Jesse Eisenberg has a few questions

Vanessa Redgrave once compared Jesse Eisenberg to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley because of his “inquiring mind.” Seventeen minutes after my last lunch with Eisenberg in Chelsea, I hadn't asked him a question, but he had bombarded me with many of his own questions. Where did I come from? How did I know so-and-so? Was I able to get advice on my topic? New Yorker Cartoon avatar? The first time I saw him, crossing the street to the restaurant, he had punched a mailman. “People are so nice when you're famous, I guess,” he argued, sounding apologetic. “Or maybe not. I don't know.” He glanced at his menu. “What are you going to get?”

Eisenberg wore an Indiana Hoosiers hoodie and cap, as well as a splint on one finger because he sustained an injury during a “major stunt sequence” on the set of “Now You See Me 3.” He was full of fear and a kind of guilt that turned out to be his fuel. For more than two decades – he is 41 but began acting at an early age – his motor neuroticism has been his defining characteristic on screen, be it as an awkward teenager (“Roger Dodger”), as a romantic lead (“Adventureland”) or as… a divorced father (“Fleishman Is in Trouble”), a supervillain (Lex Luthor, Mark Zuckerberg) or a Woody Allen stand-in (“From Rome with Love”, “Café Society”). He has also written plays, screenplays, silly songs for his private entertainment and humor pieces for McSweeney's and The New Yorker.

His new film, A Real Pain, out this week, is one he wrote and directed himself. Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play Jewish cousins ​​who travel to Poland to take a Holocaust tour and visit their late grandmother's childhood home. David (Eisenberg) is an excited buddy with a wife and child; Benji (Culkin) is a charismatic stoner with no limits and barely hidden psychological wounds. The film premiered at Sundance, where it won a screenwriting award. It's already generating Oscar buzz.

In his work, Eisenberg is also a relentless questioner, especially of moral vanity and his own supposedly noble intentions: How can one really do good in the world instead of just satisfying the liberal need to appear virtuous? How do you process the pain of your ancestors, let alone your own? Shouldn't we all feel a little more uncomfortable? Our conversation, which covered these mysteries of life and more, has been edited and condensed.

Let's start with the obvious. Have you taken a trip to Poland like in the movie?

Yes. In 2008, my wife and I visited pretty much all the places the characters visit and ended up in this house in Krasnystaw, where my family lived until 1938. I stood in front of this house trying to feel something deeply cathartic and not. That's kind of what happens at the end of this movie: the characters finally get to this house and have these big emotional expectations that are barely met by a typical-looking three-story apartment building.

Right, it's disappointing. What inspired you to go there? Have you always been interested in your ancestry?

When I was seventeen, I looked for guidance and found it in my father's aunt, Doris, who was in her late eighties. She lived until one hundred and six. 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 blunt, tough, and unfazed by anything I had to offer that wasn't of substance. I even lived with her in my early thirties. My wife and I didn't date briefly and I moved into her small bedroom and slept on her couch because I needed grounding. She was born and grew up in Poland, in the house we show in the film. And I told her, “If I ever get a job in Europe, I will visit this house and take a photo for you.”

What was their reaction when you did it?

I took a photo of the house, went to Kinko and had it glossed over. I thought she would start to cry and realize that her life had come full circle. She just looked at it for a second and said, “Oh yeah, that's it.”

Another highlight.

Exactly. From the moment I started investigating their lives, Poland as an idea gave me a certain meaning that I was missing. I lived with material security and appropriate antidepressants for the things that tormented me. The connection to something bigger, something historical, something traumatic made me feel like a real person and not just floating through a happy life in superficial emptiness.

Do you think you're famous?

No, I'm just a modern person who has enough money to live comfortably. That's just embarrassing to me. Sebastian Junger has just written this book in which he talks about his stay in Bosnia during the war, and he says he wasn't there as an adrenaline junkie, but as Meaning Junkie. My wife teaches disability access and she teaches at a continuing education school. She doesn't walk around with a sense of shame, embarrassment and guilt. She moves around with a sense of: How can I be of service?

In your own writing you have mocked this sentiment. I saw your play “Asuncion” in 2011, and I still remember the line where your character says he wants to go to a famine-stricken part of Africa because “I thought I could be of use. “

Oh my God! I can't believe you remember this shit.

I remember this sentence because it encapsulates a kind of clueless self-righteousness. But that's what you're talking about, what you're actually looking for.

Yes, because in my attempt to find meaning I indulge in the very things I find repulsive. We went to Teresópolis in Brazil and tried to help the Red Cross because there had been a flood. But I'm not strong enough to carry the sacks of flour, so I just become this American burden. I also recognize the folly of someone like me accepting his life has a greater purpose if only I could find him. Luckily, I'm involved in art and can explore it in this creative and ambivalent way. “A Real Pain” tries to show these two characters searching for meaning, but they don’t really find it in the places they would have expected. You won't find it in a concentration camp or visiting your grandmother's house. They actually find meaning in their very close relationship.

I guess, more than anything, I'm constantly making my own – what's that called? – Hypocrisy in question. And then the irony is that I write about my hypocrisy, and because I write about it and am occasionally praised for it, it perpetuates the very thing I'm trying to avoid. By writing about trying to connect to something real, I can go to parties and wear a tuxedo for my film, which takes me even further away from what I'm aiming for.

Welcome to awards season! This film is, among other things, a great film about cousins, and I feel like it's an under-explored relationship. I googled “movies about cousins” and the movies I found were “My Cousin Vinny,” “Mary, Queen of Scots” – because her cousin was Queen Elizabeth I – and the strangest movie, “The Blue Lagoons.” 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 whatever.