Jesse Eisenberg‘s A Real Pain is a small-budgeted festival favorite with an impactful story to tell about a pair of mismatched Jewish cousins on a tour of Poland to learn about their heritage, the Holocaust, and how the two are intertwined. The film has a lot of things to say about pain, both expressed and repressed. It also features two of this year’s best performances and a script that feels as naturalistic and charming as it is poignant and thought-provoking.
I’m excited for you to hear what Eisenberg has to say about the film, but I want to offer a little more praise and a dash of context first.
It’s been about a month since I saw the film, and I still catch myself thinking about the way Eisenberg (the film’s writer, director, and co-lead) allows silence and time to convey the weight of the characters (and the audience) seeing the Majdanek death camp as it is now, largely untouched post-liberation. I’m also thinking about Kieran Culkin’s career-best performance — his bounding charisma, his eyes at the end of the film, and emotional outbursts that also lend voice to the way individual human stories of the Holocaust get lost sometimes.
Like Eisenberg, I’m a third-generation American with Polish roots and relatives who survived the Holocaust. As such, there are common threads with the way the Holocaust was and wasn’t discussed in our families and occasional questions about the worth of our own pain in contrast to what our ancestors went through. When we spoke with him, we discussed those topics. We also touch on the weight of telling a story that’s semi-autobiographical, the difference between his and Culkin’s characters, and how those characters dictated the pitch-perfect ending of the film.
Obviously, this isn’t fully autobiographical, but there are elements. Does it put more pressure on you, weaving in things that you went through or family experiences? Does that pressure help?
Jesse Eisenberg: For me, the fact that it was like semi-autobiographical in these certain areas was wonderful. Because to me, I’m always just striving for some kind of specificity in my writing, and there’s nothing better than basically having these family histories to account for the movie.
The characters visit this house at the end of the movie, and we filmed it at my family’s house that they lived in up until 1939. And again, it added to a layer of specificity in the movie that almost paradoxically makes it even more universal. That because we’re at this actual house and having this kind of strange, unexpected reaction of an almost emotional anti-climax, I think it just reads for people who can’t relate to this exact culture as something specific and more universal than, I don’t know, narrow. And so, I loved having these stories at my fingertips, and I loved the pressure of feeling like I had to account for them and account for my family’s history and try to tell a story that was, kind of, as truthful to my own life as possible.
At one point, there had been some thought that you were going to play the Benji role, and then it switched to Kieran. Why did you want to play that role initially and was the decision to make that change something you feel like you would’ve had the maturity to do 10 years ago?
Yeah, I wanted to play that role because it’s the cool role. If anybody reads the script, they know, oh, that’s the fun role. The character is an extroverted character. It lives in extremes. And so, as an actor, when you train as an actor, you don’t do subtle scenes from How I Met Your Mother. You do scenes from Greek tragedies in acting school, so those are the scenes you sink your teeth into.
I was just… Basically, the producer of the movie is Emma Stone, and she just said, I really don’t think you should play an unhinged character while you’re also trying to manage a set. She had just been on the set of Poor Things, I think, and she was a producer and playing an unhinged character, and I think she just had probably a lot more experience than I do with basically being in a managerial position while also playing a character that’s not living in our reality. And so, she just counseled me to play the more regular role.
And so, for me it felt… I just want to get the movie made. Anytime I write anything with my plays — and it’s so hard to get anything made — I would just do anything to get them made. And only in retrospect do you think of the maybe creative decisions that at the time seemed practical, but in retrospect, now seem creative. So she was right, and I’m so lucky I didn’t play that role because Kieran is just such a gem.
Why was it important that these characters don’t end in a place where everything’s all better?
I mean, to me, I’m writing not from a place of academic calculated storytelling. I’m writing from a place of knowing the characters so well that they, in some ways, especially as the movie ends, tell me where they want to wind up.
I know that sounds pretentious, but that’s the only way I can describe it is that the character’s voices, especially in the last third of the movie, have developed so specifically almost out of my own control. Again, I know that sounds pretentious and perhaps unrelatable, but that’s just the way I can describe it, and I think a lot of writers understand what I mean.
