also something a little bit awkward about going on a middle-class, creature-comfort-filled trip to a concentration camp, to stay in a nice hotel and take advantage of the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and the Polish złoty while at the same time trying to understand historical trauma. There’s an irony to that, which I wanted to express. 

And then you bring up the added trouble, which is: if you are trying to feel some kind of pain or suffering, because you’re trying to connect to historical pain and suffering, you find yourself in a place of true self-indulgence, as though your attempt at feeling suffering is the right answer to being connected to real suffering. For me, it just poses complicated questions of how best to live, knowing that other people are suffering. What is tourism? What is anthropology? That’s what I’m trying to question. 

There’s a line in the movie that says, “My grandmother survived through a thousand miracles, and how is it possible that the product of a thousand miracles wound up like me and my cousin?” How is it possible that the product of a thousand miracles, which is to say her grandchildren, are these miserable modern creatures with everything they could possibly want in life, and yet who experience a lack of meaning and happiness?

You’ve called this a story of the third generation, with a certain privilege and distance from the Holocaust, as well as a fascination with what took place and what its memory signifies in this moment to the grandchildren of survivors and the world they live in today.

I almost feel strange talking about “third-generation survivors” because there’s an implication there that we are currently suffering in some way because of it. That, for me, trivializes real suffering that’s happening around the world right now — and trivializes, of course, the suffering that the people who experienced the war and the Holocaust felt. What does “third generation” mean? I think of it more in philosophical terms rather than in terms of any kind of visceral suffering. Philosophically, there’s a generation of people who have enough distance from the Holocaust that we can reflect on it in ways that are at once removed and connected. 

The way I look at it and choose to express my thoughts is with a movie like this, which shows these two guys struggling to figure out what exactly their connection is to this tragedy. How does it affect them now? They can’t figure out the answers to that. In this movie, they go to the house their grandmother is from, and they try to have this cathartic experience in front of it, and they actually don’t feel anything, because they’re just standing in front of a three-story house. 

It’s not ambivalence. It’s a feeling of trying to grasp hold of meaning and connection to the past, and not finding it where you think you might. They go to the oldest Jewish cemetery and, again, they’re just struggling to figure out: do they think about the history here and the fact that it’s older than Shakespeare, or do they think about the people buried here? Third generation, to me, is about trying to connect with something that is further away and all the complications and difficulties that come with that attempt.

In the scene you’re discussing, the cousins leave a stone on the doorstep of the house where their grandmother once lived — until a neighbor tells them the old woman who now lives there might trip on it. This effort to physically impose your longing to honor the past comes through encroaching on a space where somebody else now lives. This desire for some kind of homecoming ultimately becomes something more abstract, less about historical location than personal meaning. 

That’s so well put, thank you. What I would say is that, yes, the characters try to memorialize their grandmother by putting a stone on the stoop of the house that she lived in 85 years ago and are told there’s an old woman who lives there now, that she might trip over the stone, and so they have to take it away. 

I was trying to present a dramatic irony in terms of how we try to hold onto the past in ways that are just not practical for modern life. I was trying to show that time moves on, irrespective of our strong, flailing attempts to hold on to it; you have to live in the present as much as you’re trying to grasp onto the past. These characters are trying to connect to the past, but oftentimes, it’s literally impossible.

You’ve worked with so many great directors over the years. Did any of them come to mind for you in preparing to make “A Real Pain” as role models to emulate in how you ran your set and directed your actors?

My experience on film sets, for now 20 years, has been one of an actor. When I think of the best experiences I’ve had as an actor, it’s been with directors like Richard Ayoade and Greg Mottola, who I loved so much and who made me feel at all times like not only were they watching me and rooting for me behind the camera, but that they were also incredibly sensitive and great leaders on set. They made sure that everybody on set felt like they were there to do the best possible work, including the actors, the prop department, the lighting crew, and so on. That was the most inspiring thing, because I don’t stand by the monitor as an actor. I’m really just feeling what it feels like to be on set. I want to create a culture that reminds me of all the wonderful experiences I’ve had with really sensitive, smart people who make everybody on set feel worthwhile.

David and Benji love and hate each other; they’re a study in contrasts, but they reflect a shared history as well, and so much of the comedy and drama of this film stems from their differing approaches to navigating the tour. I’m curious about articulating your own internal debates through this dynamic. If characters in your stories always spring from voices in your head, to what degree are you just having a conversation with yourself, and how does bringing in other actors add to that conversation?

Yeah, sure. I mean, it’s a strange thing where I’m writing a script—and, for me, I write in the library, and if you were to see me writing, you would see a man cackling at his own jokes and crying over his sad monologues—and I’m feeling all of that emotion while I’m writing it. And then, it becomes a script, which gets broken down for budgetary reasons, filming and scheduling reasons, and it becomes this other thing. And by the time you’re hiring actors and sitting on set, it almost feels like the script has nothing to do with it. It almost feels like the script is a thing that came from another place, that is now a blueprint for this $3 million escapade in Poland, of contracts and scheduling and hours and unions. It becomes this other thing. 

And then, you start working with the actors, and it reminds you of that emotion because, for example, in this case, I’m seeing Kieran emotionally break down at the same things I was breaking down while writing in the library a year prior. In a way, the actors bringing their emotions to it—especially an actor as brilliant, funny, and lived-in as Kieran—allows me to reconnect with what had become so alien over the last year of trying to get the movie made.

“A Real Pain” is now playing in select U.S. theaters, expanding nationwide Nov. 15.