Travel is often a chance to escape our stressors, but the ever-growing genre ofJewish-heritage tourism dares to contradict everything we associate with a vacation.A Real Pain, out now in limited release, looks suffering straight in the face with a trip that is anything but relaxing. Cousins David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) set off together toPoland as a sort of tribute to—and chance to better understand—theirgrandmother Dory, who survived the Holocaust there. The two cousins were once thick as thieves, but have become increasingly estranged in adulthood. In Poland, they join a small tour that guides them around the cities of Warsaw and Lublin to important sites of Jewish life and remembrance, including a visit to the Majdanek concentration camp.

This film has the obvious backdrop of the painful history of genocide and generational trauma, but David and Benji have their own “first-world problems” going on too. David is tightly wound, neurotic, and obsessive compulsive, while manic Benji has a penchant for saying exactly what is on his mind. In a conversation with some of their fellow tour-goers about the immensity of pain in the world, David asks them, “If we wept for every sad thing in the world, what would that accomplish?” Without taking a beat Benji replies, “I don’t know. Maybe sad shit wouldn’t constantly happen?”

A Real Pain is a movie about a unique, often tragic form of tourism. Below, Eisenberg and cinematographer Michał Dymek talk about trying to capture an American tourist's journey through Poland, their delicate approach to filming at the Majdanek concentration camp, and the rich history of Jewish life hiding in plain sight.

Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg play a pair of once-close cousins traversing Poland in honor of their late grandmother.

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I loved this film and I want to start by sharing that I was drawn to it for personal reasons. A littleless than 10 years ago, I went with my family to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp outside of Berlin, where some of my family was taken during the Holocaust. We weren’t part of any formal tour group but in many ways, had a similar experience to that of the characters in this film. I was hoping to start by asking you, Jesse, to what extent this film is biographical and influenced by your own family?

Jesse Eisenberg: Yeah, a lot of the movie is what I would call autobiographical. The house that the characters visit at the end of the movie was my family's house up until 1939 and a lot of the stories I tell in the movie are stories from my family or combinations of two family members. In 2008, my wife and I traveled through Poland and had the experience that the characters have in this movie. We weren't on a guided tour; we were traveling alone. Traveling from Szczecin in the North to Krasnystaw in the South, I had a good feeling of what this country looks like and feels like, and more specifically the history of this country in relation to my family. So when I started writing about it, I was writing about this tour, but all my personal family stuff kept finding its way in. A lot of the stories that the characters tell about their families were actually just my family’s stories.

As an American, going to a city likeBerlin, I found myself—even as a teenager—burdened with this heavy feeling of history. Michał, as someone who actually grew up there, did you find yourself in conversation with that history regularly or was that something you made an active effort to think more about when working on this project?

To learn more about their heritage, the duo join a small tour group.

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Michał Dymek: I was raised with awareness of historical fact and the history of what happened in my country and also what affected the whole world. Of course, I have this awareness in my DNA, but it is also something which I more deeply analyzed when we were shooting. I had never gone on a trip to a concentration camp before I started working with Jesse. It’s hard to say it was a great experience, but it was a very emotional experience for me.

This is very much a film about travel and tourism, albeit a unique form of it. Had you encountered these Holocaust tours before?

MD: I never participated in one of these tours before, but I know it’s very popular and Poland is a destination for Jewish heritage tours. School groups come into Poland, or like our characters, a more random group of people will unite to follow the traces of their ancestors. It’s common.

What was the location scouting process like?

JE: The scenes were all designed to be in these particular locations. I was writing it during the pandemic so I was actually usingGoogle Maps street view to take the tour that the characters were going on so I could see exactly what their path would be and what they would pass—they’re going from this monument to this park, so they would pass a grocery store, for instance. The way I was writing, I would initially conceive of these scenes by looking at all the pictures I had taken in 2008 on my initial trip, and setting scenes at those locations. My wife took a picture of me standing in front of these statues that were twice the size of me, and I thought it would be so cool to have Kieran’s character run up and try to lure everyone to pose with the statues. Michał is obviously a brilliant cinematographer but also knows Warsaw so well. So when we wanted to have little montages of Warsaw and of historical locations, Michał was just an encyclopedia of places we could shoot—and more than just places we could shoot, but places that would look beautiful as imagery in a movie.

