Alison Stewart: Writer and actor Jesse Eisenberg who's sitting across from me can now add director to his ever-growing list of accomplishments. This Friday, Jesse's film directorial debut will premiere in theaters around the country, titled When You Finish Saving the World. It's an adaptation of a 2020 audio drama Jesse wrote and starred in alongside actors Finn Wolfhard and Kaitlyn Dever. In the film, Wolfhard reprises his role as Ziggy, a teenage boy with a love for making music and streaming it to his 20,000 online followers, which he is happy to tell you about anytime.

Cast alongside him is Julianne Moore who plays Ziggy's mom, Evelyn, a super serious founder of a women's shelter. Ziggy and his mom, they don't connect. Sometimes they are lowercase hostile with one another. Both Ziggy and Evelyn seek validation elsewhere. For Ziggy, that means pursuing the cool activist girl at school, Lila. She's the kind of girl who writes poetry about the colonial history of the Marshall Islands. Ziggy is desperate to convince her that he is woke too even though he doesn't really know much about anything political.

Then at work, Evelyn latches on to a really sweet teenager named Kyle, son of a woman who's just entered the shelter. Evelyn becomes convinced that Kyle isn't living up to his full potential and goes out of her way, way out of her way to take him under her wing, whether Kyle and his mother want that or not. Can these relationships really give Ziggy and Evelyn what they're looking for? When You Finish Saving the World will be in theaters tomorrow. It's written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg who is back in studio. Nice to see you in real life.

Jesse Eisenberg: Nice to see you, too, and thank you for the nicest summation of that movie.

Alison: It's a really lovely movie. It's a movie that in moments, and I think you'll appreciate this, I grasp my hands together on my shoulders when I'm like, "Oh, gosh, what is happening between this mother and son?"

Jesse: Yes, and that's my favorite part and the inspiration behind it is just thinking about how it's possible to just live on the same floor as somebody in the same house and your family, and just have a completely different, often oppositional set of values, ethics, life pursuits. It's not that uncommon. In fact, oftentimes, children's world perspectives are formed in opposition by design to their parents.

Alison: This was originally an audio project. Did you always think that it would be adapted or did it just start as audio for you?

Jesse: My background as a writer in theater, I've written plays. Before every play I write, I always end up writing monologues from the character's perspective so that their voices are in my head before I put a plot around them. With this, it was the same thing I had written this audiobook. It was essentially told from three characters' perspectives; the young boy, the mother, but when she's in college at 18, and the father when he's a new father. Then when I was trying to figure out another play to write, I had these characters, and I wanted to flesh them out.

As I started writing this, I realized that it took place in more than one room and wanted to cover the two divergent worlds that you see. You see this domestic violence shelter and you also see this kid's app online. He's like a rock star on this app that allows him to play his songs for kids from Belarus, to Bangladesh, and everywhere in between. I wanted to see the world of that app and juxtapose it to the world of the shelter, which is doing this incredible, immediate, vital social work.

Alison: When did you realize that you wanted to take it to screen and then what were the first things you did as a writer before you even jumped into the director's chair?

Jesse: I wrote essentially a novel from these character's perspective. I had their voices in my head and then my background as an actor, of course, is in movies. I've been reading scripts for 20 years and been on so many sets. The kind of structure, formula, and style of the medium is in my bones. It was not my first screenplay, it's just my first screenplay that any other human being is watching. It wasn't like a new medium for me, it was just a little different than writing plays because scenes can't take 20 minutes long on one prop.

Alison: Sometimes when an actor comes to a project, they can help the writer or the director see something in the character that maybe they didn't see, or they didn't fully understand until it was 3D in front of them. When Julianne Moore came on as Evelyn, what did she bring out in the mother character of Evelyn that maybe you hadn't really realized?

Jesse: She is so dynamic that I think she. like all amazing actors, transcends a logical interpretation of a character because they're bringing layers to a human experience that are hard to articulate or define. She is just this unbelievably gifted person with a lot of experience. The character, as you mentioned, in your lovely summation of the movie can be quite self-serious.

Julianne, because of her experience understands how to also play against that and find humor in places that make it feel lighter to make a person like any great actor can make a person feel like a psychologically authentic, full-fledged human being with various parts that often contradict the one adjective summation of their personality that you might give.

Alison: Not a lot, but there are many times in the movie, her reaction is as important as the line she's saying. How did you work with her on the idea of reaction to things that Ziggy says?

