The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to episode 672 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, how do we handle loss? Loss of a parent, loss of a relationship, loss of a home? How do we grieve both alone and collectively? To help us explore these questions, we have a very special guest.
Jesse Eisenberg is a writer of plays, short stories and screenplays, who’s also an accomplished actor and director. He’s the writer, director and star of his film A Real Pain. Welcome to Scriptnotes, Jesse Eisenberg.
Jesse Eisenberg: Thank you so much, John. It’s a real privilege to be on the show and to talk to you.
John: Excited to have you here. Congrats on your WGA nomination.
Jesse: Oh, thanks.
John: Yesterday.
Jesse: Thanks a lot.
John: I want to talk to you about your movie, about the writing of it, the journey to making it into a movie. Also, if we can, I’d like to answer two listener questions that we got in.
Jesse: Sure.
John: One about signature styles and simultaneous perspectives. Then we do a bonus segment at the end and I’d love to talk to you about the radio drama as a form. Because it’s weird, Scriptnotes, we’ve been doing this for 12 years, but we’ve never actually talked about the audio drama. You’re actually a person who has written and performed in those. I want to talk to you about that as a thing.
Jesse: Oh, great. Oh, I would love to.
John: Cool. We’re recording this on Thursday afternoon, January 16th. We’ve just gotten word that David Lynch has died today, which is the writer-director behind Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks, which was such an important thing for me. Jesse, did you ever get to work with him? Did you ever get to meet him? Did you ever cross paths with him?
Jesse: No, I’ve never met him and would definitely have not forgotten that experience. No, I just loved him so much. I think I wrote three different college papers on Mulholland Drive because I was recycling them because I love the movie so much.
John: Yes. I never got to meet him either. I think the thing about writer-directors is they just generate their own work. As a screenwriter, it’s hard for me to enter into his orbit. I was just always so impressed by the specificity of his work and that you have some filmmakers whose names become adjectives and Lynchian is just a thing. You can identify it as a signature style. It’s not even just the visuals, but just the way-
Jesse: The feeling.
John: -his worlds feel. Yes.
Jesse: Exactly. Yes.
John: He died at 78, not in the fires, but partially because of the fires. He was evacuated from the Sunset Fire, which was-
Jesse: Oh, is that right?
John: -also affected us. It was headed down our way. Apparently that was part of what set off this last series of things.
Jesse: Oh, I had no idea. Oh my goodness.
John: Emphysema, but when people are in a fragile state and then they have emergency, you’re moving them around.
Jesse: Right. Oh goodness, I didn’t realize.
John: Jesse, I associate you as a New York person. Have you been in Los Angeles much?
Jesse: I’m aware of it. The first times I would go to Los Angeles would be for screen tests for movies. I just developed this horrible Pavlovian anxiety about landing at LAX because I knew I had to go– I was trying to memorize my lines in the car over to some audition. I never got the wonderful LA experience. I shot there and I did a play there actually.
When I’m working there, it’s nice. When I’m not working there, all that old stuff, when I’m there, I have a day off or something, all that old feeling of being out there and, I don’t know, just the anxiety of being out there comes back.
John: Yes. It’s strange that in the States we have these two big cities, big iconic cities. We have many great iconic cities, but the two big ones we think of are New York and Los Angeles. New York though, everyone has a connection to New York. Los Angeles is sort of a place people drop into and out of, but they don’t have that same kind of affinity for.
Jesse: Exactly. Being in the entertainment industry, I always felt like, “Well, if I’m in LA and I’m not working, what am I doing there?” Whereas when I’m not working in New York, it feels like less of a problem because I’m a third generation New Yorker. It just feels like, “Oh, this is where I should be.”
John: This really brought me to this last week in the fire. Watching the national coverage of it, there was good coverage of it. You could see a lot of national interest in it, but it wasn’t the same visceral feeling we had after 9/11, something like that which was so devastating on a national level.
Jesse: Exactly.
John: The attack on 9/11 was an attack on a fundamental piece of America. These fires were more disparate. There wasn’t one center to it.
Jesse: Exactly. I’ve been really eager to talk to people about the fires because I was in LA a few days before. I have so many friends and colleagues there. I know several people that have lost their homes. And in New York, I’m finding it’s more difficult to connect with people about it because it’s really not on their radar as much as I would have expected.
John: Yes. Update from where we are here, as we’re recording this, the fires aren’t out, but they aren’t growing. They feel like they’re largely under control. We have thousands of homes burned, people displaced, and we’re just starting to get a handle on what we’ve lost and what happens next. I and a bunch of other writers donated to the Writers Guild Member Fund, which is through the Entertainment Community Fund, which is helping out people in the industry affected by this.
Obviously at Scriptnotes and individually, we’re going to be doing a lot of donations and fundraising for folks impacted by these fires and the work of rebuilding the city and the parts that were lost. So we’ll have a link in the show notes to resources for writers from the WGA for if you’ve been impacted, places to go first to look for some help here.
Let’s get to talking about you and what you’ve been working on. It’s just so fascinating, this intersection between you as a writer and you as an actor. I want to talk about where things started because looking back through your history, it feels like you were doing both things at the same time. You were never an actor who then decided they wanted to write or a writer who then got put into some things. They were simultaneous interests for you. That started as a kid, I’m guessing.
Jesse: Yes, exactly. I would always write. I started just writing jokes and then I would be writing scenes. When I was 16 years old, I wrote a movie about Woody Allen. That was like a young version of Woody Allen in modern society, but it was about him changing his name to Woody Allen from his real name. I got a cease-and-desist letter from his lawyers once they finally got the script.
John: I want to put you on pause there. Once they finally got the script, so that means that you hustled your way into getting him to read this script.
Jesse: Exactly. Yes, exactly. Because I wanted to film it on a little camera. I was just trying to do all things at all times. As you know or maybe you don’t know because you’re a very successful screenwriter, but as an actor, you always feel like you’re one job away from never working again. I felt that way even when I was 17 and auditioning for things. I always felt like, “This all feels like you have to win the lottery to get a part in something.” I was just doing anything I could in the arts, which included just writing scripts in high school and trying to send them to anybody who might read them.
Then I started getting parts in movies when I was 18, 19, 20. I started getting good parts in movies that people actually saw. That helped me, because I got an agent, that helped me to get my screenplays that I was writing. I was writing commercial style screenplays. That helped me have an agent to get them into company’s hands. Some of them got optioned by like Depth of Field, which is the Weitz Brothers company.
