It was during a trip to Poland that Jesse Eisenberg had what he calls a ‘strange revelation’. A two-week trip through the country landed him at the tiny house in the village of Kranystaw, where his aunt Doris had lived before the Holocaust displaced her entire family. “Had the war not happened, this is where I would be living,” Eisenberg remembers thinking. “What would my life be like? Who would I be?” Twenty years later Eisenberg found himself back at that house, this time as the director, writer, and co-star of A Real Pain.
Eisenberg was so inspired by that initial trip to Poland that he first wrote a play, The Revisionist, which debuted off-Broadway 2013. Eisenberg played a different character named David, a young American visiting his older Polish cousin, a Holocaust survivor, played by Vanessa Redgrave. The play was a success, but his attempts to adapt it into a screenplay didn’t get far. “All of my adaptations were bad,”
Eisenberg says plainly. “And I thought, you know, I really want to write and set a movie in Poland, to be able to film there, to be able to experience another story there. It took about 15 years to get something
good, but I finally came up with this story, which is a buddy story. And that takes place on a tour of Polish
history.”
It was a different Eisenberg project, and another attempt at adapting it to the screen, that provided that other essential part of the story. “I wrote a short story several years ago for Tablet magazine about these two guys going to Mongolia together, and the story was very similar to the dynamic in A Real Pain,” Eisenberg says.
When he hit a wall attempting to adapt it as a film, he happened upon a ‘depressingly fortuitous advertisement’ online, promising ‘Holocaust tours (with lunch)’.
As Eisenberg explains, “It took me to this company that was advertising a tour through the Holocaust sites of Poland—but with all of the creature comforts that an upper middle class American tourist would want. I read it with just a mix of awe and shock and feeling icky that I would be one of those people going on this tour where I would kind of demand my comforts while also viewing the horrors of my family’s history. And I just thought, that is a phenomenal framework to set this movie.”
In A Real Pain Eisenberg plays David, a New Yorker and young father who goes on a tour of Polish Holocaust history accompanied by his cousin Benji, played by Kieran Culkin, thanks to money left by their recently deceased grandmother. Joining a tour group led by the affable James, played by Will Sharpe, David and Benji rekindle their childhood bonds as they grapple with the family tragedies of the past that still, in some ways, define them.
David & Benji
Of the two cousins at the centre of the film, Eisenberg initially intended to play Benji, the free spirit who charms and exasperates the tour group in equal measure. “I’ve written a lot from the perspective of a character like that because I aspire to be somebody like that,” says Eisenberg. “Someone who’s looser, who is more open, who lives in the moment, who struggles with possibly the same depression I struggle with but deals with it in this freer way.”
Instead, he plays the role of David, who initially seems more grounded than Benji, with a stable if unglamorous tech job and a wife and child back home in Brooklyn.
When David and Benji meet up in the airport for their flight to Poland, it’s the first time they’ve seen each other in years, and their paths have diverged considerably. “They were very tight in their childhood, almost like brothers,” says Culkin, who plays Benji. “When they got older they just grew apart, and to me a lot of the story is about how they handled that very differently. One seemingly moves on from that and seems pretty well-adjusted, and the other one seems to be a bit of a case of arrested development, particularly when it comes to that particular relationship.”
As David is overshadowed by Benji throughout the tour, and as he confronts his family history throughout Poland, his internal struggle— essentially, a struggle with whether he should even allow himself to feel a sense of struggle — becomes clearer. “That’s why the movie is called A Real Pain,” Eisenberg says. “It’s questioning what is real and what is valid pain. Is David’s OCD pain real even when you’re visiting the sites of genocide? Is David’s general anxiety disorder real and valid even though his cousin is experiencing something far worse in his own life? That’s what the movie is questioning.”
Benji is introduced as the kind of guy who can chat up a TSA agent without seeming annoying, and whose unexpected outburst during the tour group’s first meeting is seen as charming, not inappropriate. But as the film goes on it becomes clear that his freewheeling lifestyle is the result of, yes, real pain. Still grieving the loss of the grandmother who inspired the trip, as well as mental health struggles that have recently reached a breaking point, Benji is a stark emotional contrast to his more reserved cousin.
“I think David has managed his baggage a bit and Benji really, really has not,” says Culkin. That baggage comes out in unexpected ways throughout their trip, like Benji resisting sitting in a first-class cabin on a train, or walking away from a jovial group dinner moments after he seemed to be enjoying himself.
As Eisenberg sees it, ”Benji is the real star of the movie. He’s the character that the audience is going to be, by design and thankfully because of Kieran’s brilliance, watching the whole time, trying to kind of figure out.” Enthusiastic and charming one moment, then sullen and sarcastic the next, Benji is “hard to nail down,” Culkin says. But nearly everyone knows a Benji. “It’s interesting how many people will say they know this one person that they can never quite nail down or fully understand,” Culkin says.
