Jesse Eisenberg’s Latest Film Is Painfully Good

In 2008, when Jesse Eisenberg and his wife, Anna Strout, visited Poland, they finished their trip in the village of Krasnystaw, in front of the home where Eisenberg’s family had lived until 1939. Their trip was an odyssey of sorts to better understand who came before them.

“Anna’s [family] is from the west side of the country; mine is from the southeast,” says the Oscar-nominated actor, whose vast credits include The Social Network, Fleishman is in Trouble, Zombieland, and Sasquatch Sunset. “Both families survived the war in various ways and we wanted to go back to see where they are from.”

Eisenberg remembers standing outside the small, unassuming apartment building thinking he would feel a profound catharsis. “We had come full circle in our lives and returned to this place that was the site of tragedy,” he recalls. But what he experienced was not something epic or colossal. “We felt like we were just standing in front of a three-story apartment building,” he says. That strange disconnect stayed with him. He thought, How do we connect to our past in a way that fulfills something for us in our present moment? “It’s so hard, awkward, and clumsy when we try to connect in explicit ways and it doesn’t have the resonance that we expect.”

More than a decade later, Eisenberg was adapting a short story he had written into a screenplay. The premise was two friends, Benji and David, flying to Mongolia to visit a pal from their childhood. Eisenberg was 30 pages into the script when he realized it was not working. “The script wasn’t going well,” he says. “I thought, Does this thing have legs to be a feature film or is this going to die right here?”

In the midst of his should-I-scrap-this pondering, a banner ad popped up on his computer screen: Auschwitz tours (with lunch). “I guess the parentheses was because they wanted to be discreet,” he says. He clicked and knew he had his next film.

“It was this life changing, creatively-changing thing,” says Eisenberg. “I thought, That is what the movie should be. I should take these guys out of Mongolia and set them on a Holocaust tour. It would allow me to explore their intimate relationship and have these personal crises against the landscape of something so inexplicably tragic and massive.”

So Eisenberg wrote A Real Pain, a gem of a film about two bonded but disparate cousins, Benji (Kieran Culkin) and David (Eisenberg). Using money from their late grandmother Dory, they go on a Jewish heritage tour through Poland. Their mission is to better understand their family and Dory, who survived the holocaust because of “a thousand miracles” as David says. What they discover is that their connection to one another is more pertinent than their relationship to their past.

“I thought it would be so interesting to set their modern day problems against the backdrop of something so much bigger,” says Eisenberg. “It would allow me to create a commentary on these two guys without any kind of academic or didactic points.” The result is a deft exploration of how people experience pain in this context. “Is their interpersonal pain valid against the background of the Holocaust?” he posits.

Culkin’s Benji is an unfiltered, rule-breaking loose cannon. Eisenberg’s David is more buttoned up and seemingly stable with a wife, child, and job selling internet banner ads at home. But both men struggle with their demons, although Benji’s may be less hidden.

“They were very tight in their childhood, almost like brothers,” says Culkin of Benji and David’s relationship. “When they got older they just grew apart. And, to me, a lot of the story is about how they handled that very differently. One seemingly moves on from that and seems pretty well-adjusted. And the other one seems to be a bit of a case of arrested development, particularly when it comes to that relationship.”

In fact, Culkin, who had planned to take time off from acting to be with his family following the final season of Succession, says he did everything in his power to get out of doing A Real Pain. But Eisenberg’s script pulled him back in. “I instantly thought, I know who this guy is. I know I can play this,” says Culkin. “I don’t want to think about it. I can do it. It’s very, very rare when that happens.”

Produced by Emma Stone and her company Fruit Tree, A Real Pain has been racking up nominations this awards season. Already a winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the Sundance Film Festival, A Real Pain is nominated for four Golden Globe Awards, along with Critics Choice and Independent Spirit Awards, and has been listed as one of the 10 best films of 2024 by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the National Board of Review.

For Stone, who says she adores Eisenberg’s unique voice as a writer and loves his sense of curiosity and his ability to write such personal stories, producing Eisenberg’s work seems to be the ideal fit. The first film that Fruit Tree produced was 2023’s When You Finish Saving the World—Eisenberg’s directorial debut. “I have known Jesse for 15 or 16 years and fell in love with him as an actor and a person and then I very quickly fell in love with his writing,” says Stone. “The two characters of David and Benji are so beautifully realized and complex while being extremely funny. It becomes very personal and moving because of the way he illustrates David and Benji.”

That illustration is one of people both flawed and charming. And that makes for a devastatingly relatable film. “The characters are trying to connect to history, but really the only important thing in the movie is them trying to connect with each other,” says Eisenberg. “Their disconnect is the painful thing. Not the disconnect with history. Because the only thing that is so visceral is connecting to another person who is there in front of you.”

InStyle spoke with Eisenberg at the Rams Head Inn in Shelter Island, NY, ahead of a discussion with the historic property’s film society program. Here, he talks about working with Culkin, his real life Aunt Doris who inspired the film, and what’s next on his movie-making docket.

