A few minutes into A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg’s latest film, cousins David and Benji Kaplan are checking into their hotel in Poland for a Holocaust history tour, whereupon Benji retrieves a small parcel he shipped there in advance—some weed.
With that we’re off on the uneasy journey of two American Jewish millennials in Poland, trekking across the country by train and visiting the concentration camp Majdanek before peeling off to see the town where their late grandma Dory, a Holocaust survivor, grew up. Succession’s Kieran Culkin plays Benji, a burnout with a heart of gold and no filter. Jesse Eisenberg—who wrote, directed, and produced the film—plays the awkward, anxious David, consumed with propriety in this most unusual of settings.
It’s a smart, thoughtful, and at times very funny exploration of what it means to be three generations removed from the Holocaust, comfortable and coddled yet undeniably marked by it. It’s a preoccupation of Eisenberg’s, in his work and in his own life: Grandma Dory is based on his great aunt Doris, who grew up in Lublin and whose real-life former home was used as a filming location.
Eisenberg brings his trademark wit and frenetic style to this latest work, which in many ways mirrors his own journey.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Stephanie Butnick: The film marks this interesting moment on the continuum of art that grapples with the Holocaust, which starts with the immediate post-war memoir and arrives where we are today, which is essentially grandchildren going back and trying to figure out where they came from. It feels like the best way to describe this moment, and much of the film, is the haunting of distance. Does that speak to you at all?
Jesse Eisenberg: The haunting of distance is a wonderful way to put it. But to me, it feels like my life has a lack of meaning because of the distance from what my relatives went through to ultimately create a comfortable life here in America. I feel a lack of meaning in my life, and the more distance that I get from being connected to those who have been through more potent circumstances, the less meaning I feel.
And so when you talk about the continuum of Holocaust response, and that it starts with immediate first-person accounts of terror, and now a movie about two cousins who’ve grown apart exploring their family history with a feeling of disconnect, that’s true. With the movie, I was really trying to show how the characters develop their own anxieties and inner demons that are seemingly unrelated to their family’s history. And they’re going back in an attempt to understand where they came from, and to try and feel a connection to something greater than themselves.
SB: Was that true for you personally?
JE: Yeah, 100 percent. I first went to this town where my family lived, Krasnystaw in Poland, in 2008. My wife and I stood outside this house that I was told my family lived in up until 1938—seventy-eight years prior. I was standing outside the house, desperate to feel something, to have some kind of catharsis, to close an emotional loop in my mind, to experience the ghosts of my past, et cetera, and understand where I come from and how I fit into the great timeline of our ancestors and our family tree.
And I just didn’t feel anything.
I’m just looking at a three-story house. Suddenly, you’re outside and you look weird because you’re just standing there staring up at a building, and locals are passing you wondering what the hell you’re doing. So, yeah, I’ve just always felt this need for connection to something bigger than myself, and struggling to find it. A lot of this movie really is just my attempt at doing that, but through this fictional story of these cousins.
I feel a lack of meaning in my life, and the more distance that I get from being connected to those who have been through more potent circumstances, the less meaning I feel.
SB: I did my own return to Poland, a fellowship in grad school, a week spent living in the town where Auschwitz is, and you really nailed it. The hotel breakfast. The weirdness of being on a train in Poland. What you capture so well is that disconnect of who we are now—going back there. In the film, your tour guide shows the Jewish sites that used to be there that are just nothing now, and the Jewish things that used to be there that were changed into other businesses or buildings. I’m curious about that chasm of what could be. Your characters say something like, “We could have been from here … ”
JE: Yeah, exactly. The way I am able to fathom that big idea is thinking that my family was in Poland more than they were in America. If you look at the grand scale of the family timeline, America is a blip, and yet for me it feels like I’ve lived in New York for ten thousand years. It feels like my family knows Queens better than we know each other’s faces. And yet it’s just a blip. And how ironic it is, or how unfortunate it is, that no one in my family was curious about going back or seeing it or interacting with that history.
You lived in Oswiecim?
