The Holdovers, Alexander Payne’s comedy-drama, is not just a movie that takes place in the 1970s.
The retro-style title cards for the companies that produced it; the scratches in the film and the pops in the audio; even the opening credits that says it was copyrighted in 1971, the film is trying to transport its viewers back to the years in which it is set.
The film, which is Payne’s first directorial effort since 2017’s “Downsizing,” takes place at an elite boys’ boarding school in Massachusetts. During the school’s Christmas break, dyspeptic teacher (played by Paul Giamatti) is assigned to watch over the handful of students who won’t be returning home for the holidays, including a talented but unruly pupil (Dominic Sessa) in his class.
Though the two start out as adversaries, predictably, they gradually come to an understanding and forge an ad-hoc family with the school’s head cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph)–all with their own reasons for remaining behind on campus.
“I’ve been trying to make ’70s movies my whole career,” Payne said. “Good, human, character-based stories.” Thinking back on the celebrated films of that period, from “Five Easy Pieces” to “Breaking Away,” he said, “I grew up being taught they were commercial American movies.” They were “literate, human, interesting, ambiguous, disturbing — if they have sentimental effects, they are earned, not forced.”
The Holdovers takes the idea of the period film “one step further”: not just to conjure up the mood of a bygone time, but to recapture a moviemaking sensibility that it pioneered.
Payne was given a television pilot written by David Hemingson, the creator of ABC’s “Whiskey Cavalier” and veteran writer for such shows as “Kitchen Confidential” and “How I Met Your Mother.” The pilot, too, was set at a boarding school, and though its present settings didn’t appeal to Payne, he saw the makings of a possible screenplay and potential collaboration.
“David likes stories in which people try to find ways to love one another despite the slots they’re placed in,” Payne said.
They connected over shared interests in filmmakers like Ashby and his 1973 movie The Last Detail, about two Navy sailors (Jack Nicholson and Otis Young) escorting a court-martialed seaman (Randy Quaid) to prison. “For my money, that is one of the greatest love stories,” Payne said.
Payne has written most of the other films he’s directed–he won Oscar Awards for the screenplays of Sideways (written with Jim Taylor) and The Descendants (written with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash).
But he took a more supervisory role on The Holdovers, for which Hemingson gets sole screenplay credit.
“He would run two, three, four different scenarios by me, and I would put the kibosh on him until we finally said, ‘Yes, this one,’” Payne noted.
Payne didn’t go to boarding school but, while growing up in Omaha, he attended Jesuit preparatory high school that exposed him to uncompromising teachers like the one in “The Holdovers.”
Naming a Latin teacher whom he’d studied with, Payne said, “He made kids cry in class, and then when you’d speak to him afterwards, he was just so sweet. But he was willing to allow himself to be disliked to uphold old style of teaching.”
As a result, Payne has retained a sharp, playful wit and a decent command of Latin. (When I prefaced a particular question in our conversation by saying, “Forgive me,” he responded, “Ego te absolvo — you are forgiven.”)
The role of the disgruntled teacher in “The Holdovers” was always intended for Paul Giamatti, the vet character actor who gained widespread recognition for his comic turn in “Sideways.” (Payne went so far as to name the “Holdovers” character Paul and shot the film between Giamatti’s breaks on Showtime series “Billions.”)
For the part of the head cook, Payne had been eyeing Randolph, a breakout star of the biopic “Dolemite Is My Name.” “Eddie Murphy is great in that movie, but she also kind of steals it,” Payne said. “If she’s stealing every movie she’s in, then it’s time she should be a lead.”
But finding Sessa, who is making debut as the student protagonist in “The Holdovers,” proved challenging. Payne said his casting director received more than 800 submissions to play the role but found Sessa — then a student at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts — only by reaching out to the drama departments at the schools where the film was being shot.
When casting young actors, Payne said, “you don’t want them to be too slick and polished, so it’s hard to use star kids. And then when you want the real McCoy, do they have the chops to do it? This kid nailed it.”
Payne realized the “Holdovers” script was practically written for him. “He’s not just a student at a boarding school, but the script called for him to ice skate — he was a hockey player!” Payne said, his voice rising to an exaggerated level. “There was nothing that the screenplay wanted him to do that he couldn’t do. Jerk.”
Payne’s Small but Distinguished Body of Work
Payne now has eight features he’s directed, including “Citizen Ruth,” “Election” and “Nebraska.” But he can often spend several years between projects, a result of lacking development staff.
When it comes to finding new material for himself, Payne said, “I have no company, no office, it’s just me.”
“Scorsese and Spielberg have 30, 40, 50 scripts being developed for them at any one time, and they emerge from one film and look at the field of scripts and see, well, which one is ready or nearly ready?”
In his own case, Payne said, “I’ve maybe got three or four right now. None is quite ready to move from the back burner to the front burner. But I have started working more with other writers to kind of get the scripts up on their feet.”
His last film, Downsizing, a social satire starring Matt Damon as a man who chooses to be shrunk to a height of five inches, was a critical and commercial disappointment.
Payne, who rewatched it recently, said it “was not as terrible as people thought” and might have been better suited as a limited TV series. “The film has different chapters, which are easily forgiven if not welcomed in a limited series,” he said. “In a feature film, people just felt a little bit jolted from one chapter to the next. There’s a way in which ‘Downsizing’ was 15 pounds of sausage in an 8-pound casing.”
Payne said he could understand if viewers felt misled by the marketing for “Downsizing,” which suggested a high-concept comedy when the film was more concerned with its characters’ emotional interests. “You’ve got this big premise, but you’re worried about, like, a lady with no leg and taking care of someone sick and helping her die?” he said.
Payne said he was not necessarily looking to cleanse his palate of that experience — as he explained, “When you’re done with any movie, success or tanker, the only thing you’re thinking is: next!”
After “Downsizing,” he planned a film inspired by magazine article by Karl Ove Knausgaard, in which that Norwegian author retraced the Vikings’ settlement of North America. That movie, for Netflix and starred Mads Mikkelsen, was canceled days before filming was to start in 2019.
“There was a disagreement between the film and the novelist on whose nonfiction article the screenplay had been loosely based,” Payne said. He’d largely gotten over the collapse of that project, now four years in the rearview mirror, but he still occasionally speaks about it as if it were a fresh wound. “It happens to everybody,” he said. “It was my turn. It’s just my turn.”
Payne said that he might never have arrived at “The Holdovers” if not for that earlier setback.
“There’s the old adage that you can never tell a good thing from a bad thing because they’re always turning into each other,” he said. “Good things turn into bad, bad things turn good. So it all works out with a little elbow grease.”
Films as “The Holdovers” were becoming increasingly rare at theaters. More often these days, he said, “the human stories are on TV. That urge is being channeled, thank God, into series.”
He pointed to a scene in the film where Giamatti’s and Sessa’s characters go to a movie theater to see Little Big Man, the 1970 western that starred Dustin Hoffman.
“The Holdover is about the story it’s telling. But it’s also about cinema. You see people going into a movie and think, what is a movie now? What was a movie then? There is a discussion going on in the movie about movies.”
Making Giamatti’s character a scholar of ancient history is way showing reverence for pop-cultural past and asking audiences to reflect on its importance.
