Vanessa Redgrave once compared Jesse Eisenberg to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, because of his “inquiring mind.” Seventeen minutes into my recent lunch with Eisenberg, in Chelsea, I had yet to ask him a question, but he’d peppered me with plenty of his own. Where was I from? How did I know So-and-So? Did I get to consult on my New Yorker cartoon avatar? When I first glimpsed him, as I crossed the street to the restaurant, he’d been fist-bumping a postman. “People are so nice if you’re famous, I guess,” he reasoned, sounding apologetic. “Or maybe not. I don’t know.” He glanced at his menu. “What are you going to get?”
Eisenberg wore a hoodie and an Indiana Hoosiers cap, plus a splint on one finger, owing to an injury sustained during “a big stunt sequence” on the set of “Now You See Me 3.” He was abuzz with anxiety and a kind of ambient guilt, which turns out to be his fuel. For more than two decades—he is forty-one but started acting young—his motor-mouthed neuroticism has been his defining quality onscreen, whether as an awkward teen (“Roger Dodger”), a romantic lead (“Adventureland”), a divorced dad (“Fleishman Is in Trouble”), a supervillain (Lex Luthor, Mark Zuckerberg), or a Woody Allen stand-in (“From Rome with Love,” “Café Society”). Along the way, he’s been writing: plays, screenplays, silly songs for his private amusement, and humor pieces for McSweeney’s and The New Yorker.
His new film, “A Real Pain,” which comes out this week, is one that he wrote and directed himself. Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play Jewish cousins who go to Poland to take a Holocaust tour and to visit their late grandmother’s childhood home. David (Eisenberg) is a high-strung fuddy-duddy with a wife and a kid; Benji (Culkin) is a charismatic stoner with no boundaries and barely concealed psychic wounds. The movie premièred at Sundance, where it won a screenwriting award; it’s already getting Oscar buzz.
In his work, too, Eisenberg is a relentless questioner, especially of moral vanity and his own ostensibly noble intentions: How can you do real good in the world, rather than just catering to the liberal need to seem virtuous? How do you process your ancestors’ pain, much less your own? Shouldn’t we all feel a little more uncomfortable? Our conversation, which covered these riddles of life and more, has been edited and condensed.
Let’s start with the obvious. Did you take a trip to Poland like the one in the movie?
Yeah. In 2008, my wife and I went to pretty much all the sites that the characters go to and wound up at this house in Krasnystaw, where my family lived until 1938. I was standing outside this house and trying to feel something profoundly cathartic, and not. That’s kind of what happens at the end of this movie: the characters finally get to this house and have these great emotional expectations that are just met by a typical-looking three-story apartment building.
Right, it’s anticlimactic. What inspired you to go? Had you always been interested in your ancestry?
When I was seventeen, I was looking for direction, and I found it in my dad’s aunt Doris, who was in her late eighties. She lived until a hundred and six. I went to her house every Thursday, and she became my life mentor. In the movie we call her Grandma Dory, and she’s as we describe: she was blunt, tough, and unimpressed by anything I had to offer that was not from a place of substance. I even lived with her in my early thirties. My wife and I were not together briefly, and I moved into her tiny one-bedroom and slept on her couch, because I needed grounding. She was born and raised in Poland, in the house that we show in the movie. And I told her, “If I ever get a job in Europe, I will visit that house and take a picture for you.”
Once you did, what was her reaction?
I took a picture of the house, went to Kinko’s, and had it blown up with a glossy finish. I thought she would start weeping and realize that her life had come full circle. She just looked at it for a second and was, like, “Oh, yeah, that’s it.”
Again, an anticlimax.
Exactly. From the moment I started investigating her life, Poland as an idea gave me a certain meaning that I was missing. I was living with material security and appropriate antidepressants for the things that ail me. Having a connection to something bigger, something historic, something traumatic, made me feel like I was a real person and not just floating through a lucky life of shallow emptiness.