SB: Oswiecim. In a Catholic school dorm. A very strange experience. But to me, it was about wanting to know where I’m from, and feeling like no one else really wanted me to do that.
JE: Yeah.
SB: Everyone was like, “Why are you going back?” Even my great aunt, who at the time was the only survivor still alive in our family, was like, “Why would you go to Poland?” and also, “Be careful with your purse.” Those were the two things she said before I went to find the house she grew up in.
JE: That’s really funny. My great aunt Doris, who I based this movie on—we call her Grandma Dory in the movie—I told her if I ever work in Europe I will go to your house and get a picture of it. So that’s why I went to that house: to get a picture for my aunt who grew up there.
I came home to America, I took the digital camera to the CVS, I printed out the most beautiful, glossy image of this house, and I brought it to her house and I said, “Look! This is it.”
She looked at it and said, “Oh, yeah, I think that’s it.”
And that was it. She had the most unimpressed reaction you could possibly have. It’s exactly what you’re saying.
Even my great aunt, who at the time was the only survivor still alive in our family, was like, “Why would you go to Poland?” and also, “Be careful with your purse.” Those were the two things she said before I went to find the house she grew up in.
The truth is, I meet so many Americans who have a resentment to Poland and to Poles. They say “Oh, it’s antisemitic.” My experience, which has now been very broad there, has been the exact opposite. I’ve been to Poland so many times—I’m going back in a few days—and all I have found there are people who were supportive of my movie, one hundred fifty people working to make my American Jewish historical trip vision come to life with the utmost respect and reverence. The people who work at the concentration camp, who spend their entire lives at a concentration camp in an attempt to preserve my family’s history.
I became so indebted to Polish people, and it really inspired me to get my citizenship, which I’m getting in two weeks. I really just felt this deep connection with Poland the country, and with the people there, and if anything, a resentment towards Americans who like to criticize it.
SB: It almost seems like that is the reality of the third generation, right? There was the trauma of the Holocaust survivors, and then their kids, who were really close to it. By the time a survivor is a grandparent or a great aunt, they want to tell their stories, maybe for the first time. And they are telling their stories to a generation who are, as the film explores, quite comfortable here in America. It makes sense that those are the people who start being curious about the past, and who want to go back there.
JE: That’s exactly right. You hit on something that makes sense generationally: That you have enough distance to not feel that unplaceable rage, and you have a curiosity about the world because we’re growing up in a more global society. It feels a little more comfortable, travel is cheaper and easier, people are speaking English there now. So for a variety of reasons it allows people of our generation to re-engage with a place that maybe our parents’ generation felt too uncomfortable with.
SB: I’m curious about where this tracks in your own professional career. A lot of what you’ve written deals with this idea of a disconnected millennial-ish person, who is quite comfortable in America and trying to figure out, as you put it, these small anxieties that don’t seem so major in light of actual, real-world tragedy, whether past or present. Have you always been moved in this direction?
JE: Wow, that’s very astute. Wow. I think I’m driven by creativity and guilt. And so a lot of the things I write, maybe all of them, are equal parts creative and interesting and funny and inspired—and [there’s] guilt. And wondering what my place in the world means, because my life is easy, and how is it possible that my life is easy when most people’s lives throughout history have been hard. Many people’s lives right now are hard. Maybe more people than not have difficult lives now. And here I am in the arts, doing movies. It just seems so absurd to me, and because I’m a sensitive person, I can’t reconcile those two things.
I can’t celebrate and enjoy things when there’s so much misery, and not only when there’s so much misery, but when there’s misery connected to me so closely, like my family’s history. Because I can’t reconcile those two things, I write about them all the time, and I guess because comedy was the currency of my youth, they come out in funny ways, or self-effacing ways.
In terms of it being part of a trajectory of my career, I feel increasingly guilty being a movie actor, because it’s like winning the lottery ten thousand times in a row, every day.
SB: And then it all comes back to the Holocaust.
JE: Ultimately, yeah. When I think of my good fortune, it feels that much more unexpected considering what my family’s been through.