“When we invite stars to Karlovy Vary, we first contact their agent, who puts us through to their publicist in New York, who in turn refers us to their publicist in Los Angeles, and we only meet the guest once we are in Karlovy Vary. When we wrote to Jesse Eisenberg’s agent in April, three minutes after he had told me that Jesse should be available, I received an email directly from Jesse saying that we could arrange things between ourselves,” revealed KVIFF Executive Director Kryštof Mucha at the start of the gala screening of The Double, illustrating the sort of person Jesse Eisenberg is. The actor was then presented with the Festival President’s Award.
The American actor, director and screenwriter immediately demonstrated his spontaneity in person. “I’ll send an email to everyone in this cinema if you write to my agent. Successful actors should be approachable,” he promised the packed Grand Hall, before making the audience laugh with a joke that every American actor to have won an award at KVIFF has a Batman film in their filmography.
“Thank you very much for the invitation and for this extraordinary honour. I don’t deserve it, but actors love awards,” he then began his acceptance speech, which also served as an introduction to the film. “I’m delighted that we’re screening The Double here. Richard Ayoade made it with a distinctly European cinematic sensibility, combining Dostoevsky with Kafka, German Expressionism and the Central European realisation that bureaucracy can be both terrifying and funny.”
The actor, who was nominated for an Oscar for his role in the drama The Social Network and for the screenplay of his film A Real Pain, also revealed that he is due to be granted Polish citizenship in a week’s time. “I longed for it not only because of my roots, but also because I would like to spend more time here in Central Europe. In the US, it is getting harder and harder to make the sort of films I like: unusual, human, mid-budget films. But they are doing well in Europe. So it is wonderfully strange that I am here, a week before I become a European citizen, with a film we made more than ten years ago and which owes so much to European cinema,” said Eisenberg, before bidding farewell with the words: “I hope this marks the beginning of a much deeper relationship between me and this festival.”