Jesse: Oh, thank you for this thoughtful question, especially for me as an actor and thinks about that kind of stuff a lot. She is a person who has created this very strict rubric of ethics. She has a really difficult time finding value outside of her strong sense of ethics. I have a lot of people around me who work in social service, so I'm around people who devote their lives to these immediately vital needs. My wife just created a disability awareness and injustice program in some New York City public schools. I come home after a day of being celebrated for saying lines and patting my face on a poster to somebody who's doing this kind of work.

I'd live in some ways with the contradiction and difficult to reconcile ideas of what's valuable. I could see how somebody in social service and what I wanted to explore in this movie is how somebody in the social service sector, who's created this very strong, rigid sense of ethical beliefs, how they deal in the real world when they see waste mismanagement, selfishness, vanity, narcissism. When you bring up Julianne and her reactions, a lot of that is that. It's almost a stifle judgment. It's impossible to reconcile the real world given what she knows is wrong with it.

Alison: My guest is Jesse Eisenberg. He's the writer and director of the new film, When You Finish Saving the World. It's in theaters tomorrow. When we first meet Ziggy's doing this live stream on this app to his followers, when we meet Evelyn, she's telling her coworkers, they're singing happy birthday, a little bit too loudly to a point where she's got very specific ideas about how things should be done. What did you want audiences to learn about these two characters in those two moments?

Jesse: That they have trouble interacting with the real world. Ziggy has 20,000 followers on this app where he sings his songs, but he's coming off so shallow when you meet him. He appears like he's rehearsed these things. He says hello to them in all languages. He says, "Dobry dzień," "Dhonnobad," to his Belarusian and Bangladeshi followers, but it all feels fake. Then Evelyn is not fake at all. In fact, she's quite the opposite. She's very blunt, and her coworkers are singing happy birthday to each other a little bit loud to a colleague whose birthday it is.

They both are stifled in their lives a little bit. It's only through these relationships that they pursue with other people. Evelyn, as you mentioned, pursues a relationship with a boy who she's trying to replace her son with. Ziggy is trying to replace his mom with the political activist young woman in school. Only through them are humbled and a mirror is shown up to their lives to try to fill in the gap that is the other person what they're missing.

Alison: When you were thinking about these characters, you said you write monologues and you think about who they are. What does Ziggy want from his mom and what does mom Evelyn want from Ziggy?

Jesse: This is exactly what I think about. My feeling is like, this kid places music online, and yes, he's shallow, and yes, he's a capitalist pig because he just talks about how much money his fans pay him. He's also genuinely good at his songs, he works so hard. Evelyn, on the other hand, has a very rigid sense of right and wrong, and struggles to place value on other things. She has done such amazing work, and yes, she is, like I would say, aloof emotionally as a mother but she has done such amazing work.

What I'm hoping for these characters is that they can find value in each other, that when you live in the same house as somebody who you disagree with, it's still important to find the value, find some common ground, and maybe that common ground is ambition, even if it's ambition for different parts of life.

Alison: Well, let's listen to a clip from the film, When You Finish Saving the World that really illustrates what you're talking about. Ziggy's got his followers, he's sitting down to dinner with mom and dad, and they're trying to have a conversation about music and this is how it goes. This is from When You Finish Saving the World.

Roger Katz: Just make sure you don't play the blues.

Ziggy Katz: What?

Roger: You don't play blues music, do you?

Ziggy: No, I play folk-rock, classic folk-rock with alternative influences.

Roger: I don't know what that means.

Ziggy: Well, I could play it for you. I just debuted a new song, Truth Aches. I could show it to you.

Roger: What did you say the song?

Evelyn Katz: Did you say Truth Aches?

Ziggy: Yes. Do you want to hear it?

Evelyn: Well, I'm assuming that we're not your target audience.

Ziggy: Right.

Evelyn: It's geared towards teenagers. Am I right?

Ziggy: Yes, sure.

Roger: Because it's incredibly unethical. White people playing blues music. Did you ever read Amiri Baraka?

Ziggy: Who?

Evelyn: Roger, please.

Roger: Because he's very explicit on the issue of cultural appropriation.

Evelyn: Jesus Christ, Roger.

Ziggy: Dad, I don't play blues music. God, you shut the fuck up.

Roger: Okay, okay, because I was just saying.

Alison: Watching and listening to these people talk over each other, intersect with each other, ignore each other. The father is having a whole other conversation.

