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6 hours ago
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Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin are in complete agreement. People being more open about everyday anguish is a good thing. Absolutely. One hundred per cent.
Not them, though. They will continue to button up. “I know my pain is unexceptional,” says Eisenberg, words clattering out of him like a runaway train, “so I don’t feel the need to burden everybody with it. I have OCD and general anxiety disorder and bad things happen to me, but I’ll never talk about them because I don’t want that kind of attention.”
Unlike the generation below. “I notice younger people are much more comfortable talking about their lives and their struggles. As a 41-year-old it hits my ear in an unusual way because I wasn’t raised to do that. And maybe they’re far more healthy and they’re living better lives.”
Culkin nods, then lets his face get sceptical. “When people say: ‘I learned to love myself,’ I’m like: is that good, though? You should respect yourself, like yourself, understand yourself, but love yourself? No healthy dose of shame? A little bit of humility? That feels wrong.” Then he hops back on-message. “But maybe it’s healthy.”
A Real Pain, Eisenberg’s energetically self-critical Holocaust comedy – he writes and directs as well as co-stars – sets millennial kvetching against the backdrop of mass extermination. The pair play cousins, uptight David (Eisenberg) and scattershot Benji (Culkin), who travel to Poland on a yuppie tour of Jewish heritage at the behest of their late grandmother, who was raised there before the family fled to New York.
Eisenberg wrote the film crying in libraries. “As a third-generation American, I was surrounded by material security, by a kind of jaded New York arts scene, and I felt like I was missing some meaning in my life,” he says. “You can get that by volunteering and trying to alleviate the pain of others, maybe feeling like you’re part of something more important. But my exploration into my family’s history was really just my attempt to get some meaning in my otherwise boring life.”
The film’s bones lie in Eisenberg’s 2017 short story about mismatched friends wrangling with capitalism on a trip to Mongolia, which he was trying to adapt for the screen. Then a magazine ad caught his eye: “Auschwitz tours (with lunch)”. So he moved the setting to Poland, where he and his wife had been on their own pilgrimages. The film’s climactic visit to the childhood home of David and Benji’s grandma Dory was shot at the real-life home of her inspiration, Eisenberg’s great-aunt Doris.
Doris died in 2019 aged 106. She and Eisenberg had met at least weekly since he was 17. “She was just really blunt, and would say kind of a mean thing that only when you left the house in tears you’d realise was right,” he says. “My hips do look weird. And I needed her so much, especially as I got money from acting and was celebrated, to kind of put me in my place and tell me you’re not a great person yet, you have to do something great.”
A Real Pain is more than great. It is superb: exactly what you always hoped Eisenberg might make, but better. What would Doris have thought? “She would probably say I was indulging in an onanistic creative pursuit masquerading as some kind of great existential exploration. And she’d probably be right. But she grew up in Poland and had this inherent connection to it. And what she wouldn’t understand about me or my generation is that growing up without something like that is also painful.”
Eisenberg recently became a Polish citizen. It has changed him, he says, in a way he can’t articulate – quite something for someone who composes so carefully and self-edits so assiduously (three times he rewinds to qualify something he’s said). As for Culkin? “I’ve no idea where my family is originally from,” he says. “And I don’t care! I’m just here. Which was very frustrating for you,” he says, turning to Eisenberg. “Yeah,” he replies. “I usually do a eugenics test before I work with someone.”
Much has already been written about whether the two are similar. Eisenberg assumed they would be, being actors in New York of the same age, and was baffled to discover that Culkin’s take on many things – the need to learn lines before shooting scenes, for instance – diverged significantly. But they have grown together while promoting the film and today make a very happy couple: companionable without being cliquey, unusually playful and responsive.
Culkin stretches out in his chair, a doe-eyed scarecrow in catwalk knits; Eisenberg is all confidence and apologies, head-to-toe in black save for a long metal splint on a broken finger. He looks like a Bond villain and acts like their lackey.
Next door are Culkin’s young family; he doesn’t travel without them. “My wife and my two kids are kind of the only people,” he explains. “It’s got to a point where I don’t know what else to talk about.”
On set, he was forever fretting about getting back for bath time. “They were on his mind constantly,” says Eisenberg. “It’s rare and it’s so sweet. As a director, I felt awful: ‘I’m sorry, we do need to shoot another scene; we actually want to shoot the whole script!’ But my character in the movie kind of idolises him and that’s how I was feeling too: what an amazing father.”
Eisenberg’s real-life son Banner, seven, plays David’s son Abe in the film – seen only on a video David watches on his phone, in which the boy excitedly recites the heights of skyscrapers. It’s a throwaway moment that turns out to be carefully thought through. Eisenberg wanted father and child to have an intellectual connection, he explains, which has eclipsed the purely emotional bond David previously had with Benji. The boy is called Abraham, incidentally, because David’s (briefly glimpsed) wife is Indian-American, and the backstory is that as a recent convert to Judaism, she’d want her son to have a highly religious name.
Culkin reels, impressed by the detail. “Wow, I never thought of that!” “I tried to think of all these things,” says Eisenberg, matter-of-factly. Having children, reports Culkin, has changed his comprehension of the world because you have to start explaining how it works. “Like having to explain to my daughter why people on the subway are trying to take our picture and we don’t know them. I’ll say: ‘I don’t know, but here’s what I think.’ She’ll then ask the right questions and I’ll have to really think about it. But after getting a good understanding I can often go: well, I still don’t like this person. Still a dick!”
