Jesse Eisenberg felt ‘immediately embarrassed' when he met Kieran Culkin

Jesse Eisenberg had to change his ways while directing Succession star Kieran Culkin for A Real Pain.

Jesse wrote and directed the movie, while also co-starring with Kieran, who made him feel like a “hack.”

Recounting the first day they filmed, he told Page Six that when he asked the Emmy winner to stand on a mark, the actor questioned him, and convinced him to have the cameras follow him in a documentary-style.

“He said, ‘Why would I stand over there?’ ” Eisenberg recalled. “I said, ‘We have this gorgeous shot, these statues behind you and it’s beautiful’ and he just wouldn’t stand on this mark.”

He noted that the documentary style “was so funny, it was so alive.”

The Social Network star added: “And I realized, OK, the way we’re going to be filming Kieran is going to be, you know, with the camera on our cameraman’s shoulder and not getting the kind of gorgeous vistas that I had been planning for months.”

“I felt immediately embarrassed,” he shared of the interaction, adding, “I always just kind of try to consider the behavior that I can change, which is my own and I was thinking, yeah, I’m probably in the wrong here. Let’s make the movie that is going to make Kieran excel the most.”

In A Real Pain, Jesse and Kieran play two cousins named David and Benji Kaplan, who tour Poland to honor their grandmother. The movie is inspired by the director’s own tour of the country in 2008 with his wife. It has already received rave reviews and boasts a 93% Rotten Tomatoes rating.