How Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin Made a Different Kind of Holocaust Movie

Jesse Eisenberg has "very strong opinions on Holocaust cinema." 

"I just have a very kind of, let's say—what's the word—touchy reaction to the way the Holocaust is presented in films," he tells me in a video interview. "It's such an easy thing to evoke sympathy with a Holocaust setting that I feel, almost from a creative perspective, it's so exploitative when they overdo it."

Eisenberg says this knowing very well he recently contributed to this canon—albeit in an atypical way. His second feature film following his 2022 debut When You Finish Saving the World, A Real Pain, stars himself and Succession’s Kieran Culkin as American cousins who take a trip to Poland to honor their recently deceased grandmother. Part of their tour involves visiting the Majdanek concentration and extermination camp. The actor-director, in typical self-effacing fashion, doesn't claim to have solved the problem of the Holocaust film in making one himself. He took on the responsibility of capturing Majdanek in the only way he knew how.

"For me even to make a movie about this topic was worrying, and so I just tried to treat it with the most realistic approach I could possibly take.” The approach: “Tell the story of these two characters who have ambivalent feelings about history, who have ambivalent feelings about their own pain versus the pain of their ancestors, and to shoot their experience at Majdanek in the most austere, simple, straightforward way."

Read more: The Problem With TV’s New Holocaust Obsession

On its surface, A Real Pain is an intimate story with few characters that grafts the contours of a buddy comedy onto an exploration of historical trauma. But it is also a quietly ambitious enterprise for an American indie, and part of the logistical challenge of making it required not only going to Poland but convincing the current stewards of Majdanek to let the crew shoot there for a striking sequence where Eisenberg and Culkin's David and Benji Kaplan silently bear witness. 

The screenplay originated from a deeply personal place for Eisenberg. When he was a teen he considered his great aunt, who was born in Poland, a mentor, and he promised her that if he was ever working in Europe he would visit the house where she grew up. While acting in a film shooting in Bosnia he did just that, but found the experience more confounding than cathartic. "I'm standing outside this house, just attempting to feel something, and not," he says. 

That became fodder for the climax of A Real Pain, featuring David and Benji in a similar state of confusion. It was shot at the very house where Eisenberg once stood. 

Although Eisenberg's immediate ancestors, including his great aunt, came to America in 1918, well before World War II, other relatives stayed. They were all murdered in the Holocaust save for one, a woman named Maria. Eisenberg has been preoccupied with the idea of "trying to reconcile modern pain versus historical trauma" since he was an anxious kid who cried every day in first grade. 

"I was a very sad kid, and I would learn about my family's history, and I just felt this connection to it because I felt like, yeah, they must have been miserable, which is how I feel," he says, noting that he also felt "guilty for feeling this connection that I hadn't heard."

He began to try to answer his questions about these lofty topics in a screenplay during the Covid-19 pandemic. Confined to the United States, he downloaded a bunch of Polish tour itineraries and then would use Google Street View to do them himself as he plotted the paths that David and Benji would take—alongside a tour group with members played by Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan, Daniel Oreskes, Liza Sadovy, and tour guide Will Sharpe. When it came time to actually shoot, Eisenberg and his producers knew they needed a Polish team. Producer Ali Herting reached out to Ewa Puszczyńska, who had been collaborating with A24 on the Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest.

"They loved that it felt like a kind of quintessential American buddy movie but set in the backdrop of contemporary Poland and tackling these themes of remembrance, of legacy, of trauma but with a very kind of modern handling," Herting says. "I think they're so used to period war films and this was something new." 

Initially, the Polish producers assumed that Eisenberg would want to build a set version of the concentration camp, which would cost around $1 million. Not only was that too expensive, but Eisenberg balked at the idea of recreating such a place. "Is there somebody who knows how to build Majdanek? I don't know if I want to meet that person," he says. 

Still, Eisenberg explains, the process of getting the museum to agree to let them shoot there lasted about eight months. Again, it was Eisenberg’s specific, present-day angle that convinced the institution.

"They are mostly asked to do Holocaust movies that take place in 1942 where filmmakers want to go in there with 100 extras and Nazi uniforms and guns running around the camp, and they say, 'No, this is a sacred site that needs to be preserved and treated with great reverence,'" Eisenberg says. "Our pitch was: 'I want to show what you're doing now. I want to do the same thing you are doing. My family lived five minutes from here. They actually were not in Majdanek, but this is a part of my history and I have nothing but the utmost reverence and gratefulness for what you do and I want to just display that as simply as possible.'"

By the day of that shoot, Eisenberg had been to Majdanek a number of times for scouting and had shot-listed every moment he had to capture. But for his actors the experience was completely new. Like his character, Culkin was seeing many of the elements of the camp for the first time, as the camera rolled. 

"Oftentimes I wouldn't get into the room until they were rolling," Culkin says. "One or two takes, absorbing it, as one would, yes, in character, but also I'm there too and then he filmed it and that was it. It wasn't work. It would have been weird if we stepped out of that room and there's somebody sitting in a director's chair playing Wordle or something like that." 

Herting notes that it was a "tough day," and that she encouraged everyone to take the space they needed.

"The hardest thing about it was just the unpredictability of that day," she says. "You don't know how it's going to hit people and there were surprises along the way. We all just felt like it was a real thing of significance that we were there and allowed to do this." 

While Eisenberg wanted to shoot Majdanek in a straightforward manner, in part to represent the feelings of his characters, he also got a lot of footage, including B-roll material without any actors in it. Once he got into the editing room, all of that just felt extraneous. 

"Ultimately I just wanted it to be with the actors," he says. "It felt immature to just throw all of the cool shots we got into the movie because we got them." 

Eisenberg acknowledges that he's exploring all of this from the "safety" of a third generation removed from the event. His father now keeps saying that he wants to visit Poland. "In an ironic way, I'm bringing my older generation closer to it," he says.