Master your anxiety to unleash your genius, with Jesse Eisenberg

When I think about like the kind of motivating factors for me, you know, it's effort and, you know, talent and creativity and all that stuff

But I cannot underestimate how often I'm just driven by anxiety and fear

You and I are both very self-hating. A lot of the things that motivate me are like kind of negative motivators

Misery, self-consciousness, self, I would say self-hatred, and a lot of fear

I worry all the time that my last job is going to be the final one I'll ever have in my life

But, you know, when I meet people in other fields who have kind of forged their own paths, they have the exact same story

And it just occurred to me that this is kind of what, like, great people are motivated by

They're amazing at their job, they're creative, they think outside the box, but they're also worried that the next time is not going to go well

Once you're able to kind of reframe that anxiety as fuel, as motivation, as care, you worry less and are motivated more

Hi, my name is Jesse Eisenberg. I'm known as an actor. I also write and direct

And I forgot the other thing that I was supposed to say because I was, sorry, shit,

Hi, I'm Jesse Eisenberg. I'm an actor, writer, and director. And the most recent thing I did was those three things on a movie called A Real Pain

Probably it's important to dispel the myth that actors are full of themselves and, you know, they're in a movie, so they must be so confident all the time

As an actor, I've had to cope with, like, kind of being a public person and all that entails

Because strangely, I often do kind of receive criticism in places that I never expected to receive it

Sometimes people say to me on the street Hey man, I thought you were okay in that movie

And they say it as like almost an apology And it makes you feel even worse You know, you care like anybody else

Who works on anything How the thing is going to be received And sometimes for an actor

It's heightened that much more Because, you know, it's being written about everywhere If you somebody with the inclinations That I have towards self Towards self What I have created was essentially kind of a bubble that allows me to work at my best It sounds strange but I don watch the movies I been in

I don't read any reviews of movies that I'm in. I go so far as to not bike past streets that are overflowing of movie advertisements

because it makes me self-conscious on my way to work. And I know it sounds a little bit like I'm making my life unusually difficult

and I should just confront those things. I should just hold the tarantula in my hand, so to speak

bike past those movie posters. But the truth is I found I am most effective

by not thinking about that stuff, by not becoming obsessed with something that I can't control

Maybe it comes from a place of fear or weakness, but to me it's the only way I can kind of self-motivate

I've recently started directing. I've directed two movies now. Being in this kind of new, strange place of like being a manager of people, so to speak

has not been the easiest transition for me. I realized pretty quickly I am not a great leader in the traditional sense of being able to kind of lead a group into battle

My advantage was not so much in talking loudly about the thing we need to get and telling screaming people that the sun's going down

but I am very good at knowing what everybody does and how to kind of get the best from them

So if you're somebody who feels like me, somebody who feels like they would not be able to lead an army into battle

try to think of all of the wonderful leaders that you've worked for

The best leaders I worked for were really kind of like the quiet, sweet directors

who motivated in subtle, sweet, quiet, relatable ways. The leaders that you like working for are probably not the kind of bombastic, confident person who's the loudest in a room

I imagine what you might discover is that the leaders that you really liked working for are probably a lot like you

How did they do it? How did they excel? I only directed two movies and I interviewed people for various jobs for production design for editing for music composition for costumes for cinematography who have done 40 movies in their position and I done one or two Most people I working with know a thousand times more about their jobs than I do

and so it's important to kind of defer to them and to kind of be humble, be open to learning

and also be able to kind of provide a space for other people to excel. I am a person who very much wants to collaborate with somebody who has as good or better ideas

than I do. I am not somebody who wants to be right, and that has motivated me to find people

who are very collaborative. That kind of humility, that kind of eagerness to learn from others

and the eagerness to defer to others has just been a great asset for me

You learn very quickly in acting class that acting, like almost every other collaboration

requires reacting to the other person, to the collaborator's intention and performing in conjunction with it

The movie I just finished directing, the two leading characters are played by me

in the wonderful actor Kieran Culkin, who's on Succession and is an absolute genius performer

in ways that I don't even know audiences are fully aware of

because I got to see him improvise in these incredibly complicated character moments

And yet it was very often not the thing that I had written and not the thing that I had expected

to perform against. So theoretically, I should have all the authority in the world

to tell him exactly how I want it to be performed. And I discovered, I think on the second day, that that was not going to be effective

That when I kind of try to micromanage his wonderful, lived-in, loose performance, it was not helping him

When, you know, you're acting in a scene, you're supposed to stand on like a little mark so that it makes the lighting look good on your face

and it makes the camera framing for all the other actors appropriate. He wouldn't stand on marks, and when I asked him to stand on a mark a few times that we did, it would stifle him

He would work so much better when it was loose. And when he was loose, he was so brilliant

When I was thinking about the priorities of the movie, the first priority of this movie is that this character is loose, alive, and complicated

That is so much more important than having the actor in the exact place

Sorry, how can I then link this back to something bigger and better? What I discovered is that you really should not try to engineer the other person work you should help them achieve the thing that they do best And so as a director I was just enthralled by allowing him to fully live in this role

to be loose, to improvise, to say what was on his mind. And it made the movie so much better

And it made the set just this kind of wonderfully enriching, fun place. Sometimes it might be intimidating to think about collaborating with somebody

who might be more successful, more experienced in their field. The first movie I directed starred one of the greatest film actresses of all time, Julianne Moore

and I had never directed a movie before, but I had acted in so many movies, and I know what I wanted from a director

What I love to have as an actor from my leader, from my boss, from the director

is I love them to really pay attention to what I'm doing and give feedback on that

And when I was directing, again, this unbearably talented, shockingly, astonishingly talented woman, Julianne Moore

I was so intimidated to do exactly what I always want directors to do

I think the reason I was probably a little intimidated was because I thought she would see me for the fraud that I must be

And so for the first week, I kind of like stayed away from her. I didn't know if she wanted me to give feedback or to ask her to try something in a different way

and you know finally when I just like splashed proverbial cold water in my face I realized no

that's exactly what of course she wants that's what I would want that's what anybody would want and so I started giving her some notes and we had the most fun. She argued back with me of course

sometimes when she disagreed which is totally healthy and wonderful but important part of the

process and so what I discovered is being in a kind of position of intimidation with a colleague

is not a sustainable place. I think Julianne Moore is more talented than me

I think she's a better actor than I'll ever be. I think she's smarter about stories than me

But those thoughts were not very helpful. The helpful thoughts were, oh, I have a really funny idea for this scene

and this character that she's playing, and I'm going to tell her what those are now. And that's like so much more, you know, effective

and such a more fun partnership to have with somebody. Sorry, is that okay

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