Do you mean being famous?
No, just being a modern person who has enough money to live comfortably. I just feel embarrassed about that. Sebastian Junger just wrote this book where he talks about being in Bosnia during the war, and he says he was there not as an adrenaline junkie but as a meaning junkie. My wife teaches disability justice, and she teaches at a school for continuing education. She doesn’t walk around with a sense of shame and embarrassment and guilt. She walks around with a sense of: How can I be of service?
In your own writing, you have poked fun at this feeling you have. I saw your play “Asuncion” in 2011, and the line I still remember is when your character says that he wants to go to some famine-plagued part of Africa, because “I thought I could be of use.”
Oh, my God! I can’t believe you remember this shit.
I remember that line because it nails a kind of clueless self-righteousness. But this is also what you’re talking about, what you’re actually searching for.
Yes, because in my attempt to find meaning I find myself indulging in the very things that I find obnoxious. We went to Teresópolis, in Brazil, and we were trying to help with the Red Cross there, because there’d been a flood. But I’m not strong enough to carry the flour bags, so I just become this American liability. I also acknowledge the silliness of somebody like me assuming that their life has some greater purpose, if only I were to find it. Luckily, I’m in the arts, so I can explore that in these creative and ambivalent ways. “A Real Pain” is trying to show these two characters searching for meaning, and they’re not really finding it in the places they’re expecting to. They’re not finding it in a concentration camp, or in seeing their grandmother’s house. They’re actually finding meaning in their very narrow relationship.
I guess, more than anything, I’m just constantly questioning my own—what’s the word?—hypocrisy. And then the irony is that I write about my hypocrisy, and because I write about it and am occasionally lauded for it, it perpetuates the exact thing that I’m trying to avoid. By writing about trying to connect to something real, I get to go to parties for my movie and wear a tuxedo, taking me once again further away from that thing that I’m striving for.
Welcome to awards season! This movie, among other things, is a great film about cousins, and I feel like that’s an underexplored relationship. I Googled “movies about cousins” and the ones I found were “My Cousin Vinny,” “Mary Queen of Scots”—because her cousin was Queen Elizabeth I—and the weirdest one, “The Blue Lagoon.” People don’t remember that those kids were cousins before they got shipwrecked on a desert island and started having sex in a waterfall or whatever.
Well, according to Jewish law, that would be O.K., right?
It’s not a familial relationship that’s been deeply explored, but it’s so specific and so rich. It’s somewhere between friends and siblings, but not quite either.
And you can choose the intensity. Unlike a sibling, you both have the opportunity to lay the foundation of what this means to each other. It’s not set. And it’s also very easy to duck out of.
And you share childhood memories, but from slightly different perspectives. You share grandparents, which is different from sharing parents.
Exactly. The original script was about two friends who go to Mongolia to see a third friend of theirs who’s sold out to a Norwegian tourism company. When I changed course and set it on a Holocaust tour, it occurred to me that it would be great if they were cousins, because the thing that they share is gone: the grandmother. It allowed me to create stakes between the two, because this relationship truly does not have a need to exist anymore, and so it’s up to the characters.
Can you tell me about your actual cousins?
One of my cousins is a fantasy-football journalist. I have a cousin who’s a prodigy, worked at Google, Facebook, Apple. I’ve been asked now a few times, when they saw the trailers, “This is definitely not me, right?” No, this is no one!
I really recognized the type of person that Benji is: the stoner who wants to have a really intense emotional connection and doesn’t realize when it’s making people uncomfortable or is sort of bullshit, but who is often very charming.
Yeah, who have their own demons. I can’t speak for you, but maybe there’s some part of you that also feels envious. Were I only to have that charm! If only I were able to connect to my grief in the grounded and full way that that person connects to their grief! Benji, Kieran’s character, talks about how much he misses the version of me that used to cry all the time. I’m so happy that I’ve matured out of that phase. But, for Benji, that was the real version of me, the pre-medicated version of me that he felt a connection to, and that he feels like he’s lost. I’m not the person who cries anymore, so he can’t control me anymore. And, because he’s lost his purpose in our relationship, he feels the need to put me down. He needs to talk about my body in this almost fetishistic way, an infantilizing way.
