Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin Go Long on ‘A Real Pain’: Filming in a Concentration Camp, Almost Playing Other Roles, and Emotional Scenes

Jesse Eisenberg entered the Zoom chat for our “A Real Pain” interview with a splint on his finger. In between press duties for his second directorial feature — a surefire awards contender after winning prizes up and down the festival circuit — he’s been in production on the stunt-heavy “Now You See Me 3” in Budapest and Antwerp. In the film, he reprises his role as arrogant illusionist Danny Atlas, far-flung from his self-directed role as Danny Kaplan, a wound-up New Yorker on a Holocaust tour in Poland with his estranged and more confidently affable cousin (Kieran Culkin), in “A Real Pain.”

“I tore a ligament doing a stunt last week [on ‘Now You See Me 3’],” Eisenberg told IndieWire. “It’s really going to be fine; I just can’t take this thing off. It was a massive [stunt]. 20-foot high ceilings and a 20-foot wide hallway in a mansion. It’s a movie set, but it takes place in a mansion, and the set is rotating 360 degrees over and over. So there’s a big fight scene, and I’m fighting these French police, big guys, big stunt guys. And while we’re fighting, the room is going like this [motions circularly]. Anytime you’re standing up, then you’re hitting the floor. So I slammed this into the one wooden thing.”

His screen partner Kieran Culkin (next up on Broadway in “Glengarry Glen Ross“) joined Eisenberg for the interview, where the stars were surprisingly fresh on their feet in discussing a movie they’ve been talking about since Sundance in January (Searchlight Pictures bought the film for $10 million worldwide). Here, David and Benji (Culkin) are on a bittersweet reunion tour to honor the memory of their late grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, which in writing and directing this sharply funny, sobering, and economically told tale came from Jewish actor/writer/director Eisenberg’s own history. And took them on location to his grandmother’s real home, and the rarely filmed concentration camp Majdanek, which is just five minutes from the city center of Lublin.

“I’ve been on movies where there are talking points, and you do a press junket, and you just get into that thing. But this is not one of those,” Eisenberg said. “This is not like we’re trying to sell something very specific to an audience, so we have to let them know that it’s ‘action-forward’ or something like that. It’s just a movie that’s a natural thing.”

In our interview, we discussed how Culkin and Eisenberg almost played each other’s roles (until producer Emma Stone stepped in to convince them otherwise), how Eisenberg eased the staff at Majdanek to bring a film crew within its walls, and how “A Real Pain” eschews the formula of self-congratulatory Hollywood movies about the Holocaust meant as awards bait.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

IndieWire: Jesse, you take such an economical storytelling approach to this two-hander road movie, where other filmmakers could’ve broadened the scope and, say, digressed with the other members of the Holocaust tour. Was there ever an impulse to make the story bigger?

Jesse Eisenberg: My background is in theater, where you just don’t have the resources to tell a lot of stories. You have to focus on something specific because you can’t go into different rooms, and you can’t have too many characters. They wouldn’t all be in that room. And also, it’s expensive, the more characters you have in a play. So my background has always been where it’s really focused on a central dynamic, and you can address big themes through that central dynamic rather than presenting everything and hoping the audience learns everything that you could possibly think about a subject.

‘A Real Pain’©Searchlight Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

It’s just not my taste or interest, especially with a movie that’s covering a subject like the Holocaust, [where there have] been 10 movies made in the last month about this topic, and I wanted mine to feel like something I’d never seen before. I wanted mine to feel like something that I can relate to, that doesn’t feel like a homework assignment or that we have to take a moment of silence as we watch the movie because it’s, in quotes, “important.” I wanted it to feel like you can tell a story about these characters who are irreverent, who have a history that is fraught and real and dirty, and yet set them against the backdrop of something sacred and see how they respond.

Why does Hollywood keep returning to Holocaust stories?

Eisenberg: Everybody has their own story. There are six million deaths and multiple million perspectives on those deaths, and it’s dramatically very potent. The truth is I write one thing a year, and they’re always just about things that I’m interested in or are from my past, and my next movie is about people doing community theater. This is just a topic that I have in my family history that I always wanted to explore, but when I thought about exploring it, I was conscious of the fact that it’s a well-worn subject in movies, and if I was going to do it, it should feel like something fresh.

Jesse, when you were writing, you were thinking about playing Benji. Kieran, would you have played David?

Kieran Culkin: I didn’t for a moment consider if I could play David, and if I were to try and look back and read [the script] now, I don’t think there’s a reality where I could have.

Eisenberg: Really, why?

