Why Jesse Eisenberg's new film hit so close to home: 'You're like the target human being' By Velvet Winter

Kieren Culkin (right), who plays Benji, tried to drop out of A Real Pain before producer Emma Stone convinced
him to stay on the production. (Supplied: Searchlight Pictures)

By Velvet Winter

Why Jesse Eisenberg's new film hit so close to home: 'You're like the target human being'

"I would call you the target audience, but you're like the target human being for the movie," Jesse Eisenberg laughs as we chat about his new film A Real Pain over Zoom.

At the end of 2024, I went to see Eisenberg's latest comedy to prepare for an interview with the writer, director and star. I went in fairly blind, only knowing that it had received glowing reviews and a fair amount of awards-season buzz (which has now turned into actual awards thanks to Kieran Culkin's Golden Globes win).

I had no idea how close it would hit home for me.

For the past few years, my grandmother, Edith, has been sharing her life story with me.

Born into a Jewish family in pre-WWII Poland, her extraordinary life story leaps from the ghettos of Warsaw to multiple "work" camps, to liberation, to assimilation in Australia.

But I never met Edith. She died 13 years before I was born.

Five years before her death, she recorded her life story onto cassette tapes destined for a biography that never materialised.

As my family's resident journalist, I'm dutifully transcribing her speech. It's immense to hear the life-and-death struggles in her own words.

A Real Pain follows David and Benji, two radically different cousins, as they embark on a Polish Holocaust tour to honour their recently deceased grandmother and reconcile their fractured relationship.

Eisenberg has made a career out of putting his neuroticism to film, whether it be as a misguided youth in Adventureland or Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, but the anxiety in A Real Pain comes from its modern characters attempting to reconcile their daily problems with the atrocities in their ancestors' history.

After a week of friction between uptight-but-well-meaning David (Eisenberg) and freewheeling-yet-troubled Benji (Culkin), the cousins and their eclectic tour group visit Majdanek concentration camp, on the outskirts of Polish town Lublin.

As I sat in the dark, empty theatre, I felt a ding in my brain — 'Where had I heard about Lublin before?'

Then it hit me.

I had not only heard Lublin countless times spoken in my grandmother's accented rasp, but seen it written on tape #4 in which she spoke about SS guards with "big wolfdogs" that would glare over her and other young girls to make sure they kept up to speed as they carried prefabricated barrels across military barracks.

Before she died, Edith recorded her life story onto 11 cassette tapes. (Supplied: Velvet Winter)

It was a surreal feeling to realise I could be looking at the areas that I had heard my grandmother describe.

I agonised over whether to include my connection to the film in this piece, worried it would frame me as a self-indulgent whiner (ironic considering the themes of the movie). But when it came to my interview time, Eisenberg was floored to hear the remarkable coincidence.

Cultural paranoia

Being a "third-generation holocaust survivor" is constantly asking yourself the same question; 'Is my pain valid?'. You have quantifiable horror baked into your DNA but obsessively remind yourself — while in your safe country with relative freedom — that you didn't survive anything and your troubles pale in comparison to your grandparents'.

It's a feeling Eisenberg's character touches on in A Real Pain. In a mid-film monologue, he says his grandmother survived because of "1,000 miracles", only for her descendants to become an online marketer with anxiety and an unemployed screw-up.

While Eisenberg's Polish connection comes from his father's side, his maternal grandparents immigrated to America before WWII from what we would now call Russia, having survived the Moldovan pogroms.

His grandparents' experience infused their lives with a paranoia that they passed onto their daughter, Eisenberg's mum.

"My mum used to wake me up in the middle of the night and say, 'I just had a dream we were in a boat, and the boat turned over, and I couldn't save you … go back to sleep'," Eisenberg says.

"It's like paranoia gets passed down and it becomes like a cultural paranoia of like, 'This bad thing is going to occur' and then it further reaffirms that that's the way we should be feeling, and we validate it to each other culturally and [it's] so innate in our culture that you can't get rid of it."

