The Diva Review interview with Jesse Eisenberg

Click here to read the interview or watch our back-up version below.

Hey all, LMD just had the pleasure of an exclusive chat with Jesse Eisenberg, star of last year’s Oscar-winner,The Social Network. Reuniting with his Zombieland director, Ruben Fleischer for the raucous comedy, 30 Minutes or Less, Eisenberg talked about keeping a straight face while working with comedy whirlwinds Aziz Ansari,Danny McBride and Nick Swardson, the perils of being a control freak and flying off to Italy for Woody Allen.

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30 Minutes or Less

July 17th, 2011

Jesse Eisenberg

The Lady Miz Diva: 30 Minutes or Less is a very bawdy comedy. Were you comfortable with some of the things that came out of your mouth?

Jesse Eisenberg: The truth is the least amount of bawdiness comes from my character. Aziz and I are in this one buddy comedy where we’re forced to rob a bank; a pizza delivery guy and an elementary school teacher, so they talk like guys who do those jobs would. But then Danny McBride and Nick Swardson’s characters are the bad guys in the movie, and they just say the most insane and crass stuff, because guys like that would be -- they’d speak in this awful way. And Danny McBride and Nick Swardson both have this wonderfully sweet quality to them personally that even when they’re saying the worst things; it’s somehow innocent and funny.

LMD: Was 30 Minutes or Less a thought when you were doing Zombieland with Ruben Fleischer?

JE: No. After Zombieland came out and received such wonderful attention, primarily for Ruben, who had never directed a movie before and did such an amazing job with that movie; he got sent every major movie to direct because he did such a good job with it and it was directed so well. The one he found out of thousands of scripts that he wanted to do was this one and he told me about six months before I read it. He said, “This is an astounding movie. It’s hysterical, there’s great action, but it also has these wonderful characters,” and I was so excited to read it and see that he was exactly right. At the center of this very funny, fast-paced plotted movie is a good character story for me. He’s a guy who starts out lazy and bored with his life; he’s developed a sense of righteousness because he doesn’t have any friends. And then he’s kidnapped, they strap a bomb to him, he’s forced to rob a bank and he spends the day doing all the things he should’ve done years ago. He confesses his love to a girl, he quits his job that he’s stuck in, he reconciles with his best friend. It’s kind of an amazing character journey in a very small period of time.

LMD: I kind of feel like between all the car chases in 30 Minutes or Less and the gun-slinging in Zombieland, Ruben is trying to make an action star out of you.

JE: {Laughs} One of the things I really loved about the movie was that it didn’t require ridiculous things from the actors. It required them to play their characters realistically, and the action is supposed to look like two regular guys in a car chase. It’s not supposed to look like Jason Statham in a car chase. The comedy comes from the juxtaposition of how these characters think of themselves; like these awesome bank robbers from Heat, and how they really appear, which is like two guys in a Judd Apatow movie.

LMD: How do you keep a straight face with Aziz Ansari around?

JE: It was actually easier for me than I expected to not laugh during this movie because my character’s in such an intense predicament that when we started shooting the scenes, I would be thinking of my character’s life or death stakes and then everything becomes a little bit less funny. Luckily for the movie on the whole, the more seriously I take my plight, the funnier the thing is anyway, because you’re buying into the storyline in a more realistic way.

LMD: When you approach a character, do you have to find something redeemable in him, or something you can identify with?

JE: Yeah, I mean any role you play, you have to find the reality of it and how it coincides with whatever your emotional experience is. So, for example, this character in this movie is very lazy, he’s stuck in this dead end job. I have a very different life circumstance; I’m ambitious, I like to work, I like to be involved with things, I’m not kind of stuck in a job. But I have that same feeling all the time; every time a movie ends and I have a week off, I feel like the laziest person in the world. You know what I mean? So I can immediately relate to that feeling, even though my life circumstances are different. I never had a falling out with a friend like I have with Aziz, but you have fights with friends, you have bitterness toward them for stuff that they do. So you take those feelings. It’s impossible to play a role if you don’t identify with it. Whether a character is redeemable is not on my radar because I don’t think people think of themselves as a person with redeeming qualities. Everybody thinks they’re doing the right thing, so I just think of it in the way that the character would think of themself.