Jesse: Yes, yes, yes.

Alison: Then Ziggy and his mother, Evelyn, are engaging, but in a way that, like I said, is a lowercase H, hostile.

Jesse: Yes, exactly. Yes, thank you for making it lowercase, and more palatable. Yes, exactly. They're so bright. They know the thing. When bright people argue, they know exactly what to say to ruin the other person's day, and yet the father-- Yes, of course, which is Jay O Sanders, who you just heard, who's amazing actor, who has New Yorker audience- [crosstalk]

Alison: Oh, immediately.

Jesse: -Richard Nelson plays, he's genius actor, but anyway, he's a brilliant anthropological professor and he's obsessed with Amiri Baraka, rather than the conversation that is happening, and the subtext that's occurring in his family.

Jesse: Ziggy become-- First of all, why Ziggy? Did I miss that?

Jesse: Oh, God. Well, actually no, you didn't miss it at all. It came from an audiobook where he was named after a Holocaust survivor. It has no relevance anymore into the story but named after Sigma, who the mom met somewhere. No, no, it has no relevance. This is why I write these monologue so that I can have esoteric threads that don't fully come together.

Alison: It's such a great name because it makes you think, "How did he come to that name with these super serious parents?"

Jesse: Yes, there's backstory in the audiobook for any completists.

Alison: [laughs] Ziggy is falling for this young woman, Lila. Feels interested in her in some way. It really becomes clear, Lila is like his mom, would come on a leaf off his mom's tree, not his. What is it that he finds so attractive about her? A, is very attractive. That helps. She's also confident, but what is it that is drawing him to her?

Jesse: Well, I think if you grow up in the house of really bright people like Ziggy does, you probably have two instincts. One is you want to be bright like your parents because you see that's what has value in the world, and the other thing is you want to reject it because it's the thing that you need to reject in order to individuate. Ziggy has dumbed himself down. He's interested in shallow love songs because he needs to individuate. How do you individuate in a house with intellectuals? Is to be interested in shallow lowbrow culture, but of course, that instinct as you age is there.

It's dormant and eager to come out, which is that I want to be smart like my parents. I want to be interested in the world like my mother. He falls in love with this girl, of course, unconsciously. He's experiencing some edible thing where he's in love with the woman who reminds him of his mother.

Alison: Who is distant.

Jesse: That's right. Yes, and this young woman is distant to him, too. I based her on my wife who's not distant, but who had a childhood. My wife was the head of the Eastmoor Action Committee when she was 15. The only art that she engaged in was writing protest art. In the movie, Ziggy goes to this like, teen activist night where everybody's doing these performances that are like these very activisty performances, and then he gets up and sings his very shallow song about missing his friends during a summer break. He's trying to fit in, but just doesn't have the grounding.

Alison: I should say Ziggy's played by Finn Wolfhard for people who know from Stranger things. He's so interesting to look at on screen. What do you find interesting about just the way he is, physically?

Jesse: My happily married cinematographer, Scandinavian cinematographer is just going, "My God, he's so gorgeous. He's just so gorgeous." He's this person who looks, it's that very strange liminal space that movie stars occupy, where they're not attractive in a way that makes you resent them, but attractive in a way where you can't take your eyes off of them. No, Finn just has that. He also happens to be like brilliantly talented. He's like an amazing singer-songwriter in his life.

He just directed a movie at 18 years old, which is infuriating, but yes, he's also has this unusual physical presence, where he's gorgeous, unusual, and angles of his face change. This is not something I like to think about because I'm an actor and I hate thinking about my face from an outsider's perspective, but as I was directing this movie, I'm watching Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard, these people who have unusually gorgeous compelling physical presences, and that takes up a lot of the movie.

They're not talking in the entire time. You're just looking at them in these physical presences and understanding the visual medium and how these people bring themselves to it.

Alison: When you think about it being on a screen, a couple of years ago, I interviewed, I think he was the costume director of Nightmare Alley and was talking about how much time he spent looking for the buttons on a certain jacket because the button isn't this big when it's on the screen, the button's as big as your hand.

Jesse: Oh, I see, yes, yes.

Alison: I think about that when I look at actors' faces, especially actors in film because the movement in their face and the reaction has to be subtle because it is so big.

Jesse: Yes, of course. No, no, of course. It's the thing that you are taught in drama school. Remember if you're studying theater, which I did, you're also reminded by the drama teachers that, tone it down when you're on camera. That's the notorious transition that actors have to make from theater to film.