But Eisenberg doesn't make the mistake of bogging A Real Pain down in Holocaust reverence. The director expands upon his own perspective through the character of Elodge, another member of David and Benji's Polish tour group who survived the Rwandan genocide in his youth.

Elodge (Kurt Egyiawan, far right) was based on Eisenberg's real-life friend Eloge Butera, who moved to Canada after surviving the Rwandan genocide. (Getty: Jeff Spicer)

"When I walk out of Majdanek [concentration camp], I don't think, 'I can't believe people are doing this to Jews'. I think, 'How it is possible that humans can create systemic, industrialised murder'," Eisenberg says.

"But when I was at the Rwandan Genocide Museum in Kigali, I was also thinking the same thoughts: 'How can people do this to each other?'"

Comedy and concentration camps

Don't let the Holocaust talk trick you into thinking A Real Pain is a drama; it's firmly in the comedy genre.

Its solemn setting is enlivened by Culkin's charmingly madcap performance as Benji, with Eisenberg mining David's exasperated realisation that he'll never be as charming as his cousin for big laughs.

"I had written what I thought was a comedy, and I just set it on the backdrop of the Holocaust. It's mostly funny, ironic set pieces, but because the backdrop is so serious, it allows for emotion," Eisenberg says.

While the comedy came easy to Eisenberg, the scenes set in Majdanek — the German death camp that saw the demise of thousands of prisoners — caused survivors' guilt to rear its head once more.

"I was so embarrassed when I was writing the movie script and suddenly had to set a scene at a concentration camp, because it just seems so petty and cheap to set a scene in a concentration camp," Eisenberg says.

Then, his Polish producers told him it would be almost impossible to film at Majdanek.

The site frequently receives requests from productions looking for an Auschwitz stand-in due to it being preserved to almost exactly how it was during the war.

Most are knocked back by the caretakers. They don't want scenes of violence filmed at such an austere site.

A Real Pain is one of the very few films allowed to film the grounds and structures at Majdanek. (Supplied: Searchlight)

But once the caretakers read Eisenberg's script and realised it was set in contemporary times in Majdanek, they gave him the green light.

"In the script, right after I wrote exterior Majdanek day, I just wrote a note to the reader: 'This scene will look very different. There will be no music, there will be no talking … and it will be shot very simply'," Eisenberg says.

"We set up the cameras and I told [the actors], 'Please don't block each other so we can see all of you. But otherwise, do whatever you want to do. Walk anywhere'. And the actors walked in and saw the stuff for the first time."

The real pain and confusion clouding the actors' faces as they take in the camp's placid grounds — the grubby cabins and the cages of discarded shoes — are nothing short of arresting.

"I don't know if we did a second take in each room," Eisenberg admits.

Do you want to make a billion dollars?

As Benji and David arrive back home at the end of the film, there is a sense that no pain has been resolved. It's been transformed, transferred, re-contextualised, but it's still there.

"My friend [Zombieland director] Ruben Fleischer watched the movie and he goes, 'Do you want to make a billion dollars?' And I was like, 'Oh, sure. What do we have to do?' And he was like, 'Just have Benji knock on the door of David's apartment at the end and give a hug and cut out'," Eisenberg says.

"And I was like, 'Oh, I don't want to make a billion dollars'."

"Basically, this is a story about David, my character, trying to change his cousin, and begging him, 'Please, please, be this wonderful person that I see you as'. In the end, he can't really change him.

"That's the nature of these kinds of lives. They're not happy-ending lives because we're ridden with paranoia and horrible traits passed down from our mums who don't know how to swim."

It's a bittersweet ending that has stuck with me from the moment I left the cinema. I can turn off my grandmother's tapes, I can walk away from my laptop, but her struggle for survival still rings in my ears every time I complain about some mundane gripe in my privileged life.

The official trailer for A Real Pain.

A Real Pain is in cinemas now.

First published at ABC News, January 10, 2025