A24’s The Debut screened at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), and writer-director Jesse Eisenberg joined stars Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti for a Q&A following the screening about the film’s autobiographical roots, the musical at its center and what drew the actors to the script.
How Jesse Eisenberg’s own community theater days shaped ‘The Debut’
Asked about the film’s origin, Eisenberg said the story is closer to his own life than it might appear.
“It’s strange to say this, but the movie is really autobiographical,” Eisenberg said. “When I was 6 years old, I was very shy and nervous and I felt invisible and I hated everything and had trouble in school, and then I started doing community theater. This movie takes place 20 minutes from my house in 1990.”
He compared his first time walking into that theater to Mona’s arrival in the film, recalling how warmly he was welcomed.
“It just suddenly felt like I was on this alien planet of nice things, and then what happened was I took it so seriously that I took it too far and I kind of ruined my own life in an attempt to understand my thankless tertiary character,” he said. “So it’s an autobiographical movie, but told through, this is pretentious to even use this word, my muse, because I wrote this for her and only her, Julianne.”
Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti on the script and the rehearsal scene
Moore said both she and Giamatti had the same reaction to Eisenberg’s script.
“Paul and I both talked about this. At this point in our lives, we’ve read a lot of scripts, and this is really one of the best scripts I have ever, ever read,” she said.
Asked about the private rehearsal scene between Mona and the director, Giamatti said he was looking forward to it from his first read.
“I was really looking forward to doing that scene,” Giamatti said. “That was one of the scenes when I first read it, I thought, this is hilarious. That stuff actually happens in classes, but it can happen in rehearsals too. It’s close to being very real. I was really excited to do it, and my biggest worry was that I just needed to be there for her, to keep feeding her to get her where she needed to go.”
“I could not have asked for a better partner than Paul. We had such a great time together,” Moore added.
Why the musical within ‘The Debut’ doesn’t mock itself
Asked how he landed on the musical Mona’s company stages in the film, Eisenberg called it his best effort.
“That is the ceiling of my skill set,” he said. “The musical that you’re all chuckling to is my best effort. I’ve been writing songs for a long time, and I even wrote a musical that was close to maybe getting produced at the worst theater in the world. The thing about it is I love this so much. I love the show they’re doing more than I love most movies that are considered great movies. That is the medium and the style that I just connect to. I don’t know why. I suppose it’s because it’s what I grew up with, and you always love the thing that you grew up with.”
“And so I’m conscious that it’s funny and silly, but to me, when I’m writing it, I’m crying and experiencing all the same things that the characters are feeling with the earnestness of it,” Eisenberg continued. “I think that’s why the movie doesn’t mock the subject of itself.”
Asked whether Waiting for Guffman was an influence, Eisenberg said he didn’t make the connection while writing and pointed instead to his favorite film at 18, Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark. He said his background as an actor makes it hard for him to write straight comedy.
“We watched Waiting for Guffman growing up,” Eisenberg said. “But the weird thing is, because of my training as an actor, I have trouble writing straight comedy, because I’m always thinking as an actor. When I used to get straight comedies to act in, I always thought, ‘But wait, why isn’t he crying? The girl rejected him, why is he just rolling his eyes drolly?’ I was like, no, he’d be heartbroken.”
“So in some ways, this takes some of that tone, but then it’s like, what would happen if she went offstage and had an actual nervous breakdown because she’s that nervous?” he continued. “I think it’s informed by my training as an actor to take things seriously even if they’re supposed to be silly.”
On whether he approached the film with a theatrical mindset, he said the setting itself did the work.
“I think it’s less thinking about it as theatrical and more that the environment gives a permission structure to have characters be big,” Eisenberg said. “It’s just the nature of the subject. The last movie I made was [set] on a Holocaust tour, and so you naturally grow more reverent as you’re writing it, because those are such different things.”
Jesse Eisenberg on writing emotional scenes
Asked how he approaches the film’s more emotionally difficult moments, Eisenberg pointed to his own temperament.
“I guess I write emotional scenes because I’m an emotionally unstable man, and I don’t understand how we’re all not crying to each other all the time,” he said. “I recognize it’s kind of a burden, but I really don’t understand small talk. I’m not saying I’m so eccentric, but I genuinely just feel very emotional at all times, and it’s always on the edge. So when I’m sitting by myself and writing something, that’s just the instinct that naturally emerges.”
“I now take a little more Prozac than I took before I wrote this,” he added, “so perhaps my next project will take place in an office.”
Paul Giamatti and Julianne Moore on the characters that follow them
Asked whether he sees a throughline in the troubled men he often plays, Giamatti said it always comes back to the page.
“It’s always gonna be what the script is telling me to do, and his scripts are so specific,” Giamatti said. “You don’t need to change a comma. It tells you absolutely everything you’re supposed to say and exactly how you’re supposed to do it, so yes, I follow the script. I try not to be the same depressive, broken, middle-aged man all the time, but I’m a depressive, broken, middle-aged man, so what do you want out of me? But no, it’s the script. It’s always the script. It’s always gonna be the script.”
Moore picked up the thread with her own recurring type.
“Paul has the broken middle-aged men and I have these housewives,” she said. “So we have these characters that we just drag along behind us and keep trying to shake them, but they cling to us and just keep coming back.”
She connected Mona to Carol White, her character in Todd Haynes’ Safe.
“We have archetypes in our storytelling often, and I think the thing about Mona for me, and for Carol White in Safe, is that she’s a regular person. She’s just a regular person, right?” Moore said. “Particularly for Mona, she finds meaning and community for the first time in her life, and that to me was so moving. She should be someone that you see every day. She should be you. She’s us, she’s me, she’s Paul, she’s Jesse. We’re the people that kind of wandered in and found a path into our lives by trying out for the play.”
How ‘A Real Pain’ led to ‘The Debut’
Asked what led him from A Real Pain to The Debut, Eisenberg first joked that no one mentions his first feature, When You Finish Saving the World, which starred Moore and Finn Wolfhard, who turned out to be in the audience. He then explained that he wrote The Debut quickly while bracing for A Real Pain to fail, after becoming fixated on A24’s Dream Scenario.
“I was obsessed with that movie, and I thought, oh, that’s what people are seeing,” Eisenberg said. “So I really quickly wrote this movie before A Real Pain screened at Sundance because I thought it was going to flop there, that it was just too much naturalism and that people want something more unusual.”
“So I finished this almost in defense of that, and I said, ‘Can we please send it to Julianne before the screening at Sundance? Because maybe she’ll say yes, and then when that flops, we’ll at least have this other thing that we could pivot to,’” he said. “And my agents were like, ‘No, no, you’re fine, we’ll send it to her in February,’ and I was like, ‘This is gonna be your fault.’”
When does ‘The Debut’ hit theaters?
A24 opens The Debut in limited release Dec. 11 before expanding nationwide on Christmas Day.
Featured image photo credit: A24
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