Write On: 'A Real Pain' Writer/Director Jesse Eisenberg

“What I wanted to do with this movie was take this interesting
relationship that I have been exploring over the course of my
writing, over 20 years, and this dynamic, and set it against the
backdrop of something so objectively worse than anything the
characters are going through. I wanted to put this funny, fraught
relationship that seems like the stakes are quite high – are
these two people going to continue on together? Against the
backdrop of stakes that are so much higher, we can put their
relationship into perspective,” says Jesse Eisenberg,
writer/director and star of the new buddy movie A Real Pain that
takes place on a holocaust tour of Poland.  


In this episode of the Write On podcast, Eisenberg talks about
spending years trying to get this particular story just right,
how it was personal to him, what it was like to shoot at a
concentration camp and the great advice his producer Emma Stone
gave him. He also shares his criteria for writing a road
trip/buddy movie.


“It has to have an original quality to justify it as a movie. I
read so many scripts as an actor and I’ve written so many things,
that [a script] has to have two things: it has to be specific
enough to feel real and personal. There are just so many movies
in this road trip/buddy movie genre, if it doesn’t feel specific
I think an audience can sniff it out immediately. The other thing
is to make it feel new, to have a new reason to tell this story
so it doesn’t feel like something I’ve seen 10,000 other times,”
says Eisenberg.    


Listen to the podcast to learn more.