Culkin, Jennifer Grey, Eisenberg, Kurt Egyiawan, David Oreskes, and Will Sharpe as group members in the midst of a tour.

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On that note about the cinematography, there are a lot of long, static shots in the film where we as an audience get to take in the sights of Warsaw and Lublin. What did you want to capture in your portrayal of these cities?

JE: I wanted the portrayal of Poland in general to feel beautiful and dynamic and colorful and all the things that I feel when I'm there. I feel it's too often depicted as bleak, fetishizing its Eastern European Soviet communist history and fetishizing the horrors of the war. And that's not the Poland I know at all. The Poland I know is vibrant and colorful and warm. So I wanted to show that side of Poland, which is a side that I hadn't seen a lot in American movies, a side that felt just completely true to me.

Train travel plays a big role in the film, serving as the connector between the various Polish cities.

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There are also several important scenes that take place on trains around Poland. How did those come together? Were you actually on a moving train?

MD: It was one of the most challenging sequences from this project. It was such a challenge because it was too hard for us to rent the train. It was too complicated to do this sequence on a moving train, so we decided to do it in a static parked car of a train, using a green screen outside of the windows. And thanks to moving lights, we created the impression of movement and we also added shakes of the train during post-production, which, put together, creates a very realistic effect.

Had you visited Majdanek before, and how did that impact your experience of it when shooting those scenes? Was anyone else there when you filmed?

JE: Yeah, they allowed us to film on a Monday, which is when they're closed. We actually did bring in extras because normally, these camps are not empty, of course. So we shot a few shots with extras in the background, and it just felt strange and distracting, so we ended up just not using any other people besides our cast. And yeah, we’d been there a few times before to scout, and Michał and I wanted a second camera so that we could get certain shots that were not involving the cast. We ended up not using that much of it though, because it started to feel like a montage—almost making it look pretty. But it was very simple camera positions, very simply shot—we were not trying to make it look any more dramatic than it already looks.

MD: We tried to work as simply as possible, as quietly as possible—we were working with respect to this place completely. It was just a very silent day where we did our plan, as it was scheduled.

Sharpe and Eisenberg as the latter prepares to take everyone else's photo with a set of statues that are part of a World War II memorial to Polish soldiers, a moment that replicates Eisenerg's own experience a few years prior.

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This is definitely a different Holocaust film than any other I’ve seen because the narrative stays in present tense. Behind the scenes, were you looking at archival photos, documents, and footage of these cities from the World War II era?

JE: No. Except that we were kind of inundated with it unexpectedly, because shooting around Lublin actually offered all sorts of history. It started coming out of the walls for us. There’s a scene where the two characters are walking above this really long mural that’s been painted on a canal. And the mural is of Jewish life from 150 years ago. It’s unbelievably detailed and evocative and specific. And we just found that while we were scouting around Lublin. So we did start to find stuff that was kind of unexpected, but in terms of linking this movie visually to older versions of Poland, that wasn’t ever the kind of rubric we used.

MD: It was variation. We tried to find frames of places that don’t exist anymore. We wanted to crash reality with the past.

JE: Oh, that’s right.

MD: We were trying to investigate and find the places where we heard something used to be—like this shoe shop or the workshop of someone, that’s not there anymore and now it’s, let’s say, a parking lot. And we decided to shoot this parking lot because from our investigation, it used to be another place [of Jewish life] and we wanted to play with that. And in terms of sequencing Warsaw, our characters were traveling along the old wall of the Warsaw ghetto—this wall divided Warsaw and the ghetto.

JE: Yeah, we were really specifically trying to find places that in a single frame could illustrate the history of Poland. So there's this street in Warsaw called Waliców Street, which has these unusually modern apartment buildings built atop the facade of a building that had been destroyed in World War II, but not crumbled. And it's across the street from a building that was like a crumbling facade. So actually there was a motif that we were going for, which was to try to show the history in a single image.