FFCC vice chair Hans Morgenstern spoke to actor Jesse Eisenberg about his new film Louder Than Bombs and Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Louder Than Bombs, the first English language film by Norwegian writer-director Joachim Trier reveals a different side of the director who gave us the low-key drama Oslo, August 31 (‘Oslo, August 31st:’ a film about those small wasted opportunities of life). It features an ensemble cast of actors including Gabriel Byrne, Isabelle Huppert, Amy Ryan, Devin Druid and Jesse Eisenberg. I had a chance to speak to Eisenberg over the phone about this film (as well as bring up another). As he explains it, “The movie is kind of told from a few different perspectives, and you see how each character deals with grief in a different way. Everybody is kind of acting out in their own way but all because of the same feeling of loss.”

In the film, Eisenberg plays Jonah, a young man with a new family (his wife just had a baby), dealing with the sudden loss of his mother (Huppert). His teenage younger brother Conrad (Druid) is failing in school and their father (Byrne) seems clueless about what to do with him, so Jonah tries to awkwardly step up to the plate. “It’s probably the problem with sibling relationships,” offers Eisenberg, “which is that the older sibling, who probably is not that much more self-actualized than the younger one, is in a position to not only give advice, but to be a role model, sometimes prematurely…”

(Read the rest on Independent Ethos; there’s also more of this conversation in the Miami New Times)