Jesse Eisenberg was stuck. Then he saw four words.
The actor, writer, and director had been trying to adapt “Mongolia,” a 2017 short story he’d written for Tablet Magazine, into a movie, and was, by his own admission, hitting a brick wall. A tale of two college friends — one of whom is grounded, the other an impulsive, boho thrill-seeker — who travel to East Asia in search of “the experience of a lifetime” and end up on in a yurt on an ecotourism center, this concise character study had seemed like the perfect foundation for a film. He liked the Odd Couple dynamic between the duo. But the more he tried to capture that dynamic in a way that would justify two hours of screen time, the more it eluded him. “I was 30 pages into a script,” Eisenberg recalls, sitting in a hotel room just off Central Park. “And I was slowly coming to the realization that this was not working. What I had so far wasn’t good. And if I kept going in the hopes that it would somehow get better, I would just end up with 60 pages of something that was twice as bad.”
So he was ready to chalk it up to a loss and search for whatever new idea might fuel a follow-up to his 2022 directorial debut, When You Finish Saving the World. Then an ad popped up on his computer browser. Not unlike the catalytic trip in his story, it also promised an experience of a lifetime. There was something about the wording of it, however, that struck him: “Auschwitz tours, with lunch.” Suddenly, the cartoon lightbulb above his head began glowing at 1,000 watts.
“I read that and just went, ‘Oh, this is so …’” Eisenberg shakes his head rapidly, the look in his eyes pitched somewhere between disbelief and morbid delight. “I mean, in four words, it sums up everything I think about being a third-generation survivor, which is: There’s no good way to experience this. There’s no perfect way to honor and revere the history, because anything you do would be in the context of modern privilege.”
A Real Pain taps into that specific sensation — as well as the inherent absurdism of that ad and the sorrow and the pity of the atrocity tourism industry — in a way that meshes with the wry, slightly ironic voice Eisenberg has established in his plays (he’s written four) and his fiction writing in publications like Tablet and The New Yorker. (It’s now playing in New York and Los Angeles, and will open wider on Nov. 15.) The duo may now be cousins rather college friends, and instead of the far reaches of Mongolia, their destination is a small town in southeastern Poland. But the relationship between these once close, now slightly estranged relatives mirrors the ant-and-grasshopper dynamic of the short story’s unlikely traveling companions. The trip’s organizer, David, is a tech-industry worker with a wife and son who craves organization and order; he’s the one who’s booked them on one of those professional tours led by a wonky guide. His cousin, Benji, is a free-spirit stoner who reacts to everything like a child would, for better and for worse. The only surprise is that Eisenberg wanted to cast himself as Benji.
Instead, he took on the part of David and relied on the advice of a real-life relative in regards to finding the film’s resident wild card. “I had written the scene where Benji kind of goads everybody in their tour group to come up and take a picture on this monument,” Eisenberg says. “It’s irreverent and a little edgy, and there’s even something a little kind of antagonistic about the way he leaves David to take all the pictures on everybody’s telephones. I saw my sister later that night, and I asked her, ‘Could you read this thing? It’s kind of funny.’ And she said, there is only one person on the planet who could play this part. You need Kieran Culkin.
“it just seemed so right,” he continues enthusiastically. “I mean, when we got together finally on set, after he, like, literally, tried to drop out of the movie multiple times, it was just, Oh, my God! It felt like, this is my long-lost acting partner!”
“Right, so did Jesse tell you that he’d never seen any of my work before he cast me?” Culkin asks, speaking over the phone the next day. “Actually, that’s only partially true, because apparently he’d seen Home Alone. We got down to the bottom of that like, you know, a day or so ago. ‘Oh, so you’d seen my work when I played a bed-wetter when I was seven. Got it.’ I also found out yesterday that he has since seen Margaret, which I have a small part in. But he told me, while he was editing the movie, that he had not seen me in anything before casting me.