“He’s very charismatic and loveable, but also detestable. I know one person in my life who’s kind of like
this, and I’ve since met people that have watched this movie that have said I have a Benji in my life. I’m
like, you’ve got one too? Is it the same as mine?”
Culkin, who had wrapped the fourth and final season of “Succession” shortly before making A Real Pain
claims he did “everything in my power to get out of doing this movie,” but was ultimately too compelled by what he read in Eisenberg’s script. “I instantly went, ‘I know who this guy is, I know I can play this,’” Culkin says. “I don’t want to think about it. I can do it. It’s very, very rare when that happens.”
A Real Pain was Culkin’s first major role since Succession, and required some adjustment from the fast pace of production on that show, where scripts would shift from day to day and improv was encouraged. “I think I chose this movie because the script was tight,” Culkin says. “It was perfect. It didn’t need my help.” Both Culkin and Eisenberg, who comes from the theater world where a script is literally called the Bible, expected to play the film exactly as written.
Basing the film so closely on his own travels, as well as his family’s specific history, Eisenberg was committed to filming in real locations across Poland.
“I could not have had a better experience shooting anywhere in the world—including my hometown New York City, or my adopted town of Bloomington, Indiana—than shooting in Poland,” says Eisenberg.
Production took place with an almost entirely Polish crew, including cinematographer Michał Dymek, winner of the National Society of Film Critics award for his work on 2023’s EO. “They were just artists,” says Eisenberg. “It was just an unbelievably ambitious shoot that I can’t imagine any other group
of a hundred people being able to pull off.”
Eisenberg took inspiration from road movies like Y Tu Mama Tambien for the film’s style and met with Dymek to discuss ways to “create a road movie that’s also beautiful, that shows Poland in a really beautiful light, but mixes the kind of elements of horror and history.” He wanted to capture the “quiet unease” of being in a comfortable tourist group while learning about horrific history.
To accomplish that, he knew the film couldn’t have a traditional score, and instead turned to one of Poland’s greatest cultural treasures: Frederic Chopin. He had visited Chopin’s home on that first trip to Poland and incorporated his Nocturnes into the sound design for his play The Revisionist. Unlike in a
traditional score where the music would highlight the characters’ emotions, the Chopin’s music in A Real
Pain “plays almost like a running commentary,” says Eisenberg. “It gives the movie this sophisticated
removed tone that I just found very helpful. When we started editing the movie and were putting these
Chopin pieces in the places that they belonged, the editor and I just turned to each other and said, ‘This
is the tone of the movie.’”
Eisenberg, who poured so much of his own story into the film, sees two ways for audiences to experience it — as a buddy comedy about “these mismatched two guys flailing alongside each other in these various contexts,” and then as something much deeper. “Because it’s a personal movie, it hits people in personal ways,” says Eisenberg. “Some people watch this movie and tell me, ‘My family came from there, and I wept the whole movie.’ So that’s a wonderful reaction, because it makes them feel something.”
Jesse Eisenberg is an Academy Award nominated actor and an acclaimed playwright and author. His film credits include Roger Dodger, The Squid and the Whale, Adventureland, Zombieland, The Social Network, Now You See Me, The Double, Night Moves, The End of Tour, American Ultra, Louder Than Bombs, Batman v. Superman, Now You See Me 2, Café Society, Justice League, The Hummingbird Project, The Art of Self Defense, Zombieland: Double Tap, Resistance, Vivarium, Wild Indian, Manodrome, and Sasquatch Sunset which sees him play the urban legend Sasquatch.
On the small screen, Eisenberg was recently seen playing the titular character of ‘Toby Fleishman’
in the FX limited series ‘Fleishman Is in Trouble’ based on Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s best-selling novel of the
same name.
Eisenberg made his directorial debut with A24’s When You Finish Saving the World, which premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival to glowing reviews and screened as a part of Critics Week at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. The film is based on the Audible Original of the same name, both of which were written by Eisenberg.
Eisenberg has written four plays, including “The Spoils,” which had a box-office record-breaking run-on West End. He also wrote and starred alongside Vanessa Redgrave in his play “The Revisionist,” and “Asuncion.” His play, “Happy Talk” starring Susan Sarandon and Marin Ireland opened April 2019 at
the Signature Theater in New York.
Born in New York, Eisenberg is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, the author of the collection, Bream Gives Me Hiccups from Grove Press and the Audible Original When You Finish Saving the World, which won “Best Original Work” at the 2021 Audie Awards.
