## [[Film Title/ Main Topic]]### [Subtitle 1]John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you're listening to episode 672 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.Today on the show, how do we handle loss? Loss of a parent, loss of a relationship, loss of a home? How do we grieve both alone and collectively? To help us explore these questions, we have a very special guest.Jesse Eisenberg is a writer of plays, short stories and screenplays, who's also an accomplished actor and director. He's the writer, director and star of his film A Real Pain. Welcome to Scriptnotes, Jesse Eisenberg.Jesse Eisenberg: Thank you so much, John. It's a real privilege to be on the show and to talk to you.John: Excited to have you here. Congrats on your WGA nomination.Jesse: Oh, thanks.John: Yesterday.Jesse: Thanks a lot.John: I want to talk to you about your movie, about the writing of it, the journey to making it into a movie. Also, if we can, I'd like to answer two listener questions that we got in.Jesse: Sure.John: One about signature styles and simultaneous perspectives. Then we do a bonus segment at the end and I'd love to talk to you about the radio drama as a form. Because it's weird, Scriptnotes, we've been doing this for 12 years, but we've never actually talked about the audio drama. You're actually a person who has written and performed in those. I want to talk to you about that as a thing.Jesse: Oh, great. Oh, I would love to.John: Cool. We're recording this on Thursday afternoon, January 16th. We've just gotten word that David Lynch has died today, which is the writer-director behind Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks, which was such an important thing for me. Jesse, did you ever get to work with him? Did you ever get to meet him? Did you ever cross paths with him?Jesse: No, I never met him and would definitely have not forgotten that experience. No, I just loved him so much. I think I wrote three different college papers on Mulholland Drive because I was recycling them because I love the movie so much.John: Yes. I never got to meet him either. I think the thing about writer-directors is they just generate their own work. As a screenwriter, it's hard for me to enter into his orbit. I was just always so impressed by the specificity of his work and that you have some filmmakers whose names become adjectives and Lynchian is just a thing. You can identify it as a signature style. It's not even just the visuals, but just the way-Jesse: The feeling.John: -his worlds feel. Yes.Jesse: Exactly. Yes.John: He died at 78, not in the fires, but partially because of the fires. He was evacuated from the Sunset Fire, which was-Jesse: Oh, is that right?John: -also affected us. It was headed down our way. Apparently that was part of what set off this last series of things.Jesse: Oh, I had no idea. Oh my goodness.John: Emphysema, but when people are in a fragile state and then they have emergency, you're moving them around.Jesse: Right. Oh goodness, I didn't realize.John: Jesse, I associate you as a New York person. Have you been in Los Angeles much?Jesse: I'm aware of it. The first times I would go to Los Angeles would be for screen tests for movies. I just developed this horrible Pavlovian anxiety about landing at LAX because I knew I had to go---I was trying to memorize my lines in the car over to some audition. I never got the wonderful LA experience. I shot there and I did a play there actually.When I'm working there, it's nice. When I'm not working there, all that old stuff, when I'm there, I have a day off or something, all that old feeling of being out there and, I don't know, just the anxiety of being out there comes back.John: Yes. It's strange that in the States we have these two big cities, big iconic cities. We have many great iconic cities, but the two big ones we think of are New York and Los Angeles. New York though, everyone has a connection to New York. Los Angeles is sort of a place people drop into and out of, but they don't have that same kind of affinity for.Jesse: Exactly. Being in the entertainment industry, I always felt like, "Well, if I'm in LA and I'm not working, what am I doing there?" Whereas when I'm in New York, it feels like less of a problem because I'm a third generation New Yorker. It just feels like, "Oh, this is where I should be."John: This really brought me to this last week in the fire. Watching the national coverage of it, there was good coverage of it. You could see a lot of national interest in it, but it wasn't the same visceral feeling we had after 9/11, something like that which was so devastating on a national level.Jesse: Exactly.John: The attack on 9/11 was an attack on a fundamental piece of America. These fires were more disparate. There wasn't one center to it.Jesse: Exactly. I've been really eager to talk to people about the fires because I was in LA a few days before. I have so many friends and colleagues there. I know several people that have lost their homes. And in New York, I'm finding it's more difficult to connect with people about it because it's really not on their radar as much as I would have expected.John: Yes. Update from where we are here, as we're recording this, the fires aren't out, but they're not growing. They feel like they're largely under control. We have thousands of homes burned, people displaced, and we're just starting to get a handle on what we've lost and what happens next. I and a bunch of other writers donated to the Writers Guild Member Fund, which is through the Entertainment Community Fund, which is helping out people in the industry affected by this.Obviously at Scriptnotes and individually, we're going to be doing a lot of donations and fundraising for folks impacted by these fires and the work of rebuilding the city and the parts that were lost. So we'll have a link in the show notes to resources for writers from the WGA for if you've been impacted, places to go first to look for some help here.Let's get to talking about you and what you've been working on. It's just so fascinating, this intersection between you as a writer and you as an actor. I want to talk about where things started because looking back through your history, it feels like you were doing both things at the same time. You were never an actor who then decided they wanted to write or a writer who then got put into