ToughLOVE

Vanities / Anatomy of a Scene

JESSE EISENBERG goes deep on his wry, resonant screenplay

JESSE EISENBERG WAS futzingabout on the computer one day when an ad popped up for a Holocaust tour that stated—in parentheses—"with lunch." "it just was such an evocative phrase and summed up so much of what's strange about modern life—the way we want to experience reality and we want to experience difficulty but always from a safe place," he says.

That pop-up ad inspired him to write A Real Pain, a funny and heartfelt story about two cousins (David, played by Eisenberg, and Benji, Succession's Kieran Culkin) who travel from New York to their beloved grandmother's birthplace of Poland on a group tour. Like his characters, Eisenberg—who also directed the film, which premiered at Sundance and will open in theaters November i—was on his own eerie sojourn, even filming scenes outside the home from which his Jewish ancestors were taken by the Nazis. "Our trailers were parked literally adjacent to the cemetery where my family was shot and killed," he says. "I was expecting all these really cathartic experiences, and a surprise for me was just how similar it felt to being on any other movie shoot, because the concerns of a movie shoot are so overwhelming."

In the film, the cousins dance around an awkward tension created by their contrasting personalities— David, uptight and sensitive, Benji, charming and unpredictable. They reflect on their grandmother's harrowing experiences but at the same time grapple with their own more recent complicated history. It's this heavy dynamic between two longtime friends that Eisenberg says will feel familiar to many: "Even when you try to remember good times, you realize it was also fraught with a little bit ofpoison."

REBECCA FORD