Jesse Eisenberg on the story behind “A Real Pain”

Jesse Eisenberg has “very strong opinions about Holocaust cinema.”

“I just have a very kind of, let’s say – what’s it called?sensitive Reaction to the way the Holocaust is portrayed in films,” he tells me in a video interview. “It's so easy to evoke sympathy for a Holocaust setting that I find it so exploitative, almost from a creative perspective, when they overdo it.”

Eisenberg says this knowing that he has recently contributed to this canon – albeit in an uncharacteristic way. His second feature film after his debut in 2022 When you're done saving the world, A real painplays itself and ConsequenceKieran Culkin as American cousins ​​who take a trip to Poland to honor their recently deceased grandmother. Part of your tour includes a visit to the Majdanek concentration and extermination camp. In typical reticence, the actor and director does not claim to have solved the problem of the Holocaust film by making one himself. He took responsibility for capturing Majdanek the only way he knew how.

“For me it was already worrying to make a film about this subject, and so I just tried to treat it with the most realistic approach that I could.” The approach: “Tell the story of these two characters who to have ambivalent feelings about history, to have ambivalent feelings about their own pain to the pain of their ancestors, and to document their experiences in Majdanek in the most rigorous, simple and direct way possible.”

Read more: The problem with the new Holocaust obsession on television

On its surface, A real pain is an intimate story with few characters that applies the contours of a buddy comedy to the exploration of historical trauma. But it's also quite an ambitious undertaking for an American indie film, and part of the logistical challenge of making it happen was not only going to Poland, but also convincing Majdanek's current administrators to let the crew there for an impressive one to have a sequence filmed in which Eisenberg and Culkin's David and Benji Kaplan can be seen silently bearing witness.

The script came from a deeply personal perspective for Eisenberg. As a teenager, he considered his great-aunt, who was born in Poland, a mentor and promised her that if he ever worked in Europe, he would visit the house where she grew up. When he took part in a film shoot in Bosnia, he did just that, but found the experience more confusing than liberating. “I'm standing in front of this house just trying to feel something, but I don't,” he says.

This became material for the climax A real painwith David and Benji in a similar state of confusion. It was filmed in the exact house where Eisenberg once stood.

Although Eisenberg's immediate ancestors, including his great-aunt, came to America in 1918, long before World War II, other relatives remained. They were all murdered in the Holocaust except one, a woman named Maria. Eisenberg has been preoccupied with the idea of ​​“reconciling modern pain with historical trauma” since his childhood, when he was an anxious boy in first grade and cried every day.

“I was a very sad child, and I learned about my family's history, and I just felt this connection to it because I felt like, yeah, they must have had it bad, and that's how I feel too,” says he, noting that he also felt “guilty for feeling this connection that I hadn’t heard.”

During the Covid-19 pandemic, he began answering his questions about these sensitive topics in a script. Since he was incarcerated in the United States, he downloaded a series of Polish itineraries and then created them himself using Google Street View, while planning the routes that David and Benji would take – along with a tour group whose members were led by Jennifer Grey and Kurt Egyiawan, Daniel Oreskes, Liza Sadovy and tour guide Will Sharpe. When it came to the actual filming, Eisenberg and his producers knew they needed a Polish team. Producer Ali Herting reached out to Ewa Puszczyńska, who had worked with A24 on the Oscar-winning film The zone of interest.

“They loved that it felt like a sort of quintessentially American buddy film, but set against the backdrop of contemporary Poland and dealing with these themes of memory, legacy and trauma in a very modern way,” says Herting. “I think they're so used to historical war films, and this was something new.”

Initially, the Polish producers assumed that Eisenberg wanted to build a stage version of the concentration camp, which would cost about $1 million. Not only was it too expensive, Eisenberg also balked at the idea of ​​recreating such a place. “Is there anyone who knows how to build Majdanek? I don’t know if I want to meet this person,” he says.

Still, Eisenberg explains, the process of getting the museum to agree to filming there took about eight months. Here too, it was Eisenberg's specific, current perspective that convinced the institution.

“Most often they're asked to make Holocaust films set in 1942, where filmmakers want to run around the camp with 100 extras, Nazi uniforms and weapons and say, 'No, this is a holy site, it has to be .' “preserved and treated with great reverence,” says Eisenberg. “Our pitch was: ‘I want to show what you’re doing now. I want to do the same thing you do. My family lived five minutes from here. They weren't actually in Majdanek, but that's part of me.' History and I have nothing but the utmost awe and gratitude for what you do and I want to express that as simply as possible.'”

On the day of this shoot, Eisenberg had been to Majdanek several times for reconnaissance and had added every moment he needed to capture to the shot list. But for his actors the experience was completely new. Like his character, Culkin saw many elements of the camp for the first time when the camera was rolling.

“A lot of times I didn’t get into the room until they were rolling,” Culkin says. “One or two takes, soaking it up like you would, yes, in character, but I'm in it too, and then he filmed it and that was it. It wasn't work. It would have been weird if we got out of that room and there was someone sitting in a director's chair playing Wordle or something like that.”

Herting noted that it was a “tough day” and that she encouraged everyone to take the space they needed.

“The hardest part was just the unpredictability of that day,” she says. “You don’t know how it’s going to affect people, and there have been surprises along the way. We all just felt like it was something really meaningful that we were there and got to do that.”

While Eisenberg wanted to shoot Majdanek in a straightforward manner, in part to portray his characters' emotions, he was also given a lot of footage, including B-roll footage without actors. When he walked into the editing room, it all just felt inconsequential.

“Ultimately I just wanted it to stay with the actors,” he says. “It felt immature to just put all the cool shots we took into the film because we got them.”

Eisenberg admits he is studying all of this in the “safety” of a third generation not attending the event. His father now keeps saying that he wants to visit Poland. “Ironically, this brings me closer to my older generation,” he says.