(l - r) Jesse Eisenberg, Terrence Howard, Richard Gere in "The Hunting Party"

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Question:

He’s asked about preparation for the film.

Jesse Eisenberg:

"Yeah, I had a friend who lives in Sarajevo, in the capital of Bosnia so I asked him if I could stay with him for three weeks before the movie started and I thought he’d take me around the county but he ended up like taking me to bars to meet like women for him” * he laughs* “but we did travel a little bit around Bosnia. It’s a pretty fascinating country, I was shocked that as soon as you got off the plane the airport’s close to the center of the city and you can really see kind of a lot of bullet scarred buildings and just destruction that’s ten-years-old that hasn’t been repaired yet. It’s a really shocking experience.”

Question:

What appealed to you most about this story and why do you think it’s relevant for audiences today?

Jesse Eisenberg:

“I was really surprised when I read the script that they were making this big American movie with celebrities involved. They said Richard Gere was in it and I was so surprised that they were making this American movie about a war and a subject, more specifically a war criminal who’s still at large. I was really excited about it. I was studying Kosovo in school at the time, which is of course related to the work I’m in. I really wanted to be involved in something that was politically relevant.”

Question:

He’s asked whether the character came naturally to him or if a lot of research was involved.

Jesse Eisenberg:

“Actually the character I play is a recent Harvard graduate who’s going on his first assignment overseas to do his first story and his father is the network Vice President so he has this big assignment right away. After I got cast in the movie I started reading everything I could about the war in Bosnia, but the character I’m playing, I knew nothing. So normally it’s the opposite usually for actors.”

Question:

He’s asked what an aspiring journalist would take away from this movie.

(l - r) Terrence Howard and Jesse Eisenberg in "The Hunting Party"

Jesse Eisenberg:

“You know, he goes there thinking he’s going to do this light story on the five year of the end of the war and ends up going in a kind of like a manhunt for a war criminal and kind of like realizes that that’s like real journalism, not that doing a light story isn’t real journalism but like when you kind of like really head off into a dangerous situation, there’s a potential to get a much richer story. The guys who this movie is based on risked their lives every day and the stories they got were just really incredible, and they were stories you couldn’t get being inside the news desk…you’d be protected and be safe but there’d be no way to get the stories that these guys got and the stories that they got in the war were really incredible.”

Question:

He’s asked about his acting influences in comedic roles.

Jesse Eisenberg:

“I guess comedically, Ben Stiller’s very funny and I like his humor and I like the humor, like I saw this movie ‘Superbad’.” He talks a bit more and moves on with “comedy that comes from a real place not just people falling down and doing silly things or something, and I was also surprised that ‘Superbad’ was such a successful movie because it’s that kind of movie you watch and you think people wouldn’t get all the jokes that were appealing, you know like some of the quieter jokes, or maybe they did get the quieter jokes, but that’s the kind of comedy I’d be interested in.”

Question:

He’s asked about the dark comedy in “The Hunting Party” and mixing humor and drama.

Jesse Eisenberg:

“Even though it’s about such a serious and important issue and the war was you know, obviously so tragic and repercussions are still really tragic, the actual journalists that the movie is based on are really funny people, they go from war zone to war zone and are faced with awful atrocities and they maintain this kind of like aggressive sense of humor, you know, almost to cope. So even though the movie is about a serious issue, I think it is really funny and the characters are naturally funny. There’s a certain humor in the Balkans, more specifically in Bosnia. There’s a Bosnia humor that everyone was telling me about before we went there and it really is true. Even though there’s a terrible war, there’s still a humor involved that’s really specific to the culture and I’m sure I don’t fully understand it enough in the language and not being there for that long but it’s like this absurdist humor and even though the awful things are happening there’s an absurdity to it and they can find the humor in it. It’s really interesting actually.”

September 11th, 2007 - 12:00PM