I was 20, 21, and I would rewrite these scripts. I had like three or four of them at the time. I’d rewrite these scripts. I never got paid for an option. It was always just like they were at these companies. I’m not complaining, nor I should not have been paid for these, but I just mean it was not like I was a success. It was basically some companies had taken these scripts and agreed to talk with this nice kid for once every six months. That was the thing. At some point I realized these are never going to get made.
John: I want to unpack a few things there. You were talking about the difference between an actor and a writer. The writer can just go off and write a new script. You have an agency as a writer that you don’t have as an actor, because as an actor, you’re asking somebody to put you in their thing. “Let me be a part of your thing,” versus like, “Let me create the thing behind it.”
Jesse: Exactly.
John: And yet as an actor, you have a lot more access to different filmmakers and different styles of doing things. Because by the time you were 20, 21, 22, you’d been on a bunch of sets. You’d seen how a bunch of different people worked. You were also reading a ton of scripts. That’s a great education.
Jesse: It’s unbelievable. I don’t think I would be able to direct a movie had I not been on so many sets as an actor. I’m on sets as an actor, but really, as you know from being on these sets, you spend the day just watching things happen. If you’re a curious person, which I’m a curious person, you can ask the people and usually people are happy to tell you about their jobs and why they’re doing what they’re doing and why the dolly should go this way and not the other way. That was really helpful.
It also helped me as a writer too, because I’d been in so many– on the micro level, I’d been in scenes that just don’t work. You’re like, “Why does this scene not work? Why is it not playable?” is the word we would use as an actor. “This scene is not playable. My character says this thing and then two lines later says this thing and it makes no sense. There’s no psychological jump.” And so as a writer, I just don’t do that stuff. That’s not the difference between a good movie and a bad movie, really. It’s just the thing that actors like to do versus what actors don’t like to do. So that was really helpful.
Then just because I’m writing things that are character based generally, it’s like, I feel like I have a good sense of what actors like to do, because that’s always the thing I come into conflict with. I just did this movie, we just finished, it was Now You See Me 3. It’s this big Hollywood thing. It’s an ensemble movie, there’s eight characters in it. But I really do have to say my character has a consistent voice from beginning to end. It’s just great. I love doing it. Even though the movie looks like maybe this movie that wouldn’t be emphasizing character stuff too much. For me, my character has a distinct voice from beginning to end and I just love doing it. It could happen in any level of movie.
John: Let’s go back to those first scripts you were writing, the ones that the Weitz Brothers were not paying you for, but to sort of bring in. What is the first screenplay you remember reading? The thing that made you think like, “Oh, this is actually a form I understand. This is a form I want to work in.” Do you remember?
Jesse: Oh, wow. God, that’s a great question. Yes. God, it must have been something. When I was younger, I was auditioning for things, but I couldn’t tell you the difference between a good thing and a bad thing.
John: Yes, and often you’re probably seeing sides, you’re seeing the pieces of a thing rather than the full-
Jesse: Exactly.
John: -work.
Jesse: I auditioned for the movie The Squid and the Whale when I was like I think 19, I ended up filming it when I was 21 because they got on hold for two years because of budget whatever, but I definitely remember thinking, “This is amazing.” It was amazing. It’s funny and emotional in a way that just felt original and that tone just seemed really cool.
John: And The Squid and the Whale, it’s a spare script. It’s not a play, but it’s not a big cinematic. There aren’t car chases. It’s not the camera doing wild things. It’s just characters in a situation creating their own issues.
Jesse: Right, so it’s easier to read. It’s harder to read a big action thing and understand actually what it’s going to look like and be, because there are just so many moving parts that are not able to be explicit in a script. But for a movie like Squid and the Whale, or the first movie I got to do, Roger Dodger, they were great scripts, the dialogue was great, and you could see on the page that the thing was going to be great. It didn’t require directorial or technical flourishes that you couldn’t see on the page.
John: Yes, but the first script I read was Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape. It was one of the first things that was printed that we had to buy at a bookstore and read.
Jesse: Oh, wow.
John: It was just the realization like, “Oh, everything that’s happening in the movie that I’m watching on the VHS copy, it’s just reflected here.” Realizing that there’s a standard format that makes sense for explaining what’s going to happen in this movie, just on the page.
Jesse: And it was a good read?
John: It was a great read.
Jesse: It was accessible read, right.
John: A hundred percent. Again, it’s spare because it didn’t need a lot of flourishes, but just the sense of like, “Oh, this is how we’re going to introduce a character on the page,” which is not necessarily going to match exactly what you’re going to see on screen. It tracks well. You can hear characters’ voices being distinct even before those actors are being cast in them. That’s a crucial thing.
Jesse: Do you find that there are a lot of movies that just don’t read well, but you know are going to be great?
John: There are. Some of the cases I’ve run into are directors who’ve written things, they have a vision for what it is, but they just can’t get it on the page very well. I know this filmmaker’s going to be able to make something great, it’s just not there yet. I’ve worked a lot at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, and sometimes you have these filmmakers coming in who are working on, generally, their second movie, and so the first one they just made, and the second one, they really are trying to put it all together. Sometimes they’re struggling with the form, but you know they have a great vision there.
Jesse: You know that because they’ve made that other movie or just from talking to them?
John: They’ve made another movie or in the conversation with them, you see what it is that they’re trying to do and they’re just not quite able to find the-
Jesse: Translate that?
John: Yes, they’re not able to evoke that on the page for what they’re going to try to get to at the end of it all.
Jesse: Right.
John: There are definitely times where I’ve read scripts that I thought, “That is just a really tough read,” and yet, in talking with a filmmaker, you see like, “Oh, yes, they have a vision. They’re going to be able to make something really cool out of that.” My job as an advisor is just to be– I describe it as like, “I’m your friend with a pickup truck who’s going to help you move from where you are to where you need to be. I’m not going to change anything, I’m just going to help you get there.”
Jesse: That’s a nice way to think about it. The alternative thing is scripts that read really well that don’t make good movies, and I’ve been able to figure out what those are too.
John: Tell me.
Jesse: Well you know, it’s the kind of script that has really flashy dialogue, funny dialogue and things that are like– What I find most of the movies that I’m thinking about that are fun to read, but I know they’re not going to make good movies, are ones that are really quirky, where the quirk factor is turned up, where people have odd names and everything. Stuff that is funny to look at, but doesn’t translate to when you’re watching human beings take on those things, and now you have to follow them. I’m not just saying you have to relate to everybody, but just things where they’re really cutesy and quirky on the page. Usually, those things are just not translating to 3D imagery.
