It’s the words that matter most, actor Jesse Eisenberg says. He’s talking at the moment about the script for The End of the Tour, his new film.
The film is a snapshot into a few days in the life of the late David Foster Wallace, a writer played by Jason Segel, whose novel Infinite Jest is a modern classic. His short stories and nonfiction are equally revered by those who love language, writing, ideas. The End of the Tour is based on a book by former Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky – Eisenberg’s character – whose interviews with Wallace as he shadowed the author on a book tour two decades ago formed the basis for Pulitizer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies’ screenplay.
And Eisenberg, best-known for roles in films such as The Social Network, Zombieland and The Squid and the Whale, himself is a well-regarded writer himself, having written three plays and now a collection of short stories set to arrive this fall.
It’s Margulies’ words that are on Eisenberg’s mind first, though, as he explains why it took him no time at all to accept the part in “The End of the Tour.”
“You typically know that when you’re getting a movie script written by a playwright it’s going to emphasize the things that actors like – dialogue, emotion, character – the things that most movies don’t tend to emphasize,” Eisenberg says recently in a hotel room at the Four Seasons Los Angeles at Beverly Hills.
“When I get a script, I don’t know the kind of scope or size of a movie,” he says. “You only really have the story and the characters to judge, and this had a wonderful story, wonderful characters.”
In a journalist’s skin
In The End of the Tour, Eisenberg’s character travels to Illinois to meet Wallace and travel with him for four or five days of his Infinite Jest book tour. They spend hours upon hours together on the road, talking about the book, spinning off onto tangents about all manner of conversation, the reporter playing his part, the writer aware of that dance.
“It’s a complicated mess of things, especially when you’re with someone for days like my character was with Wallace,” Eisenberg says. “You really like the person and you’re a human being, so it’s only natural that you should feel normal feelings like admiration.
“You also have to do this story, so you’re feeling kind of conflicted. And you probably feel a sense of guilt that you’re writing the thing that you had to overcome your admiration to write, which is maybe less than 100 percent flattering.”
The film also underscored his own reluctance to participate as the subject of such an in-depth profile.
“I think the more you’re with a journalist, the less you can protect yourself,” he says. “You just kind of get lulled into the pattern of normal speech that you’d have with friends. The kind of self- protection starts to erode.
“It’s an interesting character to play. I would not want to be on the receiving end of it.”
Relativity of success
Eisenberg, 31, says he first encountered Wallace’s writing as an undergraduate in New York City, where he jokes it was almost mandatory to profess love and admiration for the writer’s work.
“Wallace was kind of a respite (from the other readings) because he was funny, interesting. And I just thought it was phenomenal,” he said.
“I think the first thing we read was A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again – a piece Wallace wrote for Harper’s Magazine about taking a seven-day cruise. “I felt like I could relate to it, and I felt like there were all these other people in the class who were not, let’s say, (with) feelings of misanthropy but they also related to it. So it told me he was writing about something that was a universal feeling.”
Eisenberg’s three plays and the forthcoming Bream Gives Me Hiccups, a collection of short stories, gave him a particular insight into what it must have been like for Lipsky, who’d published a novel himself before meeting Wallace, a man hailed as a literary superstar.
“My character has written a well-received book, and it’s well-received on a modest scale in New York,” Eisenberg says. “And then goes out in the middle of the country as a journalist and meets with the literary genius, a god. And the kind of confidence and hubris he felt from having a well-received book in New York disintegrates to a fizzle when Wallace says he’s never heard of his book.
“And I can appreciate that. I write plays; they’re well-received in New York. Vanessa Redgrave was in my last play – I mean, what more could you ask for? And I come out to Los Angeles and they’re not only meaningless, but kind of seen as an annoyance that the business has to deal with because they lose actors for six months while they’re in this play.
“So I’ve experienced what that is,” Eisenberg says. “And the kind of confidence you feel in your bubble, and the lack thereof when it’s burst or when you leave the bubble.”
Pictures big, small
The Social Network, in which Eisenberg earned an Oscar nomination for playing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, came with a much bigger built-in audience – Facebook users – as does next year’s Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, in which he plays Superman’s nemesis Lex Luthor.
The End of the Tour is a much smaller film, but one that Eisenberg believes offers its own appeal to moviegoers.
“The movie, via the characters, raises all of these very unusually important themes,” Eisenberg says. “I say unusual because they’re themes that I think we’re not asked to think about that much.
“(Themes) where you really question how to make meaning from life.”
In that way this little film packs more emotion than any punch thrown by Batman or Superman.
– Courtesy: OCRegister.com