Right. He tells you that you have beautiful feet, which is something a cousin might say that not a lot of other people in your life would say.
That’s true. But, from my perspective, it’s this need to be in complete control of my person. By complimenting my feet, it’s a way to coöpt me, to objectify me. He says, “You’re, like, an awesome guy stuck inside the body of somebody who’s always running late. And it’s up to me to pull that guy out.” It’s a backhanded compliment: You could be cool, but you’re stuck, and the only person who can help you is me. He can’t stand that I’ve grown past him.
Your character says that he takes pills for O.C.D. Is that something you do in life?
Yeah. All the characters are based on little parts of myself. I’m not writing an exposé about my life, and I was even thinking of playing Kieran’s character when I finished the script. But David takes the same pill that I take, and the props department asked me to show them the pills so that they could replicate them in a sugar form. In Poland, they have different prescription bottles, so we had to import them from Germany. So, yeah, the movie is autobiographical, but in the same way that the last movie I made [“When You Finish Saving the World”] has touchstones from my life. “Asuncion” was a heightened version of my terror of male relationships, and also my obsession with anthropology. I had just changed my major to Anthropology when I was writing that play, and I was obsessed with the way that we as Americans “other” people. I’m making fun of myself for being, as the character in “Asuncion” says, this “walking white idiot.”
Do you still use anthropology in your writing? I think about the other people on the Holocaust tour in “A Real Pain.” It’s a cross-section of people, including a Rwandan-genocide survivor.
The Rwandan character was based on my friend Eloje. He survived the genocide, moved to Canada, and converted to Judaism when he felt like no other group of people in Canada could understand what he’d been through. He’s the only person who sends me e-mails on Jewish holidays. He’s an amazing guy, and I asked him if he’d allow me to use his story in this movie.
Besides being a great cousin movie, it’s a Holocaust movie in a way. I’m curious if you thought about it in the lineage of Holocaust movies, going back to more explicit ones like “Sophie’s Choice” and “Schindler’s List.” In recent years, filmmakers have dealt with the Holocaust in more idiosyncratic ways, like in “Jojo Rabbit” or “The Zone of Interest.”
When I’m writing something, I assume that no one’s ever going to see it, because my track record is such that most things I’ve written have never been seen or published. So I don’t have the confidence to assume that this thing I’m conceiving is going to be discussed in conversation with Holocaust movies. What I was thinking about was: How do people who don’t have a physical connection to a specific trauma try to find that connection in awkward, stumbly, often heartfelt ways? We’re trying to do the right thing, and there’s just no way.
When I was [originally] writing this movie, the characters met at the airport, travelling on Aeroflot to Russia and then eventually on to Ulaanbaatar. Thirty pages into the script, they’re walking around Ulaanbaatar, they have a fight at the A.T.M., Benji steals David’s money, and I’m realizing this movie has nowhere to go. I’m desperate to finish it, because I love the idea of shooting in Mongolia. I’m banging my head on the keyboard, and this ad pops up for Auschwitz tours—in parentheses, “with lunch.” It was like a deus ex machina, where something drops in your lap that completely upends this thing you’ve been doing. I wanted to have some perspective on the irony of wanting to connect to your ancestors’ pain but at the same time not being willing to experience any pain yourself: stay at the Radisson, eat your continental breakfast, have your croissant in the morning and your coffee in the van going to Auschwitz. And then, halfway through the day at Auschwitz, going back on the air-conditioned bus to eat your lunch. There’s nothing exactly wrong with that. It’s not unethical. In some ways, maybe the unethical thing is to have such a cynical attitude that you never do anything about it.
