Jesse Eisenberg
"Mouth?" Jesse Eisenberg pointed to his mouth, then pointed to the button and said, "Buckle? Is that right? Asked if he had learned any Chinese vocabulary during his trip to Shanghai, Jesse used his trademark cute look to show the surging news reporter the Chinese words he had just learned.
In late June, American actor and playwright Jesse Eisenberg came to Shanghai, where he was invited to attend the 21st Shanghai International Film Festival and to promote the Chinese edition of his short story collection Bream gives me hiccups, so Jesse has another identity as a humorous novelist.
Jesse wrote a preface to Chinese readers for the Chinese edition of "Eating Seabream and Making Me Burp," titled "Discovering Meat," a somewhat confusing title derived from the first sentence he learned during his 45-day trip to China in 2005 Chinese: No Meat. On that trip, Jesse went to Chongqing, Kunming, Lijiang, Dali, Guilin and other cities, and as a vegetarian, he tried to communicate enthusiastically with the locals with "no meat", but he helplessly found that no one could understand what he was saying. Toward the end of that trip, Jesse attended a Chinese speaking class and learned the four voices of Chinese.
More than a decade later, Jesse's mastery of Chinese four voices does not seem to be completely wasted, because his "mouth" and "buckle" basic tones are accurate, but Jesse still sighed: "Let me realize that your brain must be more complex than ours, in order to transform so many words, so many meanings." ”
Speaking about his feelings about Shanghai, Jesse said, "I've never seen a city with so many huge downtowns. In the case of New York, the center is Times Square, and with it as the center, the rest of New York stretches out in all directions. But Shanghai has so many centers that I finally understand why Shanghai is one of the largest cities in the world. Another point is that there are many places in Shanghai that are older than anywhere in the United States, older than New York, but some places are as developed and post-industrial as New York. ”
Jesse Eisenberg is well known to global audiences for his role as Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook in The Social Network, and in addition to making films and writing screenplays, he has long contributed to literary publications such as The New Yorker and Maxwelly, and this book "Eating Seabream Makes Me Burp" is his first collection of short stories. Although it is called a collection of short stories, in fact, most of the articles in the collection are not like the short stories we generally know, but more like humorous stories, and many chapters also use the form of letters, text messages, emails and so on.
Taking advantage of Jesse's visit to Shanghai to promote the new book, the surging news (www.thepaper.cn) conducted an exclusive interview with him about this collection of short stories that are in Jesse's style.
Bream gives me hiccups Chinese version
dialogue:
I don't care if anyone reads my stuff
The Paper: In chapter 5, you deal with the so-called post-hendigeism, do you feel that you are a post-hengeminist person?
Jesse: I'm passionate about being a so-called post-sexist person because I'm not. For me, post-hen-sex men mean rejecting those big macho stereotypes, and maybe I would call myself a post-hendiogenic middle-of-the-road. Because I wasn't born with these traits, I'd love to have them, so I'll fall back to the original gender norms.
The Paper: Is this the style and image you want to present to your fans?
Jesse: No, it's the style that I show myself, and then the final effect is weak.
The Paper: You often write for literary magazines such as The New Yorker, and the literary creation is completely out of the box for you, or do you have some kind of literary ambition?
Jesse: I don't think of writing as a profession for me to make a living, I think I have to write when I have to. I don't think it's some kind of ambition either, and I don't think writing is hard. It's like last night I spent two hours writing down my thoughts from the past week, and I write because I wouldn't live if I didn't. I also don't care if someone reads my stuff, I write because writing makes me happy.
The Paper: Usually filming is so busy, how do you have so much time to write?
Jesse: I think the public sometimes exaggerates the time that actors spend filming, just because the actor's job is public, and you can see my work in the end and I can't see your work. In your opinion, I may be spending far more energy than you, but in reality it may be the opposite, you may be working every day, but I may only be filming for six months a year.
He enjoys writing and acting in a mixed mood
The Paper: You used a lot of endnotes in the chapter "Roommate Stole My Ramen Noodles", what is the reason for this?