You have worked with so many great directors over the years (including Richard Ayoade, Greg Mottola, and David Fincher). What did you learn from them that you were able to apply in A Real Pain?

I learned to be a good leader and empathize with people’s difficulties. That was so much more important than learning technical stuff, which you can pick up. But being a good leader is really important.

You get on a movie set and there are people from all walks of life. You have people doing construction who come from the world of construction. You have actors from drama school crying at a moment’s notice, and they’re telling you that they read King Lear last night and realized that is what their part should be like. As a director you’re trying to manage all this stuff. So I learned from really nice directors to be a good leader of a group of people.

In the film, David, and especially Benji, have a deep connection with their grandma Dory. Was that borne from your bond with your late aunt Doris who lived in Poland and emigrated to the United States when she was a child?

Yes. She passed when she was 106 years old in 2019. We were incredibly close. She was born and raised in the apartment in Poland where we filmed the movie and only had great stories about living there. I told her, “If I ever get a job in Europe, I will go to your house and take a picture.”

And did you?

Yes. I was working in Bosnia, which is not near Poland. But Anna and I met in Poland, went to the apartment building, and I took this picture for my aunt. This was before Google Maps and it was kind of an ordeal to get there. We went back to New York and I blew up the picture at the highest resolution at Kinkos. When I brought her the picture saying, “This is your house,” I thought she would cry or wipe it along her face. But she just said, “Oh yeah, that was it.” She put it away.

It was the same experience I had standing in front of it. There’s no way to actually connect to history in the way you expect. The way I connected to history was talking to her and hearing about her life.

What do you think Doris would say about A Real Pain and what do you miss most about her?

She was my dad’s aunt and a loner who had an outwardly embittered presence from a troubled life. Of course, it’s justifiable. She was not somebody to easily give out hugs or compliments. As a young actor, I began regularly seeing her when I was 17 and starting to act in movies. I thought my life was missing a grounding—somebody yelling at me, giving boundaries. She was mad because I deferred college and I would tell her, “I got a job in a movie.” And she would say, “Who cares? You’re not Cary Grant.” And I was trying to tell her, “Movies are different now. I could be in movies.” She couldn’t believe it.

Is it true that you originally wanted to cast yourself as Benji?

I had written the movie and wasn’t even planning on acting in it. I have written plays for 20 years and I try not to act in them, but then it’s hard to get them produced. And so it’s better if there’s an actor attached. The truth is, no one wants to get a script in the mail. But producers are open to it if there is an actor attached. So, with this movie, I thought I should be in it to try to get initial producers interested in it and allow people to envision it. And I thought I could play the cool unhinged Benji.

Emma Stone, who had been producing a lot of the movies she acted in, told me, “Don’t play an unhinged character if you’re directing.” Directing requires a managerial approach. There are around 150 people on the crew. And to try to manage a set and act as an unhinged character, she thought it would be impossible. And she was right.

How did you end up casting Kieran?

I met Kieran once like 10 years ago when we were auditioning for Adventureland together. And he just blew me away. I hadn’t seen Succession [when I cast him]. But I knew of him from this one audition, and he was just so great—audacious and brazen.

After you do these intense scenes with Kieran, does the emotion remain? How do you go back to you?

It’s so interesting. I have acted for a long time. When I was starting out, if there was a tense scene, I would be tense all day, listening to tense music on my iPod. Now I kind of seamlessly go in and out with more ease. And, in this case, I had to set up the next shot.

The dynamic between me and Kieran existed off-screen in the same way it exists on-screen. People talk about method acting as the idea that you live inside your character. It’s not true. Because you would end up a complete psychopath to think you are this person on the set. But I did notice that I unconsciously created a dynamic that mirrored what was happening on-screen.

How did that happen?

I was Kieran’s boss. Yet, the entire time, he was manhandling me and making me feel embarrassed. The scene would end and he would say, “What are you doing now? Setting up another shot? Great idea.” And I had to tell him, “This is the shot on you.” He’d be like, “Yep. Thanks for doing me last.”

Even though I was his boss, we maintained this strange relationship where he was in charge. It’s the way actors sometimes exist. You don’t even realize it because it happens so seamlessly. It sounds like you’re just joking around, but actually there’s this complex dynamic at play.

It was recently announced that you’ll next be directing Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti in a film that takes place in the world of community theater. What can you share about it? 

Julianne plays a very shy woman who signs up for this community theater, which is run by Paul Giamatti, who leads the theater like a cult. She is very bad and he pushes her to go method. So this woman, who has never acted in anything, suddenly turns method and goes crazy. In the film they are performing a musical that I wrote. But it’s not a good musical. So it gave me the opportunity to write a musical without it having to be good. 

One of the first places where I performed was in community theater, and it was a lifeline for me. A Real Pain is very personal but it’s just as personal as setting a movie in New Jersey community theater.

What was one of the first community theater projects that you did?

The first great community theater show I did was Merrily We Roll Along. It’s a Stephen Sondheim musical that is incredibly literary, brilliant, funny, and interesting. As a 12-year-old kid, I was in heaven.