John: Also, I think what you’re describing is sometimes things could be like, “Okay, that little moment was funny, but it’s not the kind of funny that’s going to continue out through two hours of a movie experience.” The difference between sketch writing and longer form writing is the ability to really go on a journey with these characters and want to see them as it continues.
Jesse: Yes, and not be too funny. Sometimes scripts are too funny, and you’re like, “Yes, I get it, this is really funny, but you’re constantly undermining the gravity of the emotions of the characters.” It’s a good sketch, but you can’t actually engage with these characters in an emotional way.
John: Speaking of sketch, you’ve hosted Saturday Night Live.
Jesse: Oh, yes.
John: What was that experience like? As a person who’s usually going in with full preparation, usually you get a chance to really think everything through, and suddenly you’re in sketches. Did you enjoy it? What was that like for you?
Jesse: Oh, it was terrible. I’m an idiot. It’s my fault entirely. What happened was, when I was 18 and I got an agent and everything, I had put together a packet for Saturday Night Live to write. I’d written tons of sketches. I loved that format. Even as an adult, I could look back and say, “Yes, they were good sketches.” It wasn’t like a teenager writing. It was like somebody who had a voice and whatever, and the concepts were funny and varied.
When they asked me to host the thing, I didn’t want to because I only wanted to write for the thing and I didn’t want to be an actor coming in. They put the wig on an actor and parade you around. I wanted to be a writer. I spoke to somebody there before and they said, “Yes, no, you can do that. Yes, that’s fine. You can bring your scripts in. That’d be great.” I didn’t realize that they were just being nice to me. That was not the way it works. There are writers there, they all come from the Harvard Lampoon, and they are competing with each other to get sketches on, and the celebrity actor that comes in, because they’re in a popular movie that week, doesn’t get to write the things.
But I didn’t know that, and so I spent the week trying to have my scripts infiltrate the planned sketches. There was a table read, and I think I did like two sketches at the table read, and I could tell increasingly over the course of the week, people were not happy with me. But I didn’t realize, and I was just so desperate to be a writer. If I went back on the show, I wouldn’t do that again, and I was an idiot, and I guess I must have come off really obnoxious or something. I was just so eager to write comedy since I’m young, and that felt like an opportunity for me to do it.
John: Let’s take it back to the 20-year-old Jesse Eisenberg. If I were to sit you down for an interview then, and say, “Jesse Eisenberg, what do you want to do with your life? What is your goal?” What would you have identified as your aims? What were you shooting for?
Jesse: Oh, The Onion. I would have just wanted to write for The Onion. To me, it’s the greatest thing in the world. During the pandemic, they allowed me to do six weeks on a probationary period. I did not make it past the six weeks, but I had great stuff and I just wouldn’t get it voted in at the end. I was also not one of the core writers. I was on this probationary thing. My headlines and stuff would not be prioritized. That to me still feels like the whale.
John: Oh yes.
Jesse: To me, it’s the greatest comedy writing in the world. I aspire to it and feel shamed that I didn’t get in there.
John: Yes, so instead you’re just making movies and starring in things.
Jesse: To me it’s so much easier, like the head writer from The Onion saw the movie A Real Pain and he complimented me on it and I immediately sent him back a headline because I was so desperate to just have something in The Onion. To me, if I had a non-byline Onion headline, no one knows it’s me, and it came out in one of 100 headlines that week, it’d make me happier than any movie script.
John: Incredible. I want to talk to you about your movie, A Real Pain, because this is your second feature as a director. For folks who haven’t seen it yet, I’m going to give the shortest logline, but then I want to talk to you about what the movie’s really about. It follows two cousins, David and Benji, who are on a group tour in Poland to visit important Jewish cultural sites, including a concentration camp, and to learn more about where their grandmother grew up. That’s sort of the logline version. Was that the actual movie you set out to write? What was the actual intention behind sitting down and starting to write this movie?
Jesse: Yes, thank you so much for saying that in your question, which is the first time I ever was asked it in that way, is quite spot on. Because the log line was the vehicle. The log line was the way to get them– what is the actual screenwriting term? MacGuffin? Is that the thing? What is the thing?
John: Sure. Well, MacGuffin would be sort of like a plot device. It’s just like the mechanic. Yes.
Jesse: Exactly, yes. My background as a writer, after sketch stuff didn’t work out, my background was playwriting. I’ve had four plays in New York, one of them transferred to the West End, and some play in other places. I had written one character in a play, it was named David, the play took place in Poland, the play was called Revisionist. It’s similar to my character David, who I play in this movie. My third play, which is my best play, was called The Spoils, and I played a character named Ben, who is this charming, maladaptive guy, like Kieran’s character in A Real Pain.
Then I had written a short story for a tablet magazine where I took those two characters from the two separate plays, and I put them in the same room as childhood friends who go to Mongolia. These two characters that are pretty similar to the characters in this movie. Then I thought I would adapt that to a movie. I was adapting the Mongolia script and I thought it’d be cool to shoot in Mongolia and I’d never seen it before in a movie, et cetera. It was just not going well. I didn’t have a second act. It’s okay to talk in jargon, right?
John: Oh yes, a hundred percent. Jargon is very much welcome here.
Jesse: Okay, great. Basically, I had this amazing setup of these two guys who were childhood friends and they had all this funny, fraught history together and then they got to Mongolia and this big thing happened there. The problem is it happened the first day they get there so there was no second act. Basically, it was a first act and then it jumped to this big, tragic reconciliation of their past. I didn’t have a second act.
I was sitting there, I was so frustrated because I knew there was potential with these two characters. I loved them so much and I loved their banter. I knew there was potential in a road trip of these guys. I was banging my head against the computer when an ad popped up for Auschwitz Tours, and then in parentheses, with lunch. Auschwitz Tours (with lunch). I clicked on the ad, even though I already knew what it was, which is that, it takes you to a site for advertising English speaking tours of Holocaust sites. I thought, “That’s the movie.” That gave me the vehicle.
I can set these two guys who both have their own internal pain against the backdrop of objective, horrifying pain. Suddenly I could just implicitly make this bigger commentary on what pain is valid? Is my OCD character’s pain valid? Is Kieran’s pain, who has much darker demons than my character’s pain valid? Or are we just individual grains of irrelevant sand on the beach of Polish trauma, in Holocaust history? Once I came up with this Holocaust tour, it just seemed like this is a great vehicle to have a movie with these two characters.
