Jesse Eisenberg has a few questions

Vanessa Redgrave once compared Jesse Eisenberg to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, because of his “inquiring mind.” Seventeen minutes after my recent lunch with Eisenberg, in Chelsea, I hadn’t asked him a question, but he had peppered me with many of his own. Where did I come from? How did I know so and so? I was able to discuss my… New Yorker cartoon avatar? When I first saw him, as I was crossing the street to the restaurant, he had bumped a postman with his fist. “People are so nice when you’re famous, I guess,” he reasoned apologetically. ‘Or maybe not. I don’t know.” He glanced at his menu. “What are you getting?”

Eisenberg wore a hoodie and an Indiana Hoosiers cap, plus a splint on one finger, due to an injury suffered during “a big stunt sequence” on the set of “Now You See Me 3.” He was buzzing with fear and a kind of guilt, which turns out to be his fuel. For more than twenty years—he’s forty-one but started acting young—his motor neuroticism has been his defining quality on screen, whether as an awkward teenager (“Roger Dodger”), a romantic lead (“Roger Dodger”) Adventureland’), a divorced father (“Fleishman Is in Trouble”), a supervillain (Lex Luthor, Mark Zuckerberg) or a Woody Allen stand-in (“From Rome with Love,” “Café Society”). Along the way he has written: plays, screenplays, silly songs for his private entertainment, and humorous pieces for McSweeney’s and The New Yorker.

His new film ‘A Real Pain’, out this week, is one he wrote and directed himself. Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play Jewish cousins ​​who go to Poland for a Holocaust tour and to visit their late grandmother’s childhood home. David (Eisenberg) is an uptight loser with a wife and child; Benji (Culkin) is a charismatic stoner with no boundaries and barely hidden psychological wounds. The film premiered at Sundance, where it won a screenwriting award; it’s already getting Oscar buzz.

Eisenberg is also a relentless questioner in his work, especially when it comes to moral vanity and his own apparently noble intentions: how can you really do good in the world, rather than just satisfying the liberal need to appear virtuous ? How do you process the pain of your ancestors, let alone your own? Shouldn’t we all feel a little more uncomfortable? Our conversation, which addressed these riddles of life and more, has been edited and condensed.

Let’s start with the obvious. Have you taken a trip to Poland like the one in the movie?

Yes. In 2008, my wife and I went to almost all the locations where the characters go and ended up in this house in Krasnystaw, where my family lived until 1938. I stood outside this house trying to feel something profound, and not. That’s pretty much what happens at the end of this movie: the characters finally get to this house and have big emotional expectations that are simply met by a typical-looking three-story apartment building.

Right, it’s an anticlimax. What inspired you to go? Have you always been interested in your origins?

When I was seventeen, I looked for direction, and I found it with my father’s aunt Doris, who was in her late eighties. She lived until one hundred and six. I went to her house every Thursday and she became my life mentor. In the movie we call her Grandma Dory, and she is as we describe: she was blunt, tough, and unimpressed by anything I had to offer that wasn’t substantive. I even lived with her in my early thirties. My wife and I hadn’t been together very long, and I moved into her small bedroom and slept on her couch because I needed grounding. She was born and raised in Poland, in the house we show in the film. And I said to her, “If I ever get a job in Europe, I will visit that house and take a picture for you.”

Once you did that, what was her reaction?

I took a picture of the house, went to Kinko’s and had it blown up with a glossy finish. I thought she would cry and realize her life had come full circle. She looked at it for a moment and said, “Oh, yeah, that’s it.”

Once again an anticlimax.

Precisely. From the moment I started researching her life, Poland as an idea gave me a certain meaning that I was missing. I lived with material security and appropriate antidepressants for the things that bother me. Being connected to something bigger, something historical, something traumatic, made me feel like I was a real person and not just floating through a happy life of superficial emptiness.

Do you mean being famous?

No, just being a modern person who has enough money to live comfortably. I’m just ashamed of that. Sebastian Junger just wrote this book where he talks about his time in Bosnia during the war, and he says he wasn’t there as an adrenaline junkie, but as a meaning junkie. My wife teaches disability law, and she teaches at a continuing education school. She doesn’t walk around with a sense of shame, shame and guilt. She walks around with a feeling of: How can I help you?

In your own writing you have poked fun at this feeling you have. I saw your play “Asuncion” in 2011, and the line I still remember is when your character says he wants to go to a famine-stricken part of Africa because “I thought I could be of use.”

Oh my God! I can’t believe you remember this nonsense.

I remember that sentence because it reflects a kind of ignorant self-righteousness. But this is also what you’re talking about, what you’re actually looking for.

Yes, because in my attempt to find meaning, I find myself indulging in the very things I find unpleasant. We went to Teresópolis, in Brazil, and tried to help with the Red Cross there, because there had been a flood. But I’m not strong enough to carry the flour sacks, so I just become an American liability. I also recognize the folly of someone like me who assumes that their life has a greater purpose, if only I could find it. Luckily I’m in art, so I can explore that in these creative and ambivalent ways. “A Real Pain” tries to show that these two characters are looking for meaning, but they don’t really find it in the places they expect it to be. They don’t find it in a concentration camp, or when touring their grandmother’s house. They actually find meaning in their very close relationship.

I think I’m mostly constantly expressing my own – what’s that word? – questions hypocrisy. And the irony is that I write about my hypocrisy, and because I write about it and am occasionally praised for it, it perpetuates the very thing I’m trying to avoid. By writing about trying to connect to something real, I get to go to parties for my movie and wear a tuxedo, which further distances me from what I’m striving for.

Welcome to awards season! This movie is, among other things, a great movie about cousins, and I feel like this is an under-explored relationship. I googled “movies about cousins” and the movies I found were “My Cousin Vinny,” “Mary Queen of Scots” – because her cousin was Queen Elizabeth I – and the weirdest one, “The Blue Lagoon.” People don’t remember that those kids were cousins ​​before they got shipwrecked on a desert island and started having sex in a waterfall or something.