How Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin found the funny in the sadness of road-trip dramedy “A Real Pain”

Eisenberg wrote and directed the movie about cousins who reconnect for a trip to explore their Holocaust-survivor grandmother's Polish roots.

Kieran Culkin is ready to “talk s---” about Jesse Eisenberg.

The two, who star in A Real Pain, which Eisenberg also wrote and directed, calls up Entertainment Weekly during a gondola ride at the Telluride Film Festival, where the movie has a surprise screening over Labor Day Weekend.

“He’s going to walk away so he doesn’t hear this.... You want the actual truth, man?” Culkin jokes, his dry sense of humor quickly apparent as he answers a question about his impression of Eisenberg as a director. “No, it's interesting," he says on a more serious note. "I thought he wrote a brilliant script — I didn't know he was a great writer. I like him as an actor. So [I thought,] let's see how he is as a director.”

Related: Kieran Culkin is heartbreaking and hilarious in Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain

What Culkin found was someone who cared so much about striking the right tone with his dark comedy — about polar-opposite cousins who tour Poland and visit the childhood home of their Holocaust-survivor grandmother who recently died — that he sought out the opinion “on every aspect of everything” from pretty much everyone who worked on the film. “A lot of times, for better or for worse, you end up with a director that's completely in charge of every tiny little aspect of things — which has its upsides and downsides sometimes, depending on the personality — and then there's also the directors [who make you question,] ‘Who the hell's in charge here?’" Culkin says. "He wasn't either of those. He found the balance between the two.”

Considering how personal the story is to Eisenberg, it’s no surprise how much care he put into the project. In 2007, he toured Poland with his now-wife, going to all of the cities where his characters travel, including a village where his aunt lived decades earlier. After returning to the States, he wrote and starred alongside Vanessa Redgrave in the off-Broadway play The Revisionist, about a young man visiting his Polish cousin who survived the war.

“I became interested in that topic and thinking about the privilege versus trauma and how people like me walk around feeling bad for themselves over petty things when I actually know for a fact that my family suffered existential trauma, and just trying to reconcile how to think about that,” he explains. “So I've been thinking about it and writing stuff around this topic for a long time. And then the movie came. I also have a certain taste in World War II movies about Jews, and I guess this movie was also staking a claim on what the tone could be…that you can have an irreverent tone of a movie while still maintaining reverence for the subject.”

In Culkin, he found the perfect conduit for the irreverence. The Succession alum, who won an Emmy earlier this year for the final season of the HBO drama, admits he was “laughing out loud the entire time” he read the script. As Benji, he ditches the high-pressure world of corporate media for a more charming, easy-going, and likable but emotionally stunted extrovert who masks his problems with humor.

“I often don't know why I like something, which doesn't make for a good answer in an interview,” Culkin says, pondering what it was about Benji that excited him. “It's very rare that I read something and I go, ‘Oh, I fully understand who this person is. I have no questions, and I don't want to talk about it.’ I feel like I didn't make the connection until after we each shot the movie, but it was like, I know somebody exactly like this, that I’m very close with. I read it and went, ‘Oh, I know how to do that.’”

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

You could say Benji is, well, a real pain, certainly in many ways to his cousin, Eisenberg’s David. When they reconnect at the top of the film, they haven’t seen each other in years. Reuniting for this trip, funded by the money left to them by their grandmother, David — the more uptight, reserved, and by-the-book of the two — is cautiously optimistic that they can rediscover the more brotherly bond they had as kids. In some ways, they do, but in the process, Benji comes up against some struggles with his mental health. Benji’s underlying torment and grief become the focal point of the story, and Culkin’s skilled handling of the emotional acrobatics make the audience cringe one second at something he says or does and then feel an enormous amount of sympathy the next.

Related: Kieran Culkin forgot A Real Pain costar Jesse Eisenberg was also director: 'B----, I got notes for you too'

“The movie really lives or dies on that character,” Eisenberg says, expressing how lucky he feels that Culkin — who has openly said he tried getting out of the movie, which filmed right after Succession wrapped — accepted the part. “It's funny, when I was going through actors and Kieran was immediately recommended to me, my first thought was, ‘Wait, does he do comedy or drama?’ And that for me is the answer — that this person can be so funny, but you don't know them as a comic.... That's what Kieran brought to it; it's exactly the tone that I wanted. It can swing from lowbrow comedy to highbrow philosophical discussions in the same scene. Kieran just naturally is able to do that because he's super smart and he's super funny, but he has so much feeling inside."

Culkin, though, recalls that Eisenberg once admitted he had never seen any of the Igby Goes Down and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World star’s movies.

“But you’d seen me on stage?” Culkin asks, his director seemingly shaking his head in disagreement. “No? You hadn’t even…Oh, okay, so what is it you’d seen? Anything?”

“I just knew you,” Eisenberg explains as Culkin laughs in the background. “But it’s so great because you have an essence of a person. This movie is naturalism. Your character is a little heightened, and so you have to know the person because the person's bringing their whole selves to it. Kieran has an unusual life and so much emotion, and yet if you have a conversation with him, it's just hysterical. He's quick, and I'm fast, and it's important that the two of us seem like we're from the same family. We speak in a similar way, [have a] similar sense of humor, similar likings, comfortable speaking in a crass way, but not in a dumb way.”

As for the “reverence for the subject,” the film doesn’t shy away from the more profound and solemn moments we see via the tour David and Benji go on in Poland along with characters played by Jennifer Grey, Liza Sadovy, Daniel Oreskes, and Kurt Egyiawan, and led by Will Sharpe’s James. There are some antics along the way, courtesy of Benji, like a hilarious photo opp at an enormous World War II statue and David anxiously following his cousin’s lead in sneaking into first-class seats on a train ride. Those end up making the more quiet, private moments between characters even more compelling and powerful, especially when they have a moving visit to Majdanek, a former concentration camp, and seek out their grandmother’s childhood home, which they filmed at Eisenberg’s actual family home in Kranystaw.

Eisenberg & co.’s efforts paid off with an overwhelmingly warm reception — “an amazing experience,” he calls it — at the movie’s debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January. A Real Pain (opening Nov. 1 in limited release), which was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize and won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for Eisenberg’s screenplay, was the first sale of the festival, going to Searchlight for a reported $10 million. But the writer-director-star admits not being sure what to think at the premiere.

“I had no sense of if it was real or not because I've been involved with movies that have gotten really exuberant responses that are just not good movies. So as soon as the movie ended, I ran up to Ali Herting, the producer, and I said, ‘Wait, is this good or bad? Is this good or bad?’ He said, ‘No, no, it's good, it's good, it's good,’” Eisenberg recalls almost eight months later. “But sometimes you don't have a sense really if people are liking something or they're clapping because it's over. But it was a magical experience.... It was the most exhilarating experience of my professional life.”

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.