Culkin: I don’t know how to connect to that guy. You might think that I am quite a bit like Benji, but I don’t think I am, but I saw it. David, I don’t know how to get into that guy’s head.

Jesse, when did you feel like you couldn’t be Benji?

Eisenberg: I was talked out of it by my producers. Emma Stone is a producer on the movie, and she just said, “It’s going to be really challenging to play an unhinged character while you’re trying to direct a movie, while you’re trying to lead a movie set. It’s going to be very hard to then kind of switch into this unhinged persona,” and, obviously, I’m just really lucky she said that. We had a perfect dynamic, and there’s no one better in the world than Kieran. So it was luck.

Jesse, David has a monologue at a dinner table during the Holocaust tour where, after Benji storms out over a wounding family reveal, he says, “I love him. I hate him. I want to kill him. I want to be him.” Were you exorcising the same feelings you have toward a person like Benji?

Eisenberg: When I was writing the monologue, I’m right at the library, sitting there weeping because it’s this thing I’ve always felt about people like Benji, people who are comfortable in their own skin, people who even are comfortable enough in their own skin to feel great grief. I’m even envious of the way he feels grief because he’s so connected to it. He’s connected to his own pain, and even though his pain is worse than mine, he’s at least grounded in it. He lives in the soil, and it’s like there’s something so envious about it, especially if you’re a character like David, who just spends 24 hours a day trying to just show up and look normal. And then to see somebody who not only looks normal but can command a group in 10 minutes, who can befriend somebody in 30 seconds, get people to fall in love with him, to not care if somebody hates him. It’s an enviable thing, but the conflict in the movie is that Benji is worse off in so many objective ways. And so David’s envy is misplaced.

‘A Real Pain’©Searchlight Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

Culkin: I’m sure there’s definitely a good amount of envy from Benji about the kind of life [David has], the fact that we come from the same place at the exact same time, and we’re that close, but we’ve gone on these different paths where, I’m sure to a certain degree, Benji is happy with his path. I mean, not really, but [David has] seemed to figure it out. And I think Benji knows that he hasn’t quite figured out life, and the way I see it anyway is I think he probably understands that he probably never will.

Kieran, you have a powerful moment in the concentration camp where he’s numbed to the experience at first, but then feels the totality of his history looking at all the shoes of the victims. But Jesse, rather than linger on that, you almost smash-cut to Benji breaking down back on the bus.

Culkin: The thing with shooting there, I had never been to a concentration camp before, and I appreciated when reading the script, the way that it was written … the characters walk into this room, they see this next scene, they walk into this room … it really is about a five-minute drive from our hotel to Majdanek, so we got to have that experience. When we got there, it didn’t feel like we were ever on a set. There wasn’t a lot of setup. There was no scene work, there wasn’t anything. So we got to just walk in and experience it in real-time. Probably [it was] about two takes per room we went in.

Your co-star Jennifer Grey, who plays one of the other Jewish women on the tour, actually broke down at the concentration camp after similar feelings of numbness at first.

Culkin: There just wasn’t a good deal of acting. I’m dressed like Benji, so I’m Benji, and I’m there. I didn’t have the same kind of experience that Jennifer did. She had her own, which she should speak to herself. Particularly with the shoes, I didn’t want to go in that room until I heard action. I just didn’t want to see it. Not for an acting perspective, like, “let’s get it,” just because I just didn’t want to be in there unless I had to.

Jesse, “A Real Pain” began with a germ of an idea from an unfinished play you wrote a decade ago about a family trip to a concentration camp. There was also another story about two guys on a trip to Mongolia. Do you revisit your past work when starting something new?

Eisenberg: I write all sorts of things. Most are unpublished, unproduced, like most people, maybe. I have a higher batting average as an actor, so I have an agent and everything, so it gives me a little bit of a shortcut, but everything informs something else. I wrote a musical 15 years ago, and it never got produced, and the next movie I’m making takes place in the world of community theater [working off his Susan Sarandon-starring play “Happy Talk”], and I’m able to repurpose music that I wrote. [When] you’re desperate to produce something, you figure out whatever it is that you have in you that you could take advantage of in terms of previous things that actually informed this … I was trying to write a movie script about these two guys who go to Mongolia, which was based on a short story I had written. It was like most things. You’re 30 pages into something, and you realize, “Oh, there’s now 60 pages left to go.” And then I saw an ad for this thing that said “Auschwitz tours” with lunch in parentheses, and I just realized, “Oh, that’s the story.”

‘A Real Pain’©Searchlight Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

Culkin: Why Mongolia?