John: The choice to make them cousins makes a lot more sense now that you talked through the history of this. Originally they were best friends, but that really wouldn’t make sense for why they’re going on this tour together. If they were siblings, you’re dealing with all the sibling stuff of it all. Cousins is the in between place.
Jesse: Exactly. Originally when I thought about the Holocaust tour, I thought they have to be family. I thought they’d be siblings. Then I realized, no, it’d be so much more interesting to make them cousins who just lost a grandma because what that would do is allow them to basically not have a relationship anymore.
If you’re siblings, you’re always connected by your parents. There’s just expectations that you should always be in each other’s lives. Cousins who lose a grandparent, which is their only link, really have to make a decision in some ways, unconscious, implicit decision on if they’re going to remain really close. That’s what’s going on with these characters in this movie.
John: Jesse, as you sat down to start writing this script, did that you were going to star in it? Did that you were going to direct it? Was that always an intention from when you started writing the script?
Jesse: No, not really. I write all the time. This was just the next thing I was writing. I wasn’t exactly thinking that I would act in it. I guess I wanted to direct it because I want to direct because I feel like the film industry is so fickle with actors that I feel like I need to have some control. I don’t have your skill set to write the way you do these really big, wonderful movies. I can write my small personal things. And if I direct them, it gives me a little more agency in this industry that I find is really unstable. I thought, “Okay, I could direct this. This could be something. It’s a character driven movie. It doesn’t require a technical mastery.” Then in terms of acting in it, I didn’t really think about it.
John: Because it sounds like you’ve actually played both characters.
Jesse: Yes. I did. I did play both of those characters. I always think of my acting as quite separate, in terms of movies, because I’m in other movies and other people’s movies. I wasn’t exactly thinking of being in it. The weird thing happens, and God, you could probably relate to this in a roundabout or maybe the other side way, which is that, when I send people a script, it’s just much easier to get something made that has an actor attached to it, even if it’s an actor they don’t really like. Even if producers don’t really like me, just the fact that an actor seems to have, theoretically– you’re at a higher level in this, but at my level, with writing, there’s an actor engaged on a $3 million movie, it already seems like it’s possibly real.
John: No, Jesse, I assure you that at my level, and it’s sort of at every level, having an actor attached to something is really helpful. I think it anchors in people’s minds like, “Oh, I can picture the movie, I can sort of picture Oscar Isaac in that thing.” It just makes life easier if there’s somebody attached.
Jesse: Exactly. And it also seems like validated by a non-writer, that seems helpful too. “Okay, this is not just a literary thing. This is validated by somebody attractive.” Once I started sending it out to financiers, independent investors, whatever, I just put my name on it, basically just as a shorthand that it’s going to hopefully be made soon.
John: As folks started to read this, they were reading this as like, “Okay, this is something that Jesse wrote, he’s going to be starring and directing in it.” They’ve seen that you can direct a movie. They know you as an actor. It must make it easier because there’s a sense of like, “Oh, I get what this is and it’s not going to be a crazy expensive movie.” What was the process of going out and finding the money? Was it all independent investors? Did you have a plan? Because you ended up selling it at, was it Sundance or where did you sell it?
Jesse: We sold it at Sundance. Yes. No, it was really hard. Really hard. We were passed up by everybody in the first round of who we went to. It was ultimately produced by this great company, Topic. They’re certainly not a second-round company, but the people we had gone to for a higher budget essentially, all passed on it. A24, who did my first movie, didn’t do this one.
It did feel a little bit like a really uphill battle to the point where I was writing to German reparations funds who give some money to Holocaust themed movies. I was able to get a little grant from them that I thought could be seed money to make this. I didn’t know how I was going to fund it. I know that must seem strange to maybe some listeners who know me as like a Hollywood actor and it seems like, “Well, why don’t we just go make it?” The way these independent movies are made, it’s difficult. A lot of people want to make movies at this level. It’s competitive.
John: Yes. You were able to find producers and financiers. How early on in the process did you list some sort of line producer, somebody who could come up with a budget, come up with a schedule? How early did like how expensive it was to make the movie?
Jesse: Oh God, that’s a great question. Pretty early we did that because, okay, so I should also say, because I don’t want to seem like I’m asking for pity that it was a real struggle. It was a real struggle to find investors, but my producers are great. They’re Emma Stone’s company called Fruit Tree. It’s Em, her husband Dave McCary and their partner, Ali Herting. They were great. When we were looking for actual investors, that was the struggle.
We had a budget done, I think pretty early, but it was a bit amorphous because the budget is partly dependent on getting money from the Polish Film Institute and you don’t know if you’re going to get it. In our case, actually, we lost, I think it was like– we were a three and a half million-dollar movie. I think we lost $850,000 two months before because we were expecting it from the PFI. Then for a set of technical reasons, we didn’t get it. We thought it would cost five and a half. We ended up having to make it for three and a half, which meant cutting out days, which meant cutting locations. It was scrappy. It was quick. Every day felt like something would go wrong.
John: Yes. That’s really challenging. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the screenplay that’s being published, the For Your Consideration script. How close is the script that we’ll be seeing to what you went into production with? Because it’s always hard to tell with For Your Consideration scripts, how much they’re just conforming to the final movie versus what the original shooting script was. What changed?
Jesse: Oh, wow. What a nice question. I haven’t even thought about this stuff. We cut two scenes from the movie, which are not reflected in the For Your Consideration script. We cut the two scenes. Otherwise, maybe it’s word for word. It’s that close. The two scenes, one of the scenes, I put in at the very last minute. It was a scenelet. The big scene we cut was just the beginning of the movie. You see my character at home with his wife and kid. The actress was great, Ellora Torchia, she’s a brilliant British actress. She played my wife. My child played my child. Wasn’t happy to be cut out. The scene felt too formulaic and just standard issue for the pace of the rest of the movie.
John: Absolutely. The way you’re starting now makes a lot of sense because we see we’re in New York, we know we’re headed to the airport. I suspect what you found in the edit was that seeing the wife and family made you want to see them more over the course of it. That really wasn’t the movie you were making.