You’ve talked before about your Jewish-comedy influences, like Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. Was this the first time you grappled with the subject of Jewish identity in something you’ve written?
The first play I wrote, “The Revisionist,” was about a character named David who sneaks weed into Poland and spends a week at his second cousin’s house. She’s a survivor, based on my cousin Maria, who was a survivor, and it’s about him grappling with his own meaninglessness, vis-à-vis her meaning. What I don’t like is when Jewish comedians use Jewishness as a punch line, like, “Oh, I’m Jewish, so I was here early!” That’s a fake joke. I like using it in trying to contextualize these people who are obsessed with other cultures to reflect on their own otherness, or their own assimilation, because Jews have this ability to assimilate really well.
It’s been a fraught year for Jewish people, for obvious reasons.
And heeere we are. Can I get the check now?
Are there things in the movie that you think resonate differently from how you thought they would when you started writing it?
My hope and my assumption is that the answer is no, that this movie is an evergreen story about cousins who are trying to experience something very personal. There’s no discussion of global politics—certainly no discussion of the Middle East. My hope is that this movie could have taken place in 1992, when Jewish Americans started going back to Poland as tourists after the Cold War. You can’t predict the context that will surround the thing you wrote two years ago, so it would be foolish to attempt to make some kind of commentary on a world that is ever-changing.
I read that you applied for Polish citizenship after making the movie there. What inspired you to do that?
Several things. I felt like my life was comfortable in a way that made me feel very suspicious. So I became obsessed with my family’s history in Poland. We spent more time there than here, and I feel like I’ve been an American for ten thousand years. I was thinking, God, it’s so ironic that we never talk about Poland, that we never talk about this house, that we never talk about this town that was home to us for far longer than Queens was. So I had this nagging feeling that I would like to connect to it more. I don’t know if that means going on vacation there, or learning the language, or trying to find people who might be related to us, which I found, miraculously, in Lublin.
But then this other thing happened. When I was telling people that I was going to Poland, I frequently got this reaction: “Oh, they’re antisemites! Good luck.” And what I found was diametrically opposed to what I had been warned about. I found a crew of a hundred and fifty people who were giving everything they had to serve my family’s story. I found young academics who work at the Majdanek concentration camp. I got to know these people really well, because to shoot at Majdanek required eight months of negotiation of me having to prove my good intentions. And, over the course of this relationship, I had the sense that it was such a deep shame that American Jews have this perception, which I think is unfair. I met some people who work in government, and I pitched them the following sentiment: This movie is partly an attempt to bring Poles and Jews to a place of reconciliation, and, if there are any efforts I can make in that direction, I would be so thrilled to do it. So I’m going to Poland in a few days and doing events in various cities.
Was it difficult to direct yourself?
I don’t watch myself in movies. I don’t watch the dailies. I just get so uncomfortable that it distracts me from feeling like I’m just in the thing. With this, I would just look at the monitor when we were setting up the camera, so I’d be able to see what I look like for composition purposes. As an actor, I just try to feel the thing that my character is feeling, and I base my own success on whether I came close to that feeling. I had amazing producers. One of my producers is Emma Stone, so she was standing by the monitors. Who is a better arbiter of performance than the greatest actress of our generation?
Are there things that you’ve absorbed from directors you’ve worked with, whether David Fincher, Woody Allen, or Noah Baumbach, that you’ve adopted in your own directing?
I mean, is it O.K. to talk about Woody Allen?
Let’s go with yes.
I’ve been in a few Woody Allen movies, and he really does try to keep the action in as much of a single take as possible for momentum, for the artistry of camera movement and choreography, and I try to do that when possible. My favorite director that I ever worked with was Richard Ayoade. I did a movie called “The Double” with him, and there are some overlaps with this movie. I play two characters: one about whom the world is uninterested, and the other for whom the world opens up for no discernable reason. I liked the way that Richard dealt with the ironic humor of that, without making it too silly.
