A Real Pain is a recent indie darling and Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay about two cousins Benji (Kieran Culkin) and David (Jesse Eisenberg) who visit Poland following the death of their grandmother to bond and reconnect with their heritage. Jesse spoke with Creative Screenwriting Magazine about what he wanted to express in his deeply personal film and the long journey it went through.

Discuss the previous iterations of the story before landing on a buddy film about two cousins. Why do you think the earlier versions didn’t work?

This movie has several different origin stories. The first one is just my life. My family comes from Poland and, in 2008, my wife and I went on a trip to all of the locations in this film, including my family’s small town, Krasnystaw. We arrived at this little three-story apartment where my family lived up until World War II and I was standing outside of the apartment expecting to have some kind of emotional epiphany. When nothing profound came, I started thinking about how interesting it is that the ways we try to connect to the past don’t often have the expected results.

After that trip, I wrote a play that took place in Poland. It starred Vanessa Redgrave as my Polish cousin (who survived the war) and me as a character named David, who had some biographical overlaps with the character I play in this movie, who is also named David. Several years later, I wrote another play, called The Spoils, where I played a character named Ben, who was similar to the character of Benji in this film.

A few years later, I wrote a short story for Tablet Magazine, where I took these two characters, David and Benji, made them friends from high school and sent them on a trip to Mongolia. The script had a great opening twenty pages that’s not so different from the opening of A Real Pain, but as I got deeper into the film, I kept hitting a wall.

My problem was that as soon as the characters arrived at their destination in Mongolia (which was about thirty pages into the script), the story had a natural ending. This means it was missing an entire second act – an entire body. Ironically, as I was trying to power ahead with this unsuccessful script, an ad popped up on the Internet for “Auschwitz tours (with lunch).”

As soon as I saw that advertisement, it opened up a world for me. It became immediately clear that these two guys should be cousins going on a holocaust tour. Immediately I was able to see the entire film.

The title is deceptively simple, but resonates deeply. Why was this title chosen?

I got lucky that the title A Real Pain came to me one day. It perfectly captures the tone of the movie and creates a thought-provoking discussion about the concept of pain – – and the validity of different levels of pain. These two characters are both struggling internally – David with OCD and anxiety and Benji with something much darker – – but setting them against the backdrop of the holocaust allowed me to implicitly ask all of these questions about what pain is real, what pain is worthwhile, and the title keys the audience into those questions in a nice way.

On a weird and very practical level, though, there’s a play by John Cariani (a lovely man) called Almost, Maine. I’ve always loved this title and the sound of it and I think I had a file of this script saved as the title “almost made it” which kind of sounded like “Almost Maine”. And then, the word “pain” came to me, probably because it rhymed with “Maine”, and the title somehow miraculously followed.  Strange how the mind works.  Thank you John!

Benji (Kieran Culkin) Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

Discuss the tone of your film. It could have been an earnest Holocaust movie, but instead it relies more on levity, comedy, and irony.

I have a very strong interest in Holocaust-themed films.  There are so many that come out every year so it was important to me to try to create something that I’d never seen before. I had a very explicit goal from the outset which was to make a movie that felt modern, fresh and real. I wanted to depict the awkwardness that accompanies my generation’s attempts to connect to that history.

I wanted to talk about the ambivalence of that connection. That is, we simultaneously feel affected by it, but also, and more importantly, we personally did not go through it. And so there’s a strange liminal space that we occupy that I wanted to highlight. I also wanted to make a movie that could be very reverential to the history while also featuring irreverent characters. So the trick is to have realistic characters who are flawed and human and smoking weed on roofs of buildings, but that the film itself has a deep and unadulterated reverence for the history and the suffering of our forbearers.

My background as a writer is in theater and I think there are different expectations for character growth and development in theater. Because an audience is locked into the room of the action, which is happening live in front of them, they are a little more forgiving for unconventional characterizations, and journeys.

In that way, I was trying to use that same rubric with this movie. Therefore, it does not have traditional character arcs that are explicit in ways audiences have come to expect (this made our test screenings not very fun for me!)

This is really David and Benji’s film. How do they each grow, learn, enrich and bond? Where are they emotionally at the end of the film?

The way I think about the characters’ journey is that the film is told from David’s perspective as he tries to connect with, and understand, his mercurial cousin. David has spent forty years in the shadow of this guy and it has made him feel diminished, even as he’s created a stable life for himself. Over the course of the movie, David (along with the audience) sees moments in his cousin that affirm for David that his own life choices have been good for him. He sees that Benji’s pain is overwhelming in a way that makes him less than enviable.

And David realizes that, although he loves his cousin so much, he won’t be able to change him. So I think the ending of the movie leaves us with a character that is a little more comfortable in his own skin than he was at the beginning. As for Benji, I leave him in the same place that we met him at the beginning of the movie because I think the movie is about David realizing who his cousin is as opposed to Benji having some profound transition as a result of this trip.

In some ways, the character of Benji will always be unknowable to David and I wanted to create that same bittersweet distance for the audience as well — no matter how close we get to him (and the movie ends on a really tight shot of his sweet face) we can never get inside his mind.

The plot of your film is about visiting and honoring your ancestral homeland. What are you exploring thematically?

The movie uses the tour as a vehicle to get these two guys back together.  But I was also trying to use the tour to explore bigger themes. As I mentioned, setting these two struggling guys against the backdrop of historical, global trauma, allows me to pose a question to the audience. David says that his pain is too “unexceptional” to complain about. Benji, on the other hand, is dealing with something much darker, but also burdens the group with his mood swings. So I thought it would be interesting to set this movie, in which guys are contemplating their own public exploration of pain, against the backdrop of the loudest pain in our history – – that of a genocide.

To add to this, I included a character who survived the Rwandan genocide.  His name is Eloge and it’s based on a friend of mine, also Eloge, who lent his life story to me for the film. Including a character who personally survived a genocide allowed me to broaden the scope of the movie. It allowed me to talk about pain in a more universal way – – to express that it is not exclusive to the Jewish experience, but that it is part of the human experience.

It was another way of putting David and Benji into a broader perspective. Perhaps, in a way, I was trying to show how David and Benji’s pain is valid and heartbreaking even against the backdrop of much bigger pain. Maybe I was writing that to give myself a break for constantly feeling guilty about my own self pity. I don’t know. I’m sure theres a freudian analyst who’d have a better answer for me.  I write from a place of trying to figure something out about myself. I know that must seem self indulgent but the only way I can sustain interest in writing something is if I don’t know the answers to the questions I’m posing.

Overall though, my goal, tonally, was to discuss these weighty themes in a way that felt accessible and interesting without being self serious or sanctimonious.

How have you grown as a storyteller/ filmmaker after making this film?

It’s hard to say what I’ve learned from this movie as a storyteller. I have written one thing a year for the past twenty years – I’ve written plays, musicals, books, short stories, and movie scripts — and I can never predict which projects will wind up being well received. My finger is off the pulse, in that way.

So, I have tried to understand why people like this movie, but mostly ignored my first movie. And a lot of of that is luck and timing, but if I had to diagnose it, I would say that I did a better job with A Real Pain in terms of allowing the audience to understand my characters.

If anything, I’ve learned less about storytelling as a personal pursuit and more about what audiences want from a story and what they need to engage with it. Moving forward, I would like to continue writing characters that are mercurial or even transgressive, like Kieran’s character (Benji) in this movie, but I know now to make sure the audience has some window into their soul.