Jesse: Exactly. It was not helpful. Actually, you just want to– God, you probably know this better than anybody. Audiences pick up on shortcuts to characterizations really quickly. You see me in a taxi cab now in the beginning and I’m calling my cousin. It’s a funny little scene, but it just says everything you want to know about who I am, who that character is, the cousin who I’m calling. It’s a funnier scene and it’s more original. Audiences are so aware, they just know, “Oh, that’s this person. Let’s see how this person unfolds now.”
John: Yes. I want to talk about a showcase scene in the script right now. It’s eight pages long. It’s pages 64 to 72, which is the restaurant scene. This is where we’re at a restaurant, Benji’s being very prickly. He leaves the table. David apologizes for him, explains what sounds like bipolar disorder.
Two of your lines here, basically, “I know he’s in pain, but isn’t everybody in pain in some way? I know my pain is unexceptional, so I don’t feel the need to burden everybody with it.” Sort of central thesis that you’re getting out there.
Jesse: Right.
John: It’s also the revelation to this group that Benji had attempted suicide six months ago, which is new information for us as the audience. Can you talk about the writing of that scene? Did you always know it was going to be a turning point in the movie that would be a showcase scene? What were your feelings going into it, not just as a writer, but also then as the actor and the director?
Jesse: I hope it’s okay to admit this, but I didn’t have that line in the first draft that Benji tried to commit suicide. There were little droppings within the movie that indicated that this guy’s pain was far more, was darker than mine. My instinct was to not put something so explicitly detailed like that. The reason I put it in, again, I hope it’s okay to talk about this stuff, because it’s inside baseball-y a little bit. But the first movie I made wasn’t received that well.
I think the reason it wasn’t received that well is because I assumed that the audience would totally understand how I felt as a director about my characters, and they didn’t. They thought I maybe had contempt for them, and I didn’t. I was in love with them, but they were not being their best selves in the movie. It was really hard to read harsh criticism of the other movie. For this, I just wanted to make sure the audience understood what was happening and that, yes, you could imply in 10,000 different ways and looks and lies of omission and all this stuff, indicate that that character may have done something like that or tried to hurt himself or kill himself, but I needed to be more specific.
John: Yes, because we’re seeing this as an audience. We’re approaching it only with the information that we’re seeing on screen. You as the writer or director you know the facts. You know things that we’re not necessarily able to see.
Jesse: Exactly.
John: We don’t know whether this is typical behavior for Benji or atypical. Is he always just an asshole? What’s going on in this moment? What I like about the revelation where you put it is that it re-contextualizes the scenes that we’ve been thinking about beforehand. The same way that we as an audience are doing that, the other people around the table are like, “Oh, okay, the stuff we saw before…” It actually does provide just really good dramatic fodder for figuring out what happens next. It makes us appreciate both you and Benji differently for now knowing this information.
Jesse: The scene used to end– the kicker at the end of that monologue was not this revelation that Benji tried to kill himself, but the kicker in the– kicker is such a sleazy word to use for something emotional. The great ending prior to that, it was that our grandparents survived by a thousand miracles to get us here. The ending of the monologue was, “And I know we were born on third base. I know I was born on third base and I feel so lucky, but it feels like Benji is just constantly trying to run back to second.” That was the ending line. It was this guy who had everything and was trying to make his life so much worse.
John: Yes, and that’s such a great line. It’s not supported by the scene that’s there beforehand. I can understand why it changed, but it’s such a great sentiment. I want to drill into this aspect of it because what’s interesting about your movie is that it’s hard to make a dramatic comedy, comedy drama, something that walks that line. It also goes to the fact that this movie has to become quiet at moments.
It has to let the concentration camp be what it is and then find a context for it. Because you’re talking about the loss of a grandparent and your own personal pain in this environment of just unspeakable, catastrophic, unfathomable loss. And trying to hold the balance of that. And the shame you feel of feeling bad when others have it so much worse around you.
Jesse: Right, exactly.
John: Talk to me about the rest of the people in that group and how you thought about those characters and the tour guide, Will, and how you thought about putting together the rest of the folks who are going to be surrounding them.
Jesse: In a macro way, after I read up a lot on what these Holocaust tours mostly are, they’re mostly suburban, middle, upper-middle class Jews who are doing their responsible trip. Instead of going to Rome this year, they go to this place. It’s very well-intentioned. I don’t mean to sound flippant about them. No, it’s wonderful that they’re doing that and exploring that history. Basically, I knew I couldn’t have 15 people on the tour that were all basically my parents. It would just be monotonous. I was trying to think of who could be on this tour, realistically, that is just a little more interesting than probably what most of these tours offer.
For me, that meant, I wrote a character based on my friend, Eloge. I met this guy named Eloge in real life. He survived the Rwanda genocide, converted to Judaism. If you look up his name, the first video that comes up is him talking about going on an Auschwitz tour. He’s my most religious Jewish friend. I asked him, “I think you’d be a really interesting character.” I told him what I was writing. I said, “Would you mind if I used your life story in this?” Not only did he agree to it, but helped me with casting and wardrobe. It was wonderful. That was interesting.
I had a neighbor, Martha. She’s the basis of Jennifer Grey’s character, Marcia. She was divorced and she was curious about her roots in Hungary. I just put the story together in my head of how interesting it must be to be going through a divorce and trying to find grounding in your own family’s history, even if that means Holocaust history. That was a character.
Then in terms of the tour guide, I thought it’d be interesting to have a character that is– there’s a term that Jews use called a philo-Semitic. Anti-Semitic is a hatred of Jews. Philo is of course a lover of Jews, but it’s a weird– the word is not used exactly. It’s kind of derogatory. It’s basically used to describe somebody who fetishizes Jewish culture. Like, “You guys are so, and I love the food,” that kind of thing. I thought it’d be really interesting to have a character as a tour guide who is an academic so that he can represent just the cold facts of the tour because I wanted somebody–
Basically, I was just trying to create people that Benji could play off of, that Kieran’s character could play off of. I knew if I had this guy that was overly academic and intellectualizing this tragic history, I knew it would just create some tension for Kieran. As I was writing it just proved to be true because once they got to the cemetery and they’re looking at this oldest Jewish cemetery, Kieran just goes nuts on him.
John: Yes, so you’ve assembled sort of this group of folks who are traveling through this place. At this point, you’ve cast Kieran. How much time did you have to figure out the relationship between you two guys? Because I can imagine if you weren’t also the writer-director, you were just the two actors, you might find some time to get together and figure out what your dynamic was. How much time did you have to spend with him to figure out how to play things? What was the process of working with him?
