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The Hollywood Reporter
  • 1 year ago
During The Hollywood Reporter Writers Roundtable, Jesse Eisenberg recalls the moment Bob Odenkirk yelled at him after reading one of his pieces of written work.

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Transcript
00:00When I was like 16, 17, 18, 19, I started writing screenplays that what I would call
00:04like of the Adam Sandler 90s era style because I figured out like the formula and I was like
00:10a smart kid and I loved jokes so I could figure out kind of what the formula is and just kind
00:15of reproduce them.
00:17And then I, when I was like, and I had like some of these scripts even like optioned when
00:21I was a kid because I would send them to agents and then I, but nothing would ever get made
00:26and I could tell this was like a fruitless effort that people were kind of doing.
00:29And then I was working at, when I was 20, I got a part in a movie that Bob Odenkirk
00:33was directing, which was like a dark art film, it was called The Fuck Up based on this great
00:38novel.
00:39And I gave him my scripts and I knew he was in the comedy world and worked at Saturday
00:42Night Live and I thought, oh, he'll send it to Adam Sandler and I'll go to set tomorrow.
00:47And he took about two weeks to read my scripts and then called me and yelled at me for like
00:52an hour.
00:53But in this incredible way, he just said like, I'll never forget what he said to me because
00:56it changed my life entirely.
00:57I said, buddy, you're a smart, sensitive young person, why are you writing this?
01:01This is something that I would get hired to write like in a weekend and there'd be three
01:05of us sitting in a room for a weekend at Happy Madison doing this.
01:09You're a thoughtful, sensitive guy and you're 20, why are you doing this?
01:13Why is this your art?
01:14And it killed me because it really was like for four or three, four years of my life,
01:18like this is what I thought I could actually do and get a foothold in something.
01:22And like right after that, I went to Poland for a movie and I went to visit my family's
01:28house as we do in this movie, A Real Pain.
01:32And the next thing I did is I came back and I wrote a play and the play was the one you
01:36saw that was…
01:37No kidding.
01:38That's the first piece?
01:39Yeah.
01:40Yeah.
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