“I’m still baffled by it,” he adds, giggling. “Why would somebody do that? And he still thinks it’s perfectly normal that he didn’t audition me, and he hadn’t seen my work in anything. He’s just going by his sister’s recommendation? That’s the ultimate trust in your sister. ‘Well, you know, we’ve met before’ — fucking like, twice in passing! Maybe three times, I think, but small interactions. Even when I lay it out like to him, he still thinks it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to cast somebody based on briefly having met them and they have a general vibe or some shit. ‘Someone said you were good.’ That’s not how you hire someone for a job. So I just said, OK. Fuck it.”
Kurt Egyiawan, Will Sharpe, Kieran Culkin, and Jesse Eisenberg (from left) in ‘A Real Pain.’
And though Culkin confirms he did try to drop out numerous times before production started, he also acknowledges that — gut-intuition casting or not — there was something that resonated with him immediately about this project.
“It was an incredibly tight, virtually perfect script,” Culkin says. “I was laughing out loud while reading it, which never happens. And the other thing that never happens is instantly feeling like: I can play this guy. I know who he is, without having to do any extra work. It was right there on the page. The next step was just to have a conversation with Jesse. I mean, you’ve talked to him — he’s super smart and speaks very quickly. I felt right away, like, Yeah, this might work. I have known him to be a very good actor. I see the script is great. The only thing that was a bit of a question mark for me was, how was he as a director? So I watched his first movie, which was very good, and then it was just, All right, well, I hope we hit it off in terms of acting against each other. What he told you is correct: It was like sort of an instant thing. It seemed to flow really quickly and easily.”
Indeed, when you watch A Real Pain, you’d have thought that Eisenberg had written this specifically for the two of them. David feels like a kinder, gentler version of the neurotic, sometimes anxious characters he’s played in everything from The Social Network to the Zombieland movies. Culkin nails the sort of perpetually sunny, charming holy-fool type who thinks nothing of helping himself to his cousin’s snacks or blurting out “Oh, snap!” when one of his tour mates mentions he’s from Rwanda. Asked if he was drawing on anyone in particular for Benji’s blend of boundless enthusiasm and lack of boundaries, Culkin says that his wife turned to him during a screening and whispered the name of an acquaintance in his ear. “And I was like, Holy shit, she’s right,” he admits. “I could suddenly recognize it when she said it. But the influence was totally subconscious. This person wasn’t on my mind while we were doing it.”
For Eisenberg, however, the film drew on a lot of personal connections — not just to his character, but to the region. At the movie premiere at Sundance this past January, the writer-director mentioned that the small, nondescript house that is the end destination of the cousins’ journey once belonged to his late Aunt Doris. It’s where she grew up in the town of Krasnystaw, he noted, before having to flee the Nazis. In the movie, the place belongs to “Grandma Dory,” who both of the men were very close to. The whole idea of David and Benji traveling together to Eastern Europe, in fact, was to honor her roots and hopefully reconnect in the process. (Part of which involves visiting the Majdanek concentration camp, which the production used for filming. In order not to “fetishize the pain,” Eisenberg simply set up cameras and had the cast walk through the rooms. The reactions of shock and horror from the cast, he adds, were real.)
That’s based on an actual trip that Eisenberg took in 2008, not with his cousin but his wife. He’d promised his aunt that if was ever in Poland, he would take a picture of the house for her. Upon returning to the United States, Eisenberg gave her the photo as a gift. That led, he notes, to the four other words that greatly inspired A Real Pain.
“Her reaction was basically, ‘Oh yeah. That’s it.’” Eisenberg says. “And the funny thing is, I got it. I understood. When I came back to Poland to do this movie, I was filming in places that were personally relevant to me, whether it’s the concentration camp that’s five minutes away from where my family lived, or literally shooting at the house that my family lived up until 1939. This was obviously personal to me.
“But when I was standing outside the house in 2008, my reaction was: Why am I not feeling something profound?” he adds. “I was just kind of mystified that I had no connection to this place whatsoever. How is it possible that my family lived here longer than they lived in Queens, and I have no connection to it? So that’s also, I guess, what got me thinking about this story when I decided to pursue this as a second movie. I was trying to kind of close the loop a little bit. And actually, on Nov. 17th, I get my Polish citizenship. So in a way, I kind of committed to understanding this history in a way that now feels fulfilling because of this.”