Jesse: Insane. I had no time with him and that’s more having to do with Kieran than it is anything else. Kieran is the most unusual person. Every writer listening to this, hire him in your movie, but don’t expect to have any conversation with him. Don’t expect him to know what scenes you’re shooting during the day. Not only is he the main character in this movie, he’s the focus of every scene in this movie.
First of all, he showed up to Poland a day before we shot. He didn’t want to talk about it with me on the phone ever. We did a 15-minute rehearsal. Basically, he showed up to Poland the day before we shot and I had a three-hour rehearsal planned. It was the scene where he calls up all these characters to this monument to take pictures and he just bringing the group out of the shell.
I thought we’d had a three-hour rehearsal. Kieran, he was late to rehearsal. I’m criticizing him only because I’m about to compliment him. He came to the rehearsal and he didn’t know what scene we were rehearsing and he didn’t know any of his lines. He said, “Can I look at the script for a second?” I showed him the script. He looked at it for 30 seconds and then was word perfect and did the scene once so perfectly that I said, “Let’s not rehearse any more. Let’s just shoot it.”
Then he would come to set during the days and I would say like, “Hey, are you okay?” He’s like, “Eh, I’m okay.” He said, “What scene are we doing today?” I would say, “It’s the scene you have five pages of dialogue on a train and it’s moving quickly.” He goes, “Oh, I remember reading that scene. That was funny. Can I take a look at the script?” I would say, “You don’t have your script?” He’s like, “Oh no, I don’t know if I brought it.” I give him my script. I’m sitting there panicking that this guy doesn’t know his dialogue and we have eight hours to shoot on this train scene. Again, he looks at the pages for like a minute and he’s word perfect and brilliant.
He’s just the most unpretentious actor but he’s doing all of the work. He’s just not doing it in a way that’s performative. We found out from his hotel towards the end of the movie that he had been sleeping on the floor and his room was a mess. His mattress was on his floor and he was living– I don’t know if he was eating at night. He was living like Benji, the character in the movie. He was just not telling anybody about it. I contrast that to the actor that comes to set every morning and says, “God, I was just going over the pages last night and it just reminded me of Lear.” This bullshit pretense that adds nothing to the movie but just makes you realize that this person is doing their work or whatever. Kieran’s the exact opposite. I would love to work with him again and again but he doesn’t make the director comfortable or the writer comfortable.
John: I want to talk a little bit about directors here because a thing that I was thinking through this morning as I was getting ready for this is there’s some actor directors who’ve directed themselves incredibly well. I was thinking like Bradley Cooper directed himself great in A Star is Born. Lena Dunham did a great job directing herself in Girls. Yet there’s other, I won’t name names of the people who didn’t do a great job, but people who are really good actors who are good directors who don’t direct themselves well. How did you make sure that your performance is working as an actor when you’re also worrying about everything else as a director? What are the challenges there? Do you have any hints or tips?
Jesse: Yes, I guess from the outset, because I’ve been writing so long, it was not like I was an actor trying to make a vanity project for myself where I was putting so much emphasis on my performance because I had written it for me to show the audiences that, “Hey, I can do this dark thing. Look, I can play homeless.” That was not my intention with the script.
I’ve been writing for myself for years. I’ve been in my plays and I don’t know who or what you’re referring to when you say it doesn’t work, but my sense is that probably those are intended as not vanity pieces, but trying to show something that they’re not often cast in and those things just go wrong for the reasons because the initial intention is off there.
For me, I just didn’t have that and I’m sitting at the library writing the scripts and I’m crying when I’m writing because I’m feeling all the emotions and then I’m on set, it’s an extension of that. So it’s coming from a real place. I’m probably an unusual writer, actor, in that I’ve started out doing plays and stuff and so I just never think of the extravagance of a movie being something important for me to act in. Yes, maybe that helps.
John: We have two listener questions that I thought we could take a crack at together here. Drew, can you help us out with a question from Tate?
Drew Marquardt: Tate writes, “I’ve written about seven scripts now and I found that a specific central theme always seems to wriggle its way into my stories. The characters, the narratives, the settings, they all vastly differ, but this one thematic question can’t help but rear its head. Is this a problem? Where do you draw the line between crutch and signature when it comes to a screenwriter’s overall work? At what point does something shift from being a unique, constant quality of a writer’s work to a laziness that the writer continues to rely on?”
Jesse: I’m expected to answer this?
John: Together we can answer it.
Jesse: Okay, great, because like, gosh, I couldn’t possibly. Yes, no, please.
John: It strikes me that we’re trying to answer this question on the day that David Lynch died and David Lynch had very common things that kept appearing in his stuff. They felt like of a consistent piece and so I wonder whether Tate is just actually recognizing what their style is and what interests them. I think if you look at a lot of my movies, generally it’s about a person crossing from one world into another world, having to learn the rules of it and survive within it and get back out at the end.
Go is that movie, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is that movie. A lot of my movies have those same themes in them, but they’re all very different where sometimes people become a crutch and they say that they’re a hack, they’re basically doing the same scene again, movie after movie, they have one way to go to. Jesse, talking about the plays you’ve written, the two movies you’ve made, they’re consistent and of a piece, wouldn’t you say?
Jesse: Yes, they’re all based on my preoccupation of why do I have a good life when other people have a bad life? All my plays are exactly that theme. My first movie is that, it’s about a woman who works at a domestic violence shelter and resents her son because she’s raised an upper middle-class son, and so she tries to parent this kid at a shelter.
The thing you said though, you used the word interest, that seems great. You’re finding the things that you’re interested in. Well, that’s great. That’s really great, and you could repeat forever and ever, because if you’re interested in them, maybe it feels like maybe perhaps you haven’t found the solution. When you don’t have a solution for something, that’s always the best thing to write about because it has an unanswerable tension.
John: I fully agree. Tate, I think just as you’re looking through the seven scripts you’ve written now, which is great, you’ve written seven scripts, you have a sense of what it is that you like to do, those are things you’re writing for yourself. Down the road, if you’re going to be a writer who’s working for other people, you may be writing stuff that’s not that. You may be using your skills at putting scenes and words together to do a very different thing, and that may be a great opportunity for you. The same way that Jesse gets to act in movies that are not his movies, and he gets to play different people too. It’s not a problem that the stuff you’re writing for yourself is of a piece, it’s you.
Jesse: Yes, it means you have a voice. To me, it sounds actually great. When I read writers and you can recognize that it’s theirs, it’s wonderful.
