Jesse Eisenberg and Julianne Moore were full of love for each other as their latest team-up, The Debut, closed this year’s BFI London Film Festival.
The musical-comedy has been on the festival circuit over the last few months. It stars Moore as Mona, a neglected housewife cast in a community theater production directed by Paul Giamatti’s Jerry. And the London Film Festival audience received the feature warmly, with one moment of raucous applause and plenty of laughter across the screening. The Debut‘s director and lead actress introduced the film up on stage, although Giamatti, Eisenberg said, could not be in attendance as he has COVID.
Eisenberg sat down for a Screen Talk session earlier in the day, where he revealed the film would simply not have been made without Moore’s involvement and spoke at length about his own relationship growing up in community theater. “I love it more than I’ve ever loved anything I’ve made,” the director and Social Network, Zombieland and Now You See Me actor told The Hollywood Reporter on the red carpet. “It has everything that I love in a project. It has music, and it has absurdism, and it has heart, and it has depressed people, but in funny situations. It’s my favorite thing in the world.”
When asked by THR how he feels about the many, many interviews and public appearances that come with taking a movie on the festival circuit, he replied: “In terms of selling of the movie, I very, very frequently lose track of the movie itself, and I become really hyper-aware of what the package of the movie is [and] talking about it as a product. Then we go to these screenings, and I see the last two minutes of the movie because I have to go do a [Q&A] afterwards, and I see it, and I’m reminded for a few minutes: ‘Oh right, there’s a thing there too. We’re not just in competition with Martin McDonagh,'” he said, shouting out the Wild Horse Nine filmmaker. “This is how I think because I don’t like all the other stuff. Because who does? And I love Martin McDonagh.”
Eisenberg admitted that he finds the prospect of the ensuing awards campaign stressful. “I didn’t want to go to the Oscars when I was nominated because I was like, ‘Awards are stupid.’ And my dad said, ‘You are the luckiest person on the planet. If you get a seat inside that room, no matter where that seat is, you’re one of the 0.001 percent of people in the arts.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, you’re right. I’m lucky. I see.’ I always thought, ‘Oh God, this is all against me. I’m going to be humiliated by going to these things and it’s not real and it’s phony.’ And my dad just put it in perspective, like, ‘No, no, you’re an incredibly lucky person.’ So now I don’t worry about anything anymore. Now I just feel lucky.”
The U.S. star also revealed at his earlier Screen Talk that he’s working on a TV show next. Could he give THR any more details? “I wrote it for A24 and [former Disney and Fox exec] Peter Rice, and it follows an 18-year-old girl in the fall of 2002,” replied Eisenberg. “It’s about the beginning of the culture wars that we’re in now, but it’s not pretentious or overly political, or maybe it is pretentious. That’s for you to decide, The Hollywood Reporter.”
Eisenberg’s side of the story is that The Debut wouldn’t exist without Moore. But what are the Oscar-winning actress’s memories of boarding this film? “I think that I would have done anything that Jesse sent to me. I love him so much, and we had such an extraordinary time on our first film together,” said Moore, who starred in Eisenberg’s directorial debut, When You Finish Saving the World (2022). “I think he’s really a special, special writer, extraordinary director.”
Moore said she loves his “worldview, sense of humor and empathy.” She continued: “Honestly, [The Debut‘s] script was one of the best scripts I’ve read in my life. I told him that it came my way, and I was just like, ‘I can’t believe what a gift this is.’ I just feel really, really fortunate to have had this opportunity.”
The Debut earned its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival and is set to release in theaters on Dec. 11 in the U.S.
It wraps up a star-spangled BFI London Film Festival, which opened with the European premiere of Andrew Scott’s tearjerker Elsinore. Some of the glitziest galas included Behemoth!, Ink, Wild Horse Nine, Artificial, Paper Tiger, Possible Love, Bunker and La Bola Negra. Check out THR‘s Screen Talks coverage from this year’s London Film Festival and chats with Andrew Scott, John Malkovich, Javier Bardem, Naomi Ackie, Ava DuVernay, Cynthia Erivo, Sofia Coppola and Danny Boyle.