Alison: My guest, Jesse Eisenberg, writer and director of the film, When You Finish Saving the World. We talked about Ziggy's attraction to this woman, young woman, Lila. Evelyn becomes like borderline, inappropriately obsessed with this young boy named Kyle, who is just so sweet, is so grateful to be in this shelter with his mom, will do anything. He's really good with his hands, and somehow Evelyn gets it in her mind that she's going to almost save him, but there are parts of the Jesse where I felt like there was almost like a romantic kind of, she had a crush on him in a way.

Jesse: She gets really confused. She is struggling to connect to her 17-year-old son, who just plays music online. The interesting thing about her is that she has given her son this nice life. She's this brilliant woman, she's quite successful, her husband is quite successful as an academic, so she's given him this upper-middle-class life that she now has come to resent. She sees this kid at the shelter who is obviously in need of some help, but not a mother's help. He has a mother, his one stable relationship in his life is with his mother, who we meet, who's played by the wonderful actress Eleonore Hendricks, and Kyle is played by Billy Brick, I should say.

Evelyn feels like, she's unconsciously feeling, "Maybe I should help this kid." The thing is the kid, we know as an audience, doesn't need a mother, no. He needs a shelter. He might need some help with the college application, but he does not need a mother. It's just what I think about, from the origin of this movie is like, "What happens if you have a kid that you're disappointed with and you're surrounded by kids you want to help? What does that feel like and what does it feel like when you created the kid you're disappointed with by giving him the nice life that you now resent?"

If you're an activist for people who are going through the worst situations in life, how do you reconcile that with being a parent to a privileged child? I think about that all the time, and it's probably a difficult thing for a lot of people to reconcile.

Alison: There's a scene that we really get where you get a sense that her lizard brain has taken over because she boxes out another woman who could potentially help Kyle. She elbows her out of the way. She's like, "No, this is my kid to protect." Although it's not her kid to protect.

Jesse: Right. Yes, the feeling is like, she has that parental instinct, but just for the wrong person, and Ziggy has the instinct to learn from somebody, but for the wrong person. The feeling I was trying to create was like, what happens when a parent would prefer a different child, even unconsciously, what is that feeling like? I started writing this when I had my child and I don't have that feeling at all. My child is very young, but I was thinking I just rack my brain with all sorts of worst-case scenarios.

I'm thinking like, "God, what is it like for people who have children who are disappointing to them, who are culturally different?" I'm sure-- and yet they're surrounded by other kids who they feel so much more for, or they've devoted their lives to helping those kids. I imagine, and I've spoken to parents who've seen the movie and told me, "Oh, I've had these thoughts and I feel horrible that I've had these thoughts. I have this guilty feeling sometimes." It's something I guess that people think about and probably don't proudly discuss.

Alison: My guess, Jesse Eisenberg, the name of the film is When You Finish Saving the World. There's a moment in the film where Ziggy really defends what he's doing to people saying like, "Look, what I do, it gives people vacation from all the difficulty in the world." What do you think of Ziggy's point?

Jesse: Yes, I agree with it. It's like any smart person making a point you disagree with. They have some good logic. Ziggy says, like, so he's talking to Lila, Lila who's like Ziggy's mom. She says to him, "Have you thought about what you could do with such a big platform? Maybe you can work with some non-governmental actors to make change because you have a voice." He's like, "I don't know, I think I'm more of a vacation." He's making a good point, which is like, you know what? People need relaxation, too.

These people that I appeal to, they see me and they see my value for something very specific that I can do best. I think about it all the time because I'm in the arts and I do things that are purely entertaining. Sometimes when you're on the set of these purely entertainment movies, I'm using quotes, you're thinking like, oh, what is the value of this? You see people enjoy and you're like, "Okay, there is something. There is something there." It's not just an exercise in vanity or superficiality.

No, people seek it out for some reason and provided it's not some egregiously violent thing that's promoting some horrible values. People seek out that kind of thing and it's enjoyable and all that stuff. That's the argument he's making and he has a good point.

Alison: Yes, we felt that a lot during the pandemic on this show because it was so dark everywhere else in the media landscape that we were like, "Well, let's talk about what people can read. Let's talk about people who are trying to make things," because you need a break. Ziggy's not wrong.