John: Drew, next question.
Drew: Victoria writes, “One of the things I struggle with most is handling sequences where I’m relying on multiple perspectives to move the action forward. The problem isn’t one of plot or emotional outcomes. I know story-wise and emotionally where the characters will be, but more of rhythm and fragmentation. It’s a filmic problem. At this point, I’m almost ready to start using storyboards and diagrams to augment my process. How do you guys make directorial choices for sequences like these? Should I think in terms of shot coverage, where I outline each character’s full action in the timeframe of the scene, and then edit them together? Is there another good way to look at this? Do you have any specific directorial techniques you use when writing these action sequences?”
John: Whether it’s an action sequence or any time we were moving between two different things in a movie, that’s one of the great wonders of cinema, is we can cut between two different things. It’s how do you make it that feel like every time you’re cutting back and forth between them, you’re gaining energy that you’re actually moving the story forward in a way that it all fits well together. It’s just honestly so different than what you do in a play. A play is a continuous space and time, generally, and this is so different. Jesse, what’s been your experience? Because I would say that I can’t think of moments in A Real Pain where you’ve had to sort of intercut between two different things that much.
Jesse: Yes, to me, I couldn’t even imagine doing that. I’m so impressed by this questioner’s ambitions. I was just thinking, “oh wow, yes, notecard sounds like a great idea.” I’m the last person that should be asked about this. I just finished acting in this movie, Now You See Me 3, and to me, the writers are great. It’s like, to me, they built the Empire State Building. I have no idea how they put this thing together. They’re accounting for an ensemble, they’re accounting for tricks, they’re accounting for studio notes from a big studio. To me, it’s like they built a building. It’s that far afield from the thing I know about.
John: Yes, and so, listen, I think, Victoria, if you’re writing stuff that involves intercutting between that stuff, reading a bunch of scripts that do it is going to be a real help to you. Look through the For Your Consideration scripts. We have them all up on Weekend Read. Just read the scripts of the movies that you like that do it and see what that looks like on the page, and you’ll get a sense of it.
The most challenging script I had for intercutting was probably the first Charlie’s Angels, actually, in which you have the three different angels in different parts of this castle. You have your villain, you have all this stuff that’s happening and all is fitting together, and that had to work on the page before we started shooting it. What I wrote is very much the cut that there, and it’s making sure that every time you’re moving from one thing to the next thing, you’re remembering where it was there, but also you’re getting energy out of that cut. It’s a skill to learn. If it’s something that you like writing that kind of stuff, it can be really exciting.
All right, it’s time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is this little website, gamey kind of thing called Network of Time. It’s networkoftime.com if you want to go there, it’s free. It’s basically doing six degrees of separation between two famous figures. You put a person on the left, a person on the right, and it figures out like, okay, how are they connected through what other people are they connected? Not just the names, it actually connects them through photos. It shows you the photos that put all those people together.
I’m going to go to Network of Time here, because I think you are a person in here. I’m going to try Jesse Eisenberg. What other famous person should I put you into? It could be any historical figure as long as they lived in some time of photography. Anybody post-Abraham Lincoln.
Jesse: Shakira?
John: Shakira, a hundred percent. I suspect Shakira will be a link through some other actor or a talk show host. Let’s see, because you’ve probably been on the same talk shows.
Jesse: Oh, got it. Okay, so that’s an easy one.
John: It’s loading up now.
Jesse: Oh, wow, you’re right.
John: Talk show. Four photos. All right, so the connections are Jimmy Fallon. You’re both on Jimmy Fallon’s talk show. There’s a photo of here with Fran Lebowitz, all right? Jimmy Fallon, then Donald Trump, Jimmy Fallon and Donald Trump, then Donald Trump and Jennifer Lopez, then Jennifer Lopez and Shakira.
Jesse: Oh, this is amazing. Oh my God. This is amazing.
John: Before we started recording, I did one to figure out how many steps between you and Abraham Lincoln. For Abraham Lincoln, it goes to Jimmy Fallon, Paul McCartney, Queen Elizabeth, George V, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, Robert Lincoln, was Lincoln’s son, and then Abraham Lincoln.
Jesse: Got it. Oh, I see, that’s interesting. I could see this website is Jimmy Fallon and probably the British royalty are doing a lot of heavy lifting.
John: They are doing a lot of heavy lifting. Yes, presidents do a lot there. What’s weird about it is it has a limited set of things because if I try Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart, it’ll go through Jimmy Fallon. It’s like, “No, no, no, there’s photos of you and Kristen Stewart.” You starred in two movies with Kristen Stewart, at least.
Jesse: I see. Okay, got it. It sticks to its own game.
John: Absolutely. Jesse, do you have something to share for us? One cool thing?
Jesse: Yes, sure. One of my favorite shows of all time– God, when did I first learn about it? Probably when I was 14 years old? I’m 41, so do the math. It’s called Floyd Collins. It’s a great musical by Adam Guettel, my favorite composer. It’s coming back to New York. It’s a musical that’s basically every college kid’s favorite musical, but it’s never been produced on Broadway. Now it’s coming. It’ll be in New York, I think, pretty soon. I just recommend it to anybody who can go. It’s just the coolest music.
John: Floyd Collins by Adam Guettel. Tell me the story of Floyd Collins, I don’t know it.
Jesse: Actually, you probably would know the Billy Wilder movie, Ace in the Hole. It’s about a caver in Kentucky in 1925 who gets stuck in a cave, and then this circus forms around him. Ace in the Hole, I think, follows the reporter. In this, you’re following the guy who gets stuck in the cave, and this just circus forms around the cave of he turns into a novelty and he dies. This is a true story of the guy stuck in the cave. Come look at the guy stuck in the cave. The guy died, he couldn’t get out. It’s just this really dramatic irony and tragic true story and the musical.
John: That’s awesome. Floyd Collins.
That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies.
You’ll find this at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about in the newsletter you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to our premium subscribers who make it possible for us to do this. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net. We get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on audio dramas. Jesse Eisenberg, an absolute pleasure speaking with you.
Jesse: Thank you so much, John. What a great honor to be on your show.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Jesse, I want to talk to you about audio dramas because you have written a few, you’ve starred in some. Talk to me about that as a form and what interested you about them and how you do writing that you know is only going to be heard and never seen.
