Jesse Eisenberg and Ewa Puszczynska on making 'A Real Pain' shoot happen

For Searchlight’s A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg made himself a holocaust tour – a framework that provided the film’s structure, beginning in his hometown of New York City and travelling to his ancestral hometown of Krasnystaw, Poland where his ancestors lived before being displaced and murdered in the Holocaust.

However, because he was writing during the pandemic, “I couldn't go to Poland for research,” Eisenberg says.

The internet gods provided. “I downloaded pamphlets of Holocaust tours and would pick and choose based on what I needed to happen emotionally and in terms of the time frame of this trip.”

Yet, there was a very real chance the tour would not have made it to Majdanek concentration camp.

“Concentration camps don't allow movies in there for obvious reasons - these places are hallowed grounds. Most movies that want to film at these places want to turn it into 1942 and have extras in Nazi uniforms running around.”

Wryly, he adds: “Obviously, that’s not what they want.”

Nor was it what Eisenberg wanted. A Real Pain is about the tension inherent in our comfortable lives set against the backdrop of something as traumatic as the holocaust. How do we – can we, should we – put ourselves in the shoes of our relatives, literally and metaphorically.

Kieran Culkin, Jennifer Gray, Jesse Eisenberg, Kurt Egyiawan, David Oreskes and Will Sharpe in 'A Real Pain'; Source: Searchlight Pictures

The film does so by taking cousins Benji, played by Oscar-nominated Kieran Culkin, and David (Eisenberg, nominated for best original screenplay) on a tour in which they must navigate their own relationship, and the loss of their Grandma Dory, based on Eisenberg’s real great-aunt Doris.

Still, Eisenberg wasn’t expecting his tour to need a million dollar set build.

“When my producer Eva Puszczynska and I first spoke, she said everything in the script seems doable, except the scene at Majdanek will be $1m build.”

One of Eisenberg’s initial thoughts (after ‘Wait, why?’) was: “Who in Poland builds concentration camps?”.

After that, he thought: “This was a third of our [£3.5m] budget for a few minutes sequence. We would just not have been able to do it. I don't know what we would have done.”

But Puszczynska - a producing veteran who recently won an Oscar for The Zone Of Interest - said she would try. She started with a simple request: “We didn't say ‘We want you to let us in,’ but ‘we have a kind request that you can help us with.’ Then ‘You can help us to write the scene to make it as truthful and realistic as possible.’”

And, of course, “we mentioned that we would be the happiest people in the world if we could shoot on the location,” she adds.

What helped, Puszczynska says, was that they weren’t doubling Majdanek for another concentration camp. “We are telling the story of this place.”

Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, and Kurt Egyiawan in 'A Real Pain'; Source: Searchlight Pictures

Eisenberg went to Majdanek in February, ahead of the May/June shoot. “I felt immediately connected to the people working there. They are all bright young academics who could have taken any job in Poland. And the job they chose to take was to go to Majdanek every day to preserve the history, Jewish memory and Jewish trauma. How lovely is that?”

He felt an “overwhelming sense of gratitude. When they met me, they realised I had that affection for them. And it turned into this wonderful thing.” They shot the entire Majdanek scene on location.

This story is illustrative for Puszczynska of how key local production partners are. “It's about having somebody who knows the reality relevant to the story. You cannot underestimate the value of it.”

For Eisenberg, it’s a reminder. "I never think about it until I'm having conversations like this, that there was a real chance we couldn't have gone to Majdanek, and how weird the movie would have been – to be a Holocaust tour movie that doesn't visit a concentration camp.”

Honouring Aunt Doris – from Krasnystaw to Lefrak City

The other side of A Real Pain’s locations coin sees Benji and David go to their grandma Dory’s house, filmed on location in Krasnystaw, “the town that my family comes from.”

Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg in 'A Real Pain'; Source: Searchlight Pictures

“There’s this shot from high up, you see the boys walking away from the house and we call that the ‘Grandma Dory shot’ because it was [shot] from a bedroom in the house that my family lived in;" a place where "emotions are buried" says Puszczynska.

Locations pertinent to Eisenberg’s life weave through the film, which he calls a “tribute to my Aunt Doris."

This included filming in "Lefrak City, which is in New York where my dad grew up,” which you see as David drives. Eisenberg also featured his son in the film.

“I wanted four generations of Eisenberg people to be represented in this movie – in selfish terms because of sentimental reasons, but in unselfish terms, because it lent the movie a kind of authenticity that's hard to articulate but in a cumulative way, all these things add up to making a film seem a little more tangible.”

He acknowledges: “It's weird when you're making a movie based on personal things. You have to be pretty flexible because you can't do the exact thing that's in your head - because the world is not going to 'conform to your movie idea.”

For Eisenberg, it did - with the help of his 100 strong Polish crew and incentive support from the Polish Film Institute and Warsaw Film Fund, and soft-support from the city of Lublin and its film commissioner. Puszczynska adds, "We had a lot of support from Poland."

“It was kind of like a guerrilla production.”

The film's location manager secured Radom airport doubling it for JFK and Warsaw airports, but last minute production were told they would not be able to film in security, nor could Benji sneak marijuana onto the flight as was in the script. Production designer Mella Melak found a private security firm to rent conveyor belts from, and Eisenberg rewrote the script to have Benji mail himself weed.

Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, and Jennifer Gray in 'A Real Pain'; Source: Searchlight Pictures

Similar flexibility was required for the train sequences, which were filmed in a single car at a repair depot. Green screens were used and New York-based The Artery VFX spent months rotoscoping the cast. “It was the most expensive, long, and detailed thing we did on this movie,” Eisenberg says.

The platform sequences required more luck. “We had the permits to be there, but it was kind of like guerrilla production,” Puszczynska says. “We had no idea when the trains were coming,” Eisenberg explains. “We get off in this town of Krasnik and you see a train pulling up.

“I screamed ‘Kieran! Come here! Just walk with me. Don't talk, just walk.’ That's our first shot running trying to catch the train. My hat flew off - I ran to put it back on and suddenly not only does it look like a planned shot, but it's a great part of storytelling.”

Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin on the set of 'A Real Pain'; Source: Agata Grzybowska/Searchlight Pictures

Touring Poland from New York

“In 2008, my wife and I went to Poland,” Eisenberg begins. “14 years later, I’m writing this film and I’m looking at my old pictures and thinking – for example, there's one picture in front of the Warsaw uprising memorial and immediately the scene plays out in my head.

"'Benji would want to go up there and make everybody take pictures.’ And of course, everybody would - because he's charming.”

To flesh out the “bespoke holocaust tour”, Eisenberg used Google Street View. “I would see ‘If we were going from a monument to a park, how would we get there? It looks like it's a 14 minute walk. I bet they would walk.’”

So they walk. “In the film, they stop at a little fruit seller and Benji buys water for everybody. That’s because as I was doing this walk on Google Street View, I passed a little fruit seller. And because I'm thinking about the movie at all times, and I thought, ‘Oh, it would be great if they stopped and Benji buys everybody water and not David.’”

In this way, A Real Pain's story and production unfolded symbiotically – scenes and places at the same time.