Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain is one of the very best films of the year.
The film boasts not only one of the year’s very best screenplays, written by Einseberg, but also two of the year’s most astoundingly emotional and honest performances from stars Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin. Directed by Einsenberg, it provides a careful character study of two cousins, David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin) who embark on a journey to Poland where they grapple with their family legacy, the Holocaust, and the memory of their recently deceased grandmother.
Despite the intense subject matter, A Real Pain offers several extremely funny moments, dancing a delicate line between comedy and drama. Finding that tone required careful collaboration between Eisenberg and editor Robert Nassau who helps bring out the very best in the film’s performances and in Eisenberg’s vision for the project.
“In a drama with jokes, you can follow your muse a little bit and try for laughs where you can, but you don’t have to sweat that so much. This film has a couple moments like that that crack Jesse and I up but don’t get outright laughs and those are okay,” Nassau explained. “One of which is Benji saying ‘gracias’ when he buys something at a store in Poland. That one always cracks me up, but no one in the audience laughs at it.”
Nassau approached the film with his edit by highlighting the reality of each moment. He strongly believes jokes work best when they’re grounded in reality. Having Eisenberg as a creative partner through the entire process proved an invaluable experience. Nassau found that, while shooting, he doesn’t like to watch himself onscreen to avoid getting in his own head and perhaps overthinking the performance.
That process allowed Nassau to work an initial rough cut that, once filming completed, Eisenberg reviewed and helped fine tune.
“He’s just delightful. He’s just such a sensitive person and so collaborative and fun to work with. He’s also a ball of tension as am I sometimes. We’re very similar, and we hit it off very quickly,” Nassau recalled. “It wasn’t until we got back to the edit room that I forced him to sit down and confront himself. Essentially, you’re discussing what moments should be in and what should be out, what should be changed and how. So it was a very calm, clear process, which I think is a testament to the script — to how solid and well-written his script was.”
When looking back at some of the more challenging sequences to edit, Nassau recalled an instance where the cast provided such an abundance of great moments that it proved tricky to shape and keep pace. In the film, David and Benji’s tour group stop at a soldiers of war memorial in Warsaw and playfully re-enact battle sequences in honor of those who died. It’s a lighthearted moment that informs a great deal about the personality clash between David and Benji.
Pacing of the scene was critically important. Nassau and Eisenberg understood that, while the cast offered phenomenal ad-libbed moments of true comedy, the film couldn’t linger on that moment. The edit needed to put the cast quickly onto the monument and rely the literal and metaphorical space between David and Benji.
Another key editing moment occurs when the tour visits the Majdanek concentration camp just outside of Warsaw. Nassau and Eisenberg laid out the sequence out of the order in which a tourist would actually navigate the space. They followed an intuitive logic of how they felt the tour would travel, removing dialogue to avoid an overload of information. In fact, silence plays a critically important role in the sequence’s aftermath as Benji breaks down from the emotion of the tour.
“One producer really loved that we dropped the sound out of the shot of the van after the concentration camp. It’s just a completely silent shot, which is a little bit unusual. If you’re watching the film in New York, then there are certain theaters that have subways that rumble by. We were premiering at MoMA, and a subway rolled by just at that moment,” Nassau laughed. “I had to apologize to the producer and tell him we didn’t do that. That was the real subway!”
A Real Pain is now playing in theaters nationwide.