Jesse: I like writing fiction. What I mean by that is prose. I like writing. I’m not a very good writer when it’s not about characters. I can write voices really well. I wrote this book called When You Finish Saving the World and it’s three characters over the course of 30 years. That for me was my version of a novel because I can write those characters really well. It’s all first person. That’s as good as I can get at prose, which is essentially monologue form. Stories are being told and characters are shifting and changing and it takes place over 30 years. Things that are seeds that are planted in, when was it, 2002, come much later. That for me, I loved. I loved and I would do that all the time if I could.
John: So in writing something for an audio drama or performing in one, you’re just reading a script like a play, but you also have to think about creating the space. I don’t listen to a lot of fiction podcasts, but the way that you establish, ‘Where are we? What’s going on around us?” You’re in a black void without any visuals to establish what’s happening there.
Jesse: Exactly. What I did with that book was I created three mechanisms for these stories to be told, because it was all real audio, it wasn’t like a narrator. Basically, it was all audio that would have actually been recorded. The first story took place like five years ago. I played this character and it was a guy who was having trouble connecting to his emotions and they recently had a baby and they went to a couple’s counselor and the couple’s counselor told me to make a recording for them once a night where I try to talk about my feelings about the baby, where I can really talk about feelings, try to emotionally connect to the baby. Basically, the first set of tapes were just me on the iPhone messages.
Then it jumped 15 years in the future and this kid is going to therapy and it’s a therapy bot. It’s essentially like a ChatGPT therapy. You’re hearing him talk to the therapist. Then it jumps 30 years in the past and it’s a young woman and it’s the mother of the boy and the wife of me but in her past and she is making tapes for her boyfriend who is deployed overseas to Uzbekistan right after 9/11. Anyway, once I came up with the mechanism for it and you slip in as much exposition as you could possibly put in briefly and entertainingly to just establish where they are and what they’re doing and why they’re talking, then you’re good to go.
John: Just like for your movie, you had to provide a context for why we’re on this Jewish cultural site tour, but you had to provide a context for why are we hearing this audio.
Jesse: Right.
John: This is audio that would have been recorded at that place, that time. That makes sense.
Jesse: Yes, and what I’ve discovered by being in movies and writing plays and stuff is, once you just like establish that thing, audiences go on the ride because they’re no longer– as long as you make it seem relatively reasonable that they would be doing this, then they’re into the emotions and the human stories. Then you can, basically, have free rein.
John: I went to go see this play, I Am My Own Wife, which is a great one man show.
Jesse: Yes, I love it.
John: I went to see it at the Geffen here in Los Angeles and this older couple was in front of me. The woman leans to her husband and says like, “It’s a woman, but I think it’s a man in a dress. He’s all alone on stage.” I’m like, “Oh my God, what’s happening?” It took me a while to realize like, “Oh, the guy she’s sitting next to with is basically blind.” She basically had to provide a context, but then the rest of it, you didn’t need to see things.
Jesse: Not in that play.
John: A radio play made sense for that viewer there.
Jesse: Do you work in that genre at all or media?
John: I really haven’t. I’ve done the Big Fish stage musical. I’ve gotten a chance to do that, but I’ve not done the audio drama. Other than Scriptnotes, the only other audio format thing I did was called Launch, which was about my Arlo Finch book series. It was the whole process of putting that series out into the world.
Jesse: Oh, interesting.
John: I had to learn the ways of establishing, “Where are we at this time?” Literally finding audio that grounds us in a place where this conversation is happening. If we had to do audio mixing to get you back and forth from that place to this place, this time to that time, it’s just so different than the one-on-one conversation that we’re doing right here, right now.
Jesse: Right, of course. Yes, exactly. That’s interesting. I wonder if you’d find it interesting or liberating to basically just be able to write long monologues.
John: I think it would be great. It sounds really appealing. It also sounds like something that probably more of our listeners should try to do because it’s very producible, and it’s just a good writing exercise in terms of how do you convey this information out there and not worry about all the rest of prose that has to happen there.
Jesse: Exactly.
John: I get frustrated sometimes by screenwriters who say like, “Oh, I could never write a book.” It’s like, “Wow, it’s just words?” Yet I recognize that people have different skill sets and there’s things that are interesting to them or not. You’ve also, I think, acted in some things that have not been stuff you’ve written for audio, is that?
Jesse: Yes, that’s right. Yes, I’ve done books on tape and stuff like that.
John: Do you enjoy the process?
Jesse: Not really. Doing a book on tape is actually like the most physically strenuous thing of all the things I do, including big action movies where you’re shooting overnight. Doing a book on tape, just sitting there reading for like eight hours is mind numbing and really tough vocally. I’m constantly surprised because I always forget, like the pain of childbirth. You forget like, “Oh, I forgot. Last time I did this, it was miserable. It was really hard to do.” It’s hard to do. It’s not really the performance I like. I’ve done a few like radio plays. Those are better. Books on tape is not my thing. I think some actors are really great at it and have the stamina. I have too much, whatever ADD and weak constitution to–
John: My friend Graham is a narrator and it’s such a different way of living. He gets to make choices every sentence about how he’s going to do things. He gets to find a character’s voices that feels really appealing if you’re good at it.
Jesse: Right no, he’s probably great. That’s probably, he’s figured out a way to be really performative and great. I just didn’t have that skill.
John: We’re facing the question of what’s going to happen with the Scriptnotes book. We have a Scriptnotes book coming out at the end of the year.
Jesse: Oh, cool.
John: Probably should have an audio version of the book, but Lord knows I don’t want to narrate it and I don’t think Craig does either. We’ll have to find the right choice for that.
Jesse: You could also do a thing where you have multiple voices.
John: Yes, that’s probably the way to do it.
Jesse: Especially you, because you have so many contacts of performers that would love to do it, I’m sure.
John: We’ll find somebody good to do it. Maybe we’ll draft you in for a short chapter because I know you don’t like to do it.
Jesse: Yes, exactly. Yes, exactly. I’ll do the titles.
John: Fantastic. Jesse Eisenberg, an absolute pleasure speaking with you.
Jesse: You too. Thank you so much, John.
John: Congratulations on your movie.
Jesse: Thanks so much.
Links:
- A Real Pain | Screenplay
- Jesse Eisenberg
- WGAW Wildfire Resources
- David Lynch
- Mongolia by Jesse Eisenberg, Tablet Magazine
- Jesse’s plays The Revisionist and The Spoils
- Network of Time
- Floyd Collins the Musical
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on BlueSky, Threads and Instagram
- Outro by Nico Mansy (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.