Eisenberg is tickled by this. He and Culkin really are the same in some ways, he says. “We probably have a similar attitude towards wanting to prioritise our kids over our own vanity.”
Down the hall, two other actors from the film are waiting: Jennifer Grey, of Dirty Dancing fame, who plays Marcia, a wealthy divorcee also on the tour, and The White Lotus’s Will Sharpe, who plays their understated British tour guide, James. They are one of the weirdest pairings I’ve ever encountered. He is quiet, dry, thoughtful; she keen for maximum connection and empathy, gazing wide-eyed to see your reaction as Sharpe considers something, often with an affectionate this guy! expression, before chipping in with a plea for world peace. It’s delightful.
“I think the key is to remember,” says Grey, sagely, “that we don’t know what anyone’s going through, and to just assume that there is pain everywhere. Even if someone looks really together. I don’t believe anyone gets out of this thing alive.”
Sharpe murmurs assent. Grey’s family are Jewish; she speaks of her horror at the Middle East today, and about whether the Jews are, as James puts it, “a most resilient people”. “We make up 0.2% of the world’s population,” she says, “and everyone’s wanted us dead since the beginning of time. I think that’s pretty resilient.”
Her own ancestors mostly escaped eastern Europe in time. But on the day they filmed at Majdanek, a real concentration camp just outside Lublin, Grey was overcome with what she describes as generational trauma. “I could not stop crying for a long while. I’m sure Jesse was freaking out, because we only had one day at this place. My lovely makeup artist said you need to create a shield around you to get through today. I meditated and I did create a bubble around me. And then I felt nothing. It was the weirdest thing. Like I couldn’t afford to be that porous.
“Because it’s bigger than our minds can wrap itself around. You really don’t believe that it could have actually happened. It’s such an experiential, change-everything moment.”
Sharpe nods. “It’s like an abyss. So extreme your brain almost short-circuits. I am feeling something, but it’s so unthinkable you start to worry whether you have the capacity.”
For a while, Grey’s reaction – at least the first bit, in which she walks, nauseated, out of frame – was kept in the edit. “Normally in a movie you’d want to include any kind of realism,” says Eisenberg, “because everything else is artifice. But the tone was disrupted.”
That’s because, he says, the scenes at the camp “are not about the characters as much as about this indescribable, amorphous experience of visiting this thing. I was trying to create something that felt different from the rest of the movie, because it should feel different, in my opinion.” For 10 minutes there is no music. No histrionics. No particular interaction between the cast. As they are shown around a gas chamber, they look, one by one, almost down the lens – a quick wrinkle in the naturalism.
“Richard Ayoade, who’s like my favourite director of all time,” says Eisenberg, who worked with Ayoade on The Double, and may or may not have used him as considerable inspiration for the character of James, “would always tell me that when the characters are experiencing a lot of emotions explicitly, it can take away from the experience because it unburdens the audience from sitting with something. He explained that to me many, many times when I was overacting in his movie.”
Eisenberg’s own airtime in A Real Pain was culled according to this adage. “I had lines I’ve been wanting to say in real life for ever, about how I feel like such a loser and every day is 24 hours of panic to just get out the door. Finally I was on set expressing them and it just overtook me. I had this over-cathartic experience. It felt like: that’s too much from this person.”
All along, he says, his worst fear was making a “sanctimonious Holocaust movie that seems to be both showing you a movie and congratulating itself at the same time”. He names no names but singles out two titles that didn’t do that: Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest and László Nemes’ Son of Saul – the latter “just the greatest movie about that theme ever” because it’s such a “visceral, ugly experience”.
A Real Pain is a very funny, fleet-of-foot film about two terrible impossibles: quantifying suffering and sanitising genocide (perhaps not one for the poster). The parenthetic lunch on that Auschwitz ad was gauche but reasonable, he thinks. Maybe essential. Writing the script, he’d study such pamphlets and many had blurb like: “We finish early enough for a nice dinner in the centre of Krakow.”
“If you’re gonna get people to come and revisit this harrowing history, you can’t take them in a cattle car and throw them on the ground. Maybe there’s some visceral way of doing it where you walk around wearing electrodes that are triggered as you walk through the camp, but even that wouldn’t get close to the experience of being a prisoner in a war.”
What would have amazed Doris, he thinks, is how the Polish neighbours who let down her family are now fighting their corner. “Among New York Jews there’s a real resentment towards the Poles. I heard it growing up: ‘Ah, the Poles are antisemitic!’ I had the exact opposite experience. People talked about my family’s history with more reverence than I heard at home. They spend their days memorialising the history of other people’s families in a way so much more impassioned and effortful than anything I do.
“Young academics [at the museum at Majdanek] spend every day in an office that sits outside the entrance to one of the most horrifying places on Earth. And they spend their time trying to get more information about its history so they can make their museum that much more accurate.”
Eisenberg admires Ayoade and Nemes but these are the people he venerates. He’s been part of the movie industry since he was small, but he’s been surrounded by teachers and activists longer – his parents, and his wife (whom he met in 2001) and her family.
Near the end of the film, one of David and Benji’s attempts to pay tribute to the dead endangers the living. How often do we misjudge mourning? “I think about grief all the time,” he says, “for reasons I don’t wanna divulge. When is it appropriate? How do we present grief to the world, when is it self-serving and when is it helpful?”
And does he have an answer? Economy is, briefly, abandoned. “No, of course not. No, no, of course not. Of course not. No.”
