Jesse Eisenberg on Holy Rollers

 

MakingOf: How did you get involved with Holy Rollers?

 

Jesse Eisenberg: I really wanted to do the role and really wanted to do the movie and see it come to fruition so I spent like two years with everybody trying to raise the money for it. I really got involved in a way that actors don’t get involved because I really wanted to and I felt like it was important for me as an actor and also give me something fun to do, but I also had two years to prepare for the movie because it took that long to raise the financing from where I got involved. Because I was doing this research into the world of the movie and developing my character with the director and the writer that I had an added incentive to get it made and to ask producers to come on board and help us out. But, you know, on a movie like Holy Rollers you spend two years in meetings trying to get it made for like basically an 18 day shoot, which was so wonderful. I loved it so much, but it’s so quick compared to the amount of time you spend trying to get it made. And then you have 18 days on these rushed sets because there’s such little time to shoot it. But that’s of course my favorite part. That’s why I started doing, you know, movies and plays, is for that brief moment that Justin Bartha, who is the other main actor in a movie, Holy Rollers, he calls it like, you know, kind of like the orgasm you get as an actor when something feels real and this is why you get into it and, you know, in such an often frustrating business. But it’s those little moments when it feels real and feels exciting and you kind of do it for all of those moments which are few and far between, unfortunately. 

 

MO: Do you find that filming an independent on a tight schedule like you described is a lot more challenging than the studio schedules?

 

(JE): No, I much prefer the quick schedule because you have no time to second guess yourself and lose the momentum and the emotional momentum. With Holy Rollers on the first day there was like four significantly emotional scenes and three kind of just regular scenes with not much emotional fanfare. And I was so shocked by the end of the day, you are so exhausted, but at the same time, you don’t lose any emotional momentum. Where as the last movie I did was a 75 day shoot and it was just, to maintain that kind of emotional experience over the course of five months was just grueling. You end up kind of making yourself crazy a little bit because you are trying to stay in this place and just to do that for five months is really taxing. 

 

MO: And do you shoot out of sequence most of the time too, so is it difficult to pick back up wherever you left off when you are going for five months?

 

(JE): Yeah, I mean, Holy Rollers also shot out of sequence. Like my character was peyos for the first 75, beginning 75% of the movie. You know, the sideburns. The curls. And so we would be running back to the, you know, whatever, to some room to glue them on and then, you know, rip them off when the scene was done so we could run to the next scene. And it was almost, like, ridiculous. But it was hard to kind of remember when, you know, did he cut the peyos off already? Yes he cut the peyos off already. Okay, so tear them off and do the scene. You know, but it’s also kind of exciting. It’s kind of exhilarating and everybody working on it is really involved. Where as on the last movie I did was a huge budget 75 day shoot. So there is a lot of people on set that really don’t have that much to do. And it kind of just creates an atmosphere of like 25% of the people on the set are involved in the movie and 75% of the people there don’t know what the movie is. So the spirit of these smaller movies is really exciting to me.