Jesse Eisenberg has some questions

Vanessa Redgrave once compared Jesse Eisenberg to poet Percy Bysshe Shelley due to his “inquisitive mind.” Seventeen minutes into my recent lunch with Eisenberg in Chelsea, I still hadn’t asked him a single question, but he peppered me with many of his own. Where am I from? How did I know so-and-so? Have I received advice about my New Yorker cartoon avatar? When I first saw him, crossing the street to the restaurant, he was punching the postman. “I think people are so nice if you’re famous,” he reasoned apologetically. “Or maybe not. I don’t know.” He glanced at his menu. “What are you going to get?”

Eisenberg wore an Indiana Hoosiers sweatshirt and cap, as well as a splint on one finger due to an injury suffered during a “big stunt” on the set of Now You See Me 3. He’s buzzing with anxiety and the sort of ambient guilt that turns out to be his fuel. For more than two decades—he’s forty-one but started acting young—his chatty neuroticism has been his defining quality on screen, whether as an awkward teenager (Roger Dodger), a romantic lead (Adventureland), or a divorced father. (“Fleischman in Trouble”), a supervillain (Lex Luthor, Mark Zuckerberg) or a Woody Allen stunt double (“From Rome with Love,” “Cafe Light”). Along the way, he wrote plays, scripts, silly songs for personal entertainment, and humorous plays for McSweeney’s And New Yorker.

His new film, True Pain, which comes out this week, he wrote and directed. Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play Jewish cousins ​​who travel to Poland to tour the Holocaust and visit their late grandmother’s childhood home. David (Eisenberg) is a nervous guy with a wife and child; Benji (Culkin) is a charismatic stoner with no boundaries and barely hidden emotional wounds. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won an award for its screenplay; this is already being talked about at the Oscars.

In his work, Eisenberg also relentlessly asks questions, especially regarding moral conceit and his own supposedly noble intentions: How can one do real good in the world, rather than simply satisfy the liberal need to appear virtuous? How do you deal with the pain of your ancestors, let alone your own? Shouldn’t we feel a little awkward? Our conversation, which discussed these and many other mysteries of life, has been edited and condensed.

Let’s start with the obvious. Did you go to Poland like in the movie?

Yeah. In 2008, my wife and I visited almost all the places where the heroes go, and ended up in this house in Krasnystav, where my family lived until 1938. I stood near this house and tried to feel something deeply cleansing, and No. Much the same thing happens at the end of this film: the characters finally get to this house and have high emotional expectations that are just met by a typical looking three-story apartment building.

Yes, it’s disappointing. What inspired you to go? Have you always been interested in your ancestry?

When I was seventeen, I was looking for direction and found it with my father’s Aunt Doris, who was in her late eighties. She lived to be one hundred and six years old. I went to her house every Thursday and she became my life mentor. In the film, we call her Grandma Dory, and she is as we describe her: she was abrupt, tough, and unimpressed by anything I offered except the essentials. I even lived with her when I was in my early thirties. My wife and I weren’t together long and I moved into her tiny studio apartment and slept on her couch because I needed grounding. She was born and raised in Poland, in the house that we show in the film. And I told her, “If I ever get a job in Europe, I will come to this house and take a photo for you.”

What was her reaction after you did this?

I took a picture of the house, went to Kinko’s and ordered a gloss finish. I thought she would cry and realize that her life had come full circle. She just looked at it for a second and thought, “Oh yeah, that’s it.”

And again disappointment.

Exactly. From the moment I began researching her life, Poland as an idea gave me a certain meaning that I was missing. I lived with financial security and appropriate antidepressants for the things that bothered me. Connecting with something bigger, something historical, something traumatic made me feel like a real person and not just floating through a happy life full of emptiness.

Do you mean be famous?

No, just be a modern person who has enough money to live comfortably. I just feel bad about it. Sebastian Junger just wrote this book where he talks about being in Bosnia during the war, and says that he was there not as an adrenaline junkie, but as meaning drug addict. My wife teaches disability justice and teaches at a continuing education school. She doesn’t walk around feeling shame, embarrassment and guilt. She walks with the feeling: How can I be useful?

In your own writing you have satirized this feeling. I saw your play Asuncion in 2011 and still remember the line when your character says he wants to go to some hungry part of Africa because “I thought I could be useful.”

My God! I can’t believe you remember this shit.

I remember this phrase because it reflects a kind of ignorant self-confidence. But it’s also what you say you’re actually looking for.

Yes, because in trying to find meaning, I end up doing the very things I find disgusting. We went to Teresopolis in Brazil and tried to help the Red Cross there because there was a flood. But I’m not strong enough to carry bags of flour, so I just become this American burden. I also recognize the stupidity of people like me who believe that their lives has some greater purpose, if only I could find it. Luckily, I do art, so I can explore it in a creative and ambivalent way. True Pain tries to show these two characters searching for meaning, but they don’t actually find it where they expect it to be. They don’t find this in a concentration camp or in their grandmother’s house. They actually find meaning in their very narrow relationship.

I guess most of all I just constantly question my own – how do I put it? – hypocrisy. The irony is that I write about my hypocrisy, and because I write about it and am sometimes praised for it, it perpetuates the very thing I’m trying to avoid. Writing about trying to connect with something real allows me to go to my movie parties and wear a tuxedo, which again takes me further away from what I’m trying to achieve.

Welcome to awards season! Other than that, this movie is a great movie about cousins, and I feel like it’s an underexplored relationship. I Googled “cousin movies” and found “My Cousin Winnie,” “Mary Queen of Scots” (because her cousin was Queen Elizabeth I), and the weirdest movie ever, “The Blue Lagoon.” People don’t remember that these kids were cousins ​​before they got shipwrecked on a desert island and started having sex in a waterfall or something.