As he got to filming his new movie A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg realized that he and his costar, Kieran Culkin, didn’t exactly work the same way. Eisenberg was embarking on his second feature as a director, and the first in which he would also act; Culkin was playing his first role since wrapping a four-season run on HBO’s Succession, fresh off that creative high. Eisenberg had spent months working on a shot list for their expansive Poland shoot with cinematographer Michal Dymek (EO). He’d exactingly planned out each scene’s marks and blocking. A lot of that ended up scrapped. “[Kieran] is an unusual actor—he works really, really well as a spontaneous actor,” Eisenberg says.
“On Succession, we’d do the whole scene maybe seven or eight times, and then that was it. This was set-up 12 and take 40-something. I’m like, What is this?” Culkin adds with a laugh. “I felt like I was just making a fuss of nothing. He put me in the left seat and I’m like, ‘Why’d you choose that for me?’ I was just being obnoxious.”
Listening to Culkin and Eisenberg helps explain their exceptionally prickly chemistry in A Real Pain, which premieres at Sundance on Saturday. The pair give some of their most nuanced, funny screen performances to date as cousins at very different stages in their lives who travel to Poland together to honor the memory of their late grandmother. They join a sightseeing tour that allows them to bicker and reminisce on the road—with an audience of fellow tourists in tow—while they face their own intergenerational trauma, visiting the Majdanek concentration camp and later their grandmother’s home.
The script’s origins are threefold: a short story Eisenberg had written and was trying to adapt about two guys drifting apart during a vacation to Mongolia, a play he wrote that followed his own impactful visit to Poland, and an online ad he came across that seemed to bring everything together. It read: “Auschwitz Tours With Lunch.”
“It’s just the strange irony of being an upper-middle-class suburban American Jew traveling to Auschwitz and still needing to have some of the creature comforts that you have come to expect whilst traveling,” Eisenberg says. “I thought, That’s such a fascinating, ironic, dramatic and also profound juxtaposition between trying to explore the horrors of your family history while also being able to sit first class on a train car and stay at the Radisson.”
This is the tricky tonal balance that Eisenberg strikes throughout A Real Pain, even as production shot at sites of profound horror. “My main goal was to make an unsanctimonious movie set against the backdrop of the Holocaust,” Eisenberg says. “I don’t like the self-aggrandizing tone of these stories about sensitive subjects—it turns me off creatively. Not because I think they’re doing anything wrong, it just is not my taste.” So we have Eisenberg’s David living a yuppie life in New York City and butting heads with Culkin’s Benji, a kind of drifter who masks immense grief with his wit. Their dynamic rings true, and smartly anchors the film’s larger questions about suffering, guilt, and luxury.
Much of those deeper emotional components came from Eisenberg’s own experience in Poland, reckoning with his family and cultural history. The film could shoot in the country thanks to the work of producer Ali Herting, whose connection to the team behind The Zone of Interest brought them to the Polish company Extreme Emotions. “The house that my family fled in 1938—we actually had cameras inside [it] for this lovely shot of the two main characters departing this little town,” Eisenberg says.
Then there’s the matter of the tour experience, discomfitingly familiar to anyone who’s traveled abroad in this kind of regimented, temporary social circle. Jennifer Grey plays one of the people sightseeing with Benji and David, while The White Lotus’s Will Sharpe plays their tour guide. “You’re experiencing these big things on a personal level, and then also sharing this kind of odd social dynamic with new people who are outsiders,” Eisenberg says. Sharpe actually went a little method in playing a guide, learning the ins and outs of the locations his character was presenting. “There’s a lot of improvising on his part and people asking him questions—and he would actually have the answer to it, which was very impressive,” Culkin says. “It did feel like we were on a tour.”