Eisenberg: Because I went to Mongolia with [my wife] Anna [Strout], and we lived on top of this mountain in these yurts, and I just always thought this would be the coolest thing to film. There’s more horses than people, so you’re just driving along these things. And [the story] was funny. It was like the two of us, and it was funny, and they were getting into trouble and all this stuff, but it was just not as rich as Poland. But it’s stunning, and I never saw an American movie go to someplace like that.

How did you convince Majdanek’s staff that “A Real Pain” was right to film there? It’s not a particular concentration camp we see often onscreen.

Eisenberg: In 2008, my wife and I went to all the cities that these characters go in the movie, and so we went to Majdanek. I had a third cousin in Lublin, which is the town that Majdanek is just on the outskirts of. And my wife and I woke up early. We saw the cousin the night before. We woke up early in the morning, and we went to Majdanek. We were there 15 minutes before it opened, so we were just waiting outside. The entire thing was covered in fog because it was a cold Polish morning in November, and then the doors opened, and we walked in. We were the only ones there, and it felt like we were ghosts because when you walk around Majdanek, it has not been really museum-ified, so to speak, because it’s the furthest camp to the east. When the Russians came in to liberate it, the Nazis didn’t have enough time to burn everything down. It’s really preserved. It just stayed with me. How could it not? It’s just so fascinating to think that this camp exists literally five minutes away from the center city of this incredibly beautiful college town. The fact that it’s not well-trod made it just, again, more specific for what these characters are going through. I’ll just finally say that the people at Majdanek were really pleased that we were not trying to turn it into Auschwitz because that’s most of their calls, and they don’t accept those calls. And also that we want 100 Nazis in extra uniforms running around.

It’s not like shooting Toronto as New York. I’d love to know about the living situation while filming in Poland. It’s obviously a very different movie, but I’ve interviewed “The Zone of Interest” cast and they talked about trying to maintain an ebullient atmosphere on set while filming near a camp.

Eisenberg: We had the same crew. Half of our crew was half of their crew. Our sound guy [Tarn Willers] won an Oscar for [“The Zone of Interest”] right after he filmed our movie. We were basically experiencing the movie. We were staying in the hotels we were filming in. An apartment first in Warsaw, but then otherwise, we were literally staying in the rooms. In fact, I slept in the room two nights in a row — just because of a logistical fluke — that we were shooting in, in Lublin in that blue room. The characters are going on this tour. They’re staying in hotels. They’re meeting in the morning to go on the tour, which is exactly what we were doing. I mean, really, you could not have made a more analogous film shoot to what the characters were going through.

Culkin: We would do a six-day week of shooting, and on that seventh day, we would be traveling to the next town. So there wasn’t a free day to take in the town. The only way to take in our environment was in the scenes, and getting to know the other actors was in the scenes with them. There wasn’t a lot of time for kicking back.

‘A Real Pain’©Searchlight Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

Did you know Jennifer Grey at all before filming, Kieran? I love the friendship your characters develop, and it seemed like it really happened on set.

Culkin: It was such a short span of time that we were working together. The scene where I see Marcia walking alone and go talk to her, that was the first day of shooting. The day before, we had all met and done a table read, and then there was a quick dinner that I had to leave early, and then the next day of shooting was that. So it was really breaking the ice by calling her a fucking loser happening in real-time. It sort of felt like it happened as in the movie, but I think she and I had a nice rapport right away, and that seemed to work well, but in a very different way than the way Benji and Marcia had theirs.

Eisenberg: She’s just a very open, kind of funny, self-effacing person. So they got along really well. And then she really leaned on Kieran, literally and emotionally, during the scenes in the concentration camp because Jennifer was really having quite an emotional experience.

When did Emma Stone and Dave McCary come on board as producers?

Eisenberg: The first movie that Fruit Tree produced was my first movie called “When You Finished Saving the World.” It had gone to them in a roundabout way because I had sent it to Julianne Moore, and Julianne Moore’s agent represents Emma’s agent. And so when Emma and Dave, her husband, went in to talk to William Morris and said like, “Hey, what scripts do you have?” Her agent said, “Actually, I just have one by your old friend.” So that’s how that was their first movie. And they’re amazing. They’re amazing. Emma is obviously probably the greatest actress of her generation or whatever, but she’s really business savvy. She’s just super duper savvy. She’s on marketing calls, and you just see the studio just sit back and listen to her ideas. She’s been really amazing. She’s a really effective movie producer, and I hope to work with her forever.

“A Real Pain” opens in theaters from Searchlight Pictures on November 1.