LMD: When a comedy is this raunchy, is there such a thing as going too far?

JE: There is stuff in this movie that I’m uncomfortable with. I don’t like to use the “R” word, for example. Rape, for example. I’m very uncomfortable with that word, personally because I do work with domestic violence organisations and I’m very aware of the alarming statistics of women who are abused. So I’m very uncomfortable with that. I’m not uncomfortable with the sexual jokes. Sometimes I think they’re less funny than others, I don’t care about that, cos it doesn’t harm anybody. I’m uncomfortable with saying “rape,” I don’t like saying that, I never say it in my life. If somebody says it, I cringe. I don’t like it when people make jokes about that word. I’m a little bit uncomfortable with it, but I was hired to do a job. I thought most of the movie was good and kind of respectful to people, in general. The movies that really bother me are rich white people lamenting their lives when they have, like, a million dollars. That to me is more offensive than sexual humour. A rich white person lamenting their million-dollar kitchen and the audience is supposed to sympathise with that character, to me, that’s pathetic. Whereas, in this movie, I thought the characters were real and my job was to take my character seriously.

LMD: Were you comfortable with all the improvisation that must’ve been flying around your head on this film?

JE: Yeah, I like improvising. Because the script for this movie is wonderful, but the truth is when you’re on set, in the costume with the other person, holding the props, you just think of a million different things to say. Luckily, we had a director who’s really good at two things as it relates to that: Ruben is really good at allowing the actors to improvise, and then he’s really good at filtering out stuff that is extraneous and doesn’t make sense. There are lines that could have been in this movie that would’ve been hysterical; that the audience would’ve loved, but it would’ve hurt the plot, it would’ve killed the momentum, so you take them out. So he’s really looking out for the final product rather than the quick joke.

LMD: So the “off the grid” line was planned?

JE: I just thought of that because I thought my character would say it. If I knew it would kind of jokingly reference another movie I was in, I probably wouldn’t have said it. Talking about Facebook now is like talking about the telephone twenty years ago. It’s like everybody talks about it. But I thought my character would be a guy who thinks of himself as living “off the grid” when actually he has no friends.

LMD: What’s more challenging for you, comedy or drama?

JE: The things that are challenging about my job very infrequently have to do with the genre. My job doesn’t change from genre to genre, so in this movie, this character’s dealing with the most dramatic situation of his entire life; he has a bomb strapped to him and he’s thinking about his mortality all day. Whereas in The Social Network, the character is doing something which is less intense, which is just creating a website, but the movie is a drama. So, my job is not oftentimes in accordance with the way it’s framed for an audience.

LMD: What’s next for you? I understand you’ll be working with a certain famous New Yorker next.

JE: {Laughs} Yeah, yeah, yeah, Martin Scorsese!

LMD: I was thinking of another diminutive famous New Yorker.

JE: Yeah, exactly. I go to Italy tomorrow to do a Woody Allen movie {The Bop Decameron}.

LMD: Is there also a play coming up?

JE: Yeah, then I’m doing a play downtown that I wrote {Asuncion} for the rest of the year. It starts in late September.

LMD: Is that perhaps the start of more behind-the-scenes roles for you?

JE: I’m a control freak, so if I write a role, I have to perform it. I find it distracting for somebody else to read something that’s so in my head. It’s probably not a healthy way to be a writer, but I wrote the other roles for the other actors in it, so I know their voices going into it. Yeah, I’d love to continue doing it. You know, it’s funny, a movie like this where there’s so much improvisation, I think if I wrote it I would just be in a tizzy, just that a lot of lines are changed. That said, when you write a movie that’s a commercial movie like this one is, you go into it knowing there’s going to be a lot of personalities that are going to wind up changing your stuff.

~ The Lady Miz Diva

July 17th, 2011