The first movie I saw you in was “The Squid and the Whale,” and I see some of Noah Baumbach’s observational style in your work. That movie is wonderful at observing people’s flaws in a loving way. I think about the scene when your character plays a song he claims he wrote at a school assembly, but he’s just passing a Pink Floyd song off as his own. Do you feel like that movie or Noah rubbed off on you, in terms of how you create characters?
Oh, yeah. God, I love that movie. It’s like a perfect movie script. I was, like, twenty-one and was auditioning for commercials and stuff. I had this conception of acting that characters should be relatable and heroic, like most movie characters are. Doing that movie and seeing how it can have warmth—even when the characters were not warm to each other—was amazing.
There’s a line at the end that directly reminded me of “A Real Pain.” Jeff Daniels, who plays your father, says, “You used to be very emotional when you were young.” In “A Real Pain,” Kieran says, “You used to be so emotional. You used to fucking cry about everything.”
Yeah, and I say, “I know, it was awful!” That didn’t occur to me until you brought it up now. That was just me. I went to a mental institution when I was a kid. I had an emotional childhood, and I think back on it and think, Did I lose something by becoming a yuppie and medicating all that stuff away? I don’t know. Whenever I ask my therapist if the Prozac is going to dull my creative impulses, he just reminds me that every person he saw that day asked him the same question, and that he thinks the answer is no.
Why did you go to a mental institution?
Oh, I had a weird childhood. I missed sixth grade. I had a tutor. I cried every day of first grade, to the point that, when the bus picked me up on Friday, if I hadn’t cried on the bus Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, they would give Tootsie Roll Pops to the whole bus. So I would stand at the bus stop, and from down the block I heard the entire bus chanting, “Don’t cry, Jesse! Don’t cry, Jesse!” I just remember feeling extra worried that I was going to ruin it for these people, on top of trying to stifle crying. That’s one of the things I’m exploring in this movie. At one point, my character did feel more of his pain, and now doesn’t. And he’s in the backdrop of the Holocaust, searching for this thing that he’s very deliberately medicated away.
You started acting very young. Was it related to this excess of emotion?
Yeah. Acting for me was not about performance—in fact, it gave me stage fright—but about just having an outlet, being with adults and seeing that there was another possibility. I was doing community theatre with people who had other jobs during the day. They’d work at AT&T, then come to rehearsal at night. This was the place that we’d all go to, because we didn’t feel comfortable somewhere else.
It got professional very quickly. Weren’t you a Broadway understudy at thirteen, in “Summer and Smoke”?
Yeah, then I was an understudy in “A Christmas Carol” at Madison Square Garden. You mostly think of kid actors as these big, showy Broadway-baby kind of kids, but actually there are these understudies sitting in the back playing poker until the show’s over.
Did you go on?
I went on for “Summer and Smoke,” maybe two weeks at the end, because the kid left. For “A Christmas Carol,” the guy I understudied generously gave me a Monday.
Who were you playing?
Scrooge at twelve years old. It was with Tony Randall. He was Scrooge.
Do you remember anything about Tony Randall?
My grandfather was a left-wing activist, and he spent a night at a candlelit vigil once with Tony Randall. So my mom said, “You should write him a card. It was such a nice thing, and Grandpa always told us about it.” I wrote him this card, and he then remembered my name. He was so sweet.
People are more familiar with your history as an actor than as a writer, but of course you’ve been writing plays and screenplays and humor pieces. How did your writing life start? What were you writing as a kid?
My parents just moved, and they found all these little Post-it notes of mine. The jokes were all about sex, something I wouldn’t have or know about for five years. Like, I found a joke a month ago. I must have been fourteen years old. The handwriting was, like, when the kids are writing with their full fist, and the joke was, “I had sex in every room in my house. Unfortunately, I live in a studio apartment.”
That’s pretty good!
