Jesse Eisenberg is back on the big screen this week as he teams up with filmmaker Kevin Asch, who is making his feature debut, with Holy Rollers.
The movie sees Eisenberg take on the role of Sam, a youth from an Orthodox Jewish community is lured into becoming an Ecstasy dealer by his pal who has ties to an Israel drug cartel.
"I read the Holy Rollers script about a year and a half prior to shooting it. I really loved it and I wasn’t so busy at the time, so I had the time to spend trying to get it made, meeting with people I’d worked with in the past - independent financiers in New York - because I really wanted to play this role. Now that I’m a little more busy as an actor I would probably have to do less of that.
I thought it was a fantastic premise and a great opportunity for me as an actor - it’s difficult to get a movie like this off the ground. I really wanted to do the movie, and I had two years to prepare for it because it took that long to raise the money.
I was doing research into the world of the movie and developing my character with Kevin and Antonio, so I had an added incentive to get it made and ask producers to come on board and help.
I actually had a lot of time to learn abut the community, so I spent time with kids who were similar to Sam who lived in these communities, I went to the school with them for many days, they brought me into their lives a bit, so by the time we were shooting I felt like I could throw all that away and not be focused on the rigidity of adhering to a specific lifestyle and instead just focus on the emotional experience of Sam and have all that stuff in the background.
That was really important because when you’re acting you don’t want to be thinking of which hand you’re using, you want that to be instinctive.
You spend two years in meetings, for an 18-day shoot, which was so wonderful, but it’s so quick compared to the amount of time you try to get it made. You have 18 days on these rushed sets - but that’s my favourite part. It’s those moments where it feels real and exciting.
It’s a lot easier to shoot a movie in 18 days than it is to shoot a movie in 80 days. You build up a momentum and learn to not question things in the same way - it’s very difficult for me to spend 5 months in the emotional place of a character, whereas Holy Rollers we were shooting every day, 14 hours a day, and to me nothing lends itself to being creative more than efficiency.
I really loved working with Justin because we’ve been friends for several years and I was looking for something for us to do, and when I read the script and saw that character I thought he would be so perfect.
It was exhilarating to shoot because he’s my friend and those scenes are so exciting. He has a great sense of humour and is also known for being in some very funny movies, so our mantra as well as the director’s was it can always be funnier.
So we have a great premise that lends itself to great drama but also engenders chuckles, but because the way we were telling the story is so dramatic, we felt like it could always use more humour - at its heart is a fish out of water story, and there would be some funny scenes, but coming from a real place.
What we settled on in the movie was more realistic - the drug deals are clumsy, the characters are not as violent as you’d suspect somebody who’s a drug impresario might be - the characters are all realistic and all the scenes are dealt with authentically.
I loved the innocence of the character - I thought it would be interesting to try and maintain that innocence in this underworld of drug smuggling.
In the first part of the story, his innocence is understandable because he’s exposed to very little but when he starts being exposed to the more exciting and dangerous things in the world it s a bit more difficult to maintain that."
Holy Rollers is in cinemas Friday, 8th July
Tagged in Jesse Eisenberg