Jesse: Yes. When I think about all the projects I've been involved in, the things that are the most successful by far are not the politically explicit movies I've been in or the plays, rather they're things that are entertainment. You wonder like, "Why is that?" Again, these are not things that promoted bad values. The most popular movies I've been in are about a team of magicians who rob banks from evil people and give it to people who need the money. It's promoting good values if you're talking about values, but mostly, it's just entertaining.

You think of, "Why are those so popular? Why is it that's what more people in the world want to see than other things?" Yes, of course, there is not only a place for it, but an important place for it.

Alison: What do you know about directing now that you really didn't understand fully before now that you are a film director?

Jesse: Probably the most ironic thing that I learned was just how to talk to actors differently because I've always been on the other side of it and I was just nervous to talk to the actors because I so revered them, but also felt so indebted to them that they were exposing themselves from my story. The thing that I wrote at the library is now the thing that they memorized with their friend the night before and you feel like a little guilty and a little bit of imposter syndrome.

I had to warm up to the fact that, okay, I also have a job here to talk to them. In the same way when I'm on a movie set, I want the director to talk to me. That's what I came away with which is definitely not the thing I would've expected to come away with.

Alison: When I've talked to film directors, I can't remember who it was, but it was really telling, he said, directing is about making choices. You were making decisions all the time.

Jesse: Yes.

Alison: What was the tough decision that you had to make?

Jesse: Well, we are shooting this movie in New Mexico. It takes place in a specific place in Indiana that I know well. Every day was just about stripping what I know of Indiana because I'm in New Mexico. New Mexico is the most beautiful natural landscape on earth and the least anywhere else on earth. Every day, it was like, "Can we show the mountain in the background," because there's no mountain in Indiana? It just became like-- It's always the things you least expect to create an obstacle. For me, it was just like, "Okay, I'm making this very specific movie in this very specific place and we're in the least similar area on earth."

That was that kind of thing. My friend told me the thing that you just said too, my friend who's not directed before, but reads a lot, just talking before and he's like, "The only important thing is that you make a decision it doesn't even have to be the right one, you just have to make a decision so that there can be like a downstream effect of efficiency rather than necessarily worrying about which color pillow is the exact right pillow."

Alison: Do you think having been a director is going to change you as an actor?

Jesse: Yes, I had a little like, I did this movie and then I did this series that just came out and on this side.

Alison: Fleishman Is in Trouble?

Jesse: Yes. On the set of that series, I was like, I had a little bit of a weight off my shoulders having seen it from the other side and knowing that directors are not just walking around thinking I'm doing a bad job, but they're also thinking of other things because I just have this paranoia on set that, of course, the people making the thing are just walking around disappointed in me. This is like the narcissism of a self-punishing neurotic person or whatever. Now I know like, "Oh, no, they're probably also thinking about a thousand other things," because that's what I was thinking about, too.

Alison: What has the reaction been like when people want to talk to you about Fleishman Is in Trouble? It is a very New York story, I have to imagine.

Jesse: Yes, they come from one of three groups. They're doctors, divorcees, or Jewish. You can sometimes tell as they approach which category they fit in and in certain areas of New York, it's all three. It's the kind of thing that, because I'm living here and because the show is so specific to this place and about such modern topics that yes, you're approached and then you're reminded that you're in a movie playing a magician and you're so infrequently approached because so few people are magicians. That's the nature of being in anything that hits a cultural Venn diagram, that kind of thing.

Alison: What do you look for in a role at this point?

Jesse: As I was telling you with my writing background, I write monologues for characters that you never hear about, when the plays that I've written, I have pages and pages from the characters that you never hear on stage. In this movie too, I have like a novelized version of this movie that I wrote. I like to play characters that feel like they have a life off the page that feel like, "I know how this person would react doing something else," because the opposite of that is like you're just a pawn and a plot line.

Feels like 90% of characters, especially in films, are just part of a plot. If you can find a character that feels like they have a voice that is existing outside of that plot line, that's a rare gift, and that's what I always hope to find and sometimes do.

Alison: Can I ask what you're working on next?

Jesse: Yes, I'm scouting from my next movie that I'm directing. I'm also acting in this one and it's about two cousins, me and Kieran Culkin are playing the roles who go on a Holocaust tour in Poland. We're flying to Poland in two weeks to do the scout.

Alison: Safe travels to you.

Jesse: Thank you so much.

Alison: Jesse Eisenberg's directorial debut is When You Finish Saving the World, it will be in theaters tomorrow. Good luck.

Jesse: Thank you so much, Alison.

 

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