Jesse: After I read David Foster Wallace's book, I thought it would be interesting if this young woman used some very high-end technique to write something very low-end. She's talking about obese people, ugly boys and girls, but she's using a very sunny literary technique that you might only use in academic writing, or that people like Wallace, whose brain circuits are the same as ordinary people.
When I was in college, I loved Wallace. I'm a vegetarian, and he wrote the book Consider the Lobster. I love what he writes, he's the kind of writer that writers would love, but it's a bit of a headache for readers to read his stuff sometimes. Of course he died a terrible death, and you see the world so thoroughly, how can you not be depressed?
The Paper: In this story, you wrote that the heroine felt sexually harassed because the professor asked the students to explain the benefits of female circumcision, but she was very ambivalently fond of the professor, if you wrote this story today when the meta-movement is in full swing, would you feel a kind of moral pressure?
Jesse: I might write it differently, but not because I think what I'm writing is wrong, it's just because you can't talk about it in any other way when the whole society is talking about it. It's like when there's a shooting in a baseball stadium, and you can't write a song about baseball in a witty and funny way.
I myself am sensitive to issues like sexual assault, and my wife and my mother-in-law have been doing things related to domestic violence shelters for the past fifteen years.
The Paper: I noticed that many readers said that they liked the first chapter, that is, a nine-year-old boy who scored different restaurants, the tone was very humorous, but slowly you can read that the boy's mother is actually suffering from divorce, you mixed a mixture of fun and sad things, why is this mixture so attractive to you?
Jesse: I hope to be appreciated for this approach, but there's a cultural element in that, and for a lot of civilizations that oppress humanity, they perform tragedies in a comedic way, which is a coping mechanism. You'll make fun of your miserable situation and deal with it.
Just like when Chaplin played a tramp, he did it in a comedic way, and I certainly wasn't the first to do it, I think the reason I liked it was because it reminded me to face tragedy in a humorous way.
If you just write jokes, you will appear shallow, but if you only write sad things, you will appear to moan like a young man without illness. So I think this mix of sadness and joy is a little more creative.
The Paper: Do you think the best performance is also this mixture of sadness and joy?
Jesse: Do I like the show? Oh yeah, I love Ricky Reves's performance in The Office better than Marlon Brando's, and his performance is amazing, very funny, but with an unimaginable sadness. Marlon Brando is great, of course, but it just doesn't appeal to me.
The Paper: When it comes to the relationship between writing and acting, you talked about the worst roles in an interview and have their goodness, and when actors play such negative characters, they actually play them as heroes.
Jesse: Yeah, when I'm writing about some really bad characters, I think what attracts me to an actor is that their feelings of jealousy, loneliness, and other emotions are common to us ordinary people, and I think that unless it's the kind of emotionless psychopathy, most of the bad behavior comes from some sad emotions, and if we know a little bit more about this person, maybe we can understand what he does.
I like to play characters like this, that is, at the beginning you think the character is too scary, but in the end he will make you feel sad and sad. I have a new play about a sixty-year-old woman who is a very selfish and terrible woman, but I hope to see that at the end, the audience can give the character a hug and then take her home.
I'm not Woody Allen's successor
The Paper: In terms of humorous writing style, do you think there are any similarities between you and Woody Allen?
Jesse: I think when you look at the characters in his films, they think oh my God, this guy is so neurotic, but for me that's just a completely normal person. I feel normal, others feel neurotic, maybe because I have something in common with him (Woody Allen). I would see the world that way because I was influenced by him.
The Paper: There are a lot of viewers who will say that Jesse Eisenberg is Woody Allen's successor, what do you think of yourself?
Jesse: I don't think that's possible. Because in that era, he was a pioneer, and at that time in the mainstream entertainment industry, there were very few people like him, and of course now it is different. So, I can't be a pioneer in an area that already exists, I'm a beneficiary and recipient of his achievements and works. I feel like I'm lucky to have followed in his footsteps and not created anything new.