I didn’t even know what that meant. So I was obsessed with writing jokes, and they were kind of Borscht Belt-y. And I wrote Adam Sandler-style nineties comedy screenplays, and one of them was optioned by the Weitz brothers when I was nineteen years old. They made “About a Boy” right before they optioned my thing.
What was it about?
It was called “The Vigilante,” and it was about a guy in New York who meets a woman he had evicted from the building and falls in love with her without telling her he was the one who had her evicted, for some noise ordinance. I wrote a movie about two college freshmen who hate the dorms they’re in, so they pose as senior citizens and move into the local old-age home, where they have a luxurious life, called “College Seniors.” It was optioned by Michael Bay’s company. When I was sixteen, I wrote a script about Woody Allen that got sent to his lawyers, and they sent me a cease-and-desist letter.
Nice.
Then when I was twenty-two I sent a script to Bob Odenkirk, because I was acting in a movie that he was directing. I thought he would send them to Adam Sandler on my behalf, and they would get made. He called me and said, “Buddy, what the hell are you doing? You’re a sensitive guy! Why are you writing this shit?” I thought my life was over. It was shortly thereafter that I went to Poland and met my second cousin Maria, and I came back to New York and wrote my first play, “The Revisionist.” Vanessa Redgrave ended up playing my cousin, and I realized, This is my voice. I took myself seriously for the first time. I wouldn’t have done it without Bob Odenkirk’s tough reaction. That was really a big change for me.
You’d been acting steadily, but how did you react to the extra level of celebrity from “The Social Network”?
Oh, I knew it was transient. I’d been in movies that were popular before then. You go through a little fuzzy period where you rise to the top of the list for a month, and they send you all the scripts that aren’t that great but think if they get an actor who’s popular at the moment they can get it greenlit. And you don’t want to do those things. When I was eighteen, I was in this movie “Roger Dodger.” It wasn’t a hit or anything, but it was really well-liked in the New York independent-film scene. I got sent all these movies and thought, I’m set for life! Then a year later I was auditioning for commercials again. “The Social Network” was a bigger version of that.
You and Kieran Culkin both started as child actors. Is that something you talked about?
He has a very unusual life. I guess we all do, if you’re doing something like that at a young age. Kieran has the most unusual sense of ambition that I’ve seen in an actor. He’s not eager to be celebrated in any capacity. I’m just eager to be celebrated enough that I can continue working. He doesn’t even have that feeling. He tried to pull out of our movie a dozen times, because he didn’t want to leave his family. I so envy him. I live in a perpetual state of worrying that my career is going to end if X or Y goes slightly amiss. He just lives with this feeling, like, If I don’t work, I’ll do another thing.
You have some version of that. From what I understand, you spend a lot of your life in Indiana.
We were living on and off in Indiana for the last decade. In some ways, it provided a safe haven from feeling like I was pounding the pavement in New York. As an actor, you’re so at the mercy of the whims of an industry. You’re being judged based on your hair and all these other things that seem so shallow and silly. I understand it, because I’m now directing, and I judge actors in some of those same ways. So being in Indiana allowed me to not feel like I was in New York knocking on doors, which makes me feel totally out of control in my own life.
Was that part of becoming a director, having more control of your own course?
I’m not driven by one thing. As I said, most of the things I’ve written have not been published. I spent months writing lyrics to every country’s national anthem. At the BBC Web site, you could listen to the instrumentals of every country’s anthem, even Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. I would take that music, put it into GarageBand, and write a song about that country. Most of the things I write are just creative impulses that never see the light of day.
Well, I think, to close, we should show one of these anthems the light of day.
Here’s the Andorra one. [Sings.] “This is Andorra’s national anthem. / It’s a tiny little land. / There’s only sixty-four thousand people there, / A population I can count on one hand. / So it’s surprising that there are so many instruments required for this song. / Where did they find the musicians out of only sixty-four thousand? / Not a real competitive job, / To play the national anthem / for Andorra!” ♦
