In a newly released featurette, writer/director/actor Jesse Eisenberg, actor Kieran Culkin, producer Emma Stone and others discuss Eisenberg’s Sundance-premiering feature, A Real Pain, out Friday from Fox Searchlight. It’s a comedy/drama about two cousins navigating long suppressed tensions while on a Holocaust remembrance tour to Poland, and one obvious question to ask is in what order those two elements occurred within the development process? Was Eisenberg attracted to the Holocaust tour concept first, or wanting to explore the family rivalry? That question is answered, along with more, in the above clip.
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 28, 2024An experiment in shooting a movie entirely from a first-person POV, Steven Soderbergh’s Presence has conceptual precedents but no meaningful ones in terms of the camera’s weight and the operator’s resulting physical relationship to it. 1947’s Lady in the Lake tried nonstop subjectivity with a bulky 35mm camera; 2009’s Enter the Void eliminated the embodied camera in its second half of weightless drifting. More recently there’s Hardcore Henry, which strapped GoPros to its protagonist’s head for a bouncy embodiment of a stuntman’s hardest workday. In Presence, Soderbergh’s longtime practice of acting as his own cinematographer and operator takes on an […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 21, 2024Jesse Eisenberg returns to Sundance with A Real Pain, the actor’s second directorial effort following his 2021 debut When You Finish Saving the World. Eisenberg acts alongside Succession sensation Kieran Culkin, embodying cousins who travel to Poland in order to honor the legacy of their deceased grandmother. Below, cinematographer Michał Dymek describes how he was brought on board the project, the influences he and Eisenberg referenced and the emotional weight of shooting at the Majdanek Concentration Camp. See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 21, 2024