And so, by the end of the movie, it seems right to me that these are people for whom the future is not necessarily very bright. Their lives will continue on, but they can’t change each other. And the movie is really about David, my character, coming to terms with the fact that he can’t save his cousin from his cousin’s demons, and he just has to accept this person for who he is. And once he does that, he can accept himself for who he is.
By the end of the movie, David goes back to his family and he recognizes that he has a stability that his cousin will never have. And it makes me emotional to think about it because this is how I think about people who have less stable lives than me, but who I envy. And I think by the end of the movie, David recognizes that, you know what? I can’t change my cousin, but once I know that I can’t change him, I’m going to be okay in my own self and I’m going to be able to be an adult.
It’s a big question, do we look for or expect too much from catharsis, cathartic moments, or cathartic things?
Oh, wow. What a nice, interesting, and philosophical question. And I would say that, insofar as the movie is concerned, the characters think that they expect to have some amazing catharsis as they visit historical sites of their family. And the catharses don’t come from that. The catharses in the movie comes from their interpersonal strife and striving to connect when the world is not friendly to their connection.
So yeah, I mean, I personally have catharses when I least expect them. I’m often touched by things that I wouldn’t have immediately related to myself. Like the movie, for example, that touched me the most in the last few years was a movie about a woman who tried to get an abortion, Never Rarely Sometimes Always. This is, of course, not an experience I will ever have or have ever had, but something about this human striving for something in the face of very real obstacles just hit me.
And so, I guess that’s how I think about it. And so, I know what your question is, and the only thing I could say to it is I usually think our cathartic moments don’t happen where we most expect them to.
You’ve said that this movie made you ask a question whether your pain is valid or if you should just kind of shut up and stay quiet. I’m paraphrasing. I’m curious where you are in terms of that thought process at this point.
I guess I’m suspicious of people’s personal pain that immediately becomes burdensome to a group that they’re in. There’s a certain implication from people who are very publicly airing their own personal grievances that the rest of the group that they’re in has not experienced something of their own.
And I know I’ve done that in the past, and when I’ve done that in the past, I kind of kick myself for exploiting what I would consider my own historical traumas. I don’t know, perhaps in an attempt to leverage power in a group, I think we all do it, to some extent unconsciously, and I just think about that all the time.
So Kieran’s character, when he’s grieving on the train, when we’re going on a train and we’re sitting first class going to a concentration camp, on a train, he’s airing his grievances in a way that I would say are interesting and perhaps even accurate or universally, objectively true, but at the same time, he’s necessarily burdening other people with it. So yeah, that’s something I’m a little suspicious about and that’s what my character talks about in the movie and specifically says, “I feel my pain is unexceptional, so I don’t feel the need to burden everybody with my own pain.” And so, yeah, I guess that’s generally how I feel.
In terms of what we were talking about before about grandparents and not talking about their own pain… I just watched A Different Man and was very interested to see a movie about pain and someone trying to become a completely different person, and I understand that completely. Do you think our grandparents, specifically that generation, not talking about their pain was a conscious decision to not burden other people with it or a conscious decision to just live a different life and turn the page?
My grandparents were living in the context of all of their cousins, aunts, and uncles being killed. And so, I think for them, it makes sense to me that they never talked about it to my parents because there was just a feeling… a mix of survivor’s guilt, humiliation, feeling lucky, and also that the whims of the world are so random that their lives are there by chance.
And so, I can understand that. Being third generation American, I would say that I have enough distance from that historical trauma that I can have this removed curiosity about my family’s history. And I feel that is a privilege to have. It implies that it didn’t traumatize me in a way that makes me incapable of looking into it. I feel bad for my grandparents that lived with horrors, including survivor’s guilt, including thinking their lives are so fortunate because they weren’t put in a gas chamber by virtue of historical and geographical flukes.
And so, yeah, I can understand that, and I live knowing that I’m very lucky that I am allowed to have this removed curiosity about my family’s history.
Yeah, it feels like a torture and burden that they took on, but maybe a gift that they gave to future generations not taking us through so much of it.
Yeah, that’s true. That’s true.
‘A Real Pain’ is in theaters now.