A few years ago, actor Jesse Eisenberg was writing a movie about two men on a road trip in Mongolia when an ad popped up on his screen, offering "Auschwitz tours, with lunch."
"I clicked on the ad and it took me to a site for what you would imagine: An English speaking heritage tour of Poland that culminates at Auschwitz," Eisenberg says. "And it ... just posed all these interesting philosophical questions like: Why do we do tragedy tourism and why don't we try to connect to this kind of history in a way that feels less comfortable?"
Eisenberg shifted the setting of his Mongolia script to Poland, and borrowed details from his own family history. A Real Pain, which Eisenberg also directed and stars in, follows two American cousins who go on a Jewish heritage trip to Poland, culminating in a tour of Majdanek concentration camp. The trip is funded by their recently deceased grandmother, who wanted her grandchildren to see the home she fled when the Nazis were coming to power.
Each cousin is dealing with mental health issues, which are exacerbated by the trip. Eisenberg's character, David, is introverted, and takes medication for his OCD. His cousin Benji, played by Kieran Culkin, has severe depression at times, but outwardly is charismatic and lights up the room. Eisenberg says one of the themes he wanted to explore in the film is the validity of pain.
"What is real pain?" he says. "Is my character's manageable, medicated OCD pain valid? Is Kieran's pain valid ... [if] he's experiencing the worst of what a psyche can experience, but at the same time he is in a comfortable life? Or is the only pain that's valid and should be acknowledged is the pain of war, genocide and mass trauma?"
A Real Pain was nominated for four Golden Globe Awards, including the award for best supporting actor, which Culkin won. Eisenberg is grateful for the recognition his film has received, but he also acknowledges the disconnect between the subject of his film and the celebratory nature of the award season.
"There's some kind of irony there, and it certainly sums up probably a lot of my inner life," he says. "I have a materially nice life and I walk around kind of feeling bad for myself, being miserable over minor things. And yet I'm also incredibly fascinated by my family's history in Poland and learning about the suffering. And I don't know how to reconcile those two things: Feeling bad about my very fortunate life and also understanding the horrors of my family's past or the horrors of people around the world today."
Interview highlights
On shooting part of the movie at Majdanek concentration camp in Poland
[The authorities at Majdanek] get asked every day [for the camp] to be turned into essentially war sets that take place in 1942 and have extras running around in Nazi uniforms. Of course they're not going to allow that at this kind of site, which is a cemetery, which is a site of mass horror. And so over the course of the next eight months before we made the movie, I just tried to reach out in any way possible to this concentration camp, Majdanek, to explain what I wanted to do, which is I wanted to film a scene of a modern tour group going through this place, in an attempt to have it be part of the movie, but also to show audiences what this place is. And my kind of plea to them was that I want to do the same thing you're doing. You exist as a museum to show people today what happened on this site. And I'm trying to do the same thing through my movie. ...
We went over every word in the script. We went over every angle that we wanted to film, and it took a long time, but they agreed to it and we had two cameras and we basically set up the shots in the most kind of unfettered way. It was written in the script even that these scenes will be shot very simply. There will be no music. The actors will walk in and out of the room. So that's how I wrote it in the script, and that's what we filmed.
On needing to be flexible with Kieran Culkin on set
Kieran Culkin, in this movie, didn't want to stand on any marks, which means, when you're setting up a shot in a movie, the actor has to stand on their mark to deliver their lines. This is kind of a standard practice. Kieran would never stand on a mark because he didn't know what he was going to do or where he was going to walk or what he was going to be performing. And so for me, if I had some kind of strict compulsion to wanting the actors to all do my thing, the movie wouldn't be good because it would be stifling our leading character, Kieran. And so learning to be flexible is helpful. In the arts, that's really kind of paramount, because you want the most creative, interesting idea to win.
On his own relationship to Judaism and bar mitzvahs
I dropped out of Hebrew school when I was like 12. … I hated, in a real way, these [bar mitzvah] parties that people had. I grew up in the suburbs of Jersey. They turned my stomach in a way that I couldn't probably even articulate. Just like the deification and celebration of a 13-year-old kid, for doing what? I don't know. And then, the karaoke celebrating a kid, it seemed so gross to me. The kids in school would talk about the checks they got. ... In retrospect, I still feel a little put off by it. Like, why are we celebrating this kid and giving them the kind of false illusion that they've done some great deed for the world by learning seven seconds of Hebrew? …
Probably 10 years later, I was playing a Hasidic Jew in a movie called Holy Rollers. And so I was doing all this research on Hasidism and I actually got a bar mitzvah because I was kind of like going to this Hasidic school and I was kind of pretending like I was just a kind of curious, secular Jew, which they, of course, loved to have because they thought they can kind of convert me into their world. And so they gave me a bar mitzvah. … So not only did I not have a secular Jersey bar mitzvah, but I ended up having a Hasidic bar mitzvah with, like, 100 Hasidic young men standing around me chanting … so I had probably the most religious bar mitzvah a person could have, but it was just because I was trying to infiltrate the school to learn about it for an acting job.
On struggling with anxiety, depression and OCD as a child
I cried everywhere. I guess at some point I probably shed the embarrassment that most kids would have probably felt. I was kicked out of preschool … because I locked my mom in the closet because I didn't want to be away from my mom. … I probably at some point got over the expected humiliation the kid would have about being very emotional in front of people. … I didn't want attention or pity. I think I was just so miserable. I couldn't control myself.
On being briefly admitted to a mental hospital as a child – and his parents taking him out because of a swastika drawn in his room by another patient
I was really going crazy. … They kept bringing me to this padded room or something and it was terrifying. … I would go to the soft room and they would put their knee in my back and hold me back to restrain me. …
I remember actually not being bothered by the swastika at all, but for whatever reason [that] was the thing that tipped my parents into taking me out of there. And I was going home and I was like, "I think I should skydive!" I had this feeling on the way home, like, I just love life. I was kissing the car and I was kissing my sister's arm hair.
I was only in there for like a week. And then after a week or two of being out, then you're like, you go back to the same problems. But the problem for me was like, if I didn't at least try to go to school, not to go to class, but to try to go to school and sit in the therapist's office at least for three hours a day, then [I would] have to go back to the institution. So the institution became this kind of boogeyman.
On finding a place for himself in community theater as a kid
What was really great about it was I was with adults. Somehow I just felt so much more comfortable not only being with adults, but being with adults who are all attracted to the arts. And especially when you're working on the community theater level. It's all people that feel outcast in every other part of the world, and that's why they're working after their job at AT&T during the day, they come and they have their outlet at night. And just being around people like that was just so life-changing and affirming and made me realize, you know what? I think [I'm] going to be OK when I'm an adult because I could see all these people are more like me. They're not like the people I go to school with. These people are outcasts and weirdos and artists. And that just was life-changing.
Lauren Krenzel and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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