JESSE EISENBERG ENTERS THE AUDIO DRAMA WORLD
‘When You Finish Saving the World’ tells the story of the Katz family over 30 years
If you’re missing the chilly joy of ducking into a movie theatre on a sweltering day, welcome to the club.
Ditto for attending concerts, plays, sporting events and awkward variety shows on the last day of summer camp. Our usual forms of entertainment are scarce right now, but here’s a fresh alternative: Jesse Eisenberg’s Audible Original,
When You Finish Saving the World.
The idea for the five-hour, 17-minute audio drama, available Tuesday, grew out of a conversation between Eisenberg — the star of movies such as The Social Network as well as an author and playwright — and a friend who confessed that he had no emotional connection to his newborn daughter.
“He was mortified and felt terribly guilty. I thought this was an interesting dynamic to explore,” Eisenberg said in a phone interview. “Then I met these great producers who told me about a new format which is fiction created exclusively for audio. The internal struggle of a character who is emotionally a bit stifled seemed perfect for that medium.” When You Finish Saving the World tells
the story of the Katz family over
30 years. First, we hear from Nathan (voiced by Eisenberg), a young father struggling to connect with his newborn son; then Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard), that baby now grown into a 15-year-old blundering through adolescent angst in 2032, which makes the present look downright blissful; and, finally, Rachel (Kaitlyn Dever), a wide-eyed, well-intentioned student trying to get her bearings at Indiana University in 2002. Her path is about to make a zigzag that will lead her to become Nathan’s wife and Ziggy’s mother.
Each character takes shape through his or her own series of audio files. Nathan’s are intended for a couples’ therapist and Ziggy’s for a futuristic bot therapist he has been “sentenced” to see. Rachel’s cassette tapes are intended for her high school boyfriend, who is awaiting deployment to Afghanistan.
These dispatches are whispered and wept from a variety of locations, including a guest room, a bathroom and a Subway sandwich shop. They give you the forbidden thrill of reading someone else’s mail, with the bonus of being able to hear the sender’s voice. The experience is reminiscent of watching a play.
Rachel Ghiazza, the head of US content at Audible, said Eisenberg’s approach is “genre-bending” and “pushes the boundaries of what audio storytelling can do.” This podcast-weary walker would have to agree.
One might wonder about the logistics of producing anything during a pandemic, let alone a three-part drama with music and sound effects.
Here’s how it all came together. Eisenberg spent several months writing the script, even meeting with veterans to find the right military base for Rachel’s story. “When a friend who was stationed in Karshi-Khanabad in Uzbekistan told me about his experiences, I knew I had the right location,” Eisenberg said. “All of the military stories are based on friends’ experiences, and I lined them up on the same timeline as US politics in 2002, so Rachel would have to struggle to navigate two opposing worlds: a boyfriend stationed overseas and an anti-war, liberal college campus.”
In the early weeks of 2020, Eisenberg recorded his part in a Newark, New Jersey, studio, then travelled to Vancouver’s Gastown neighbourhood to record with Wolfhard in a studio owned by singer-songwriter Bryan Adams. Wolfhard, 17 and best known as Mike Wheeler on the Netflix series Stranger Things, said: “It was therapeutic. I got to be kind of a brat for a change. Hopefully I’m not as much of one in real life.” Wolfhard put Eisenberg in touch with Dever and, in March, she and Eisenberg met up at a Los Angeles coffee shop to discuss the project. “Jesse was the last person I shared a cookie with in the real world,” Dever said.
As for what listeners take away from When You Finish Saving the World, Eisenberg hopes it is empathy. “In stories that take place from multiple characters’ perspectives, where you see the same world through different eyes, I think there’s a macro message that the world is full of complicated people, not heroes and villains,” he said. “Everybody’s trying their best. If you try to understand their intentions, you might understand their behaviour better.”