Alexander Payne on Timelessness, The Holdovers as a Christmas Classic, and Making Movies for Theaters
Movies Features Alexander Payne
It’s been a hot minute since writer/director Alexander Payne released a film. His last was 2017’s sci-fi satire Downsizing, which didn’t land with audiences. That same year, he became a father for the first time and restarted his creative process. Several projects almost happened, including directing the HBO miniseries Landscapers. But it wasn’t until Payne connected with screenwriter David Hemingson (Whiskey Cavalier) to develop his idea for The Holdovers into a script that his creative path became more certain.
An intimate ‘70s-era period piece set during Christmas, The Holdovers is a coming-of-age story, a tale of adult regret and a meditation on the loneliness of the season. Payne finally reunites with Sideways star Paul Giamatti, who plays much-despised Paul Hunham, adjunct professor at an all-boys prep school. Forced to spend his holiday break babysitting the five students who have nowhere else to go, Hunham ends up bonding with the biggest troublemaker, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) and school head cook, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph). Now, The Holdovers is one of the best reviewed films of the current awards season.
Paste Magazine recently got on a Zoom with Payne to reflect on two modern classics from his film resume, how The Holdovers finally got him working with Paul Giamatti again and how he’s navigating the rough waters of financing his particular niche of adult drama films.
Paste Magazine: A few months ago, Laura Dern was on a book tour and Citizen Ruth (1996) came up as a film that still resonates with her. It got me thinking about the almost timeless quality to it and Election, which both feel like films that could have been made right now. Is that something you spend any time thinking about in the writing stage, or does it just happen with the aging of a film?
Alexander Payne: That’s at once wonderful to hear and kind of heartbreaking. Certainly with Citizen Ruth, Laura Dern and I both got a bunch of calls last year with all the Dobbs shenanigans. Of course, we’re delighted that people are still interested in that movie. But sad for the immediate reason why.
And the question is flattering, “How do you program timelessness?” And no, it’s just a matter of luck. I mean, certainly, this is an easy answer, but like in The Holdovers when [Hunham] talks about the 1% in that speech he gives at the Christmas party, you can say it’s a period film, but he’s talking about today. He’s talking about every time. People are always fighting about racism and classism, and that’s always the case.
But let me say this, though, because you’re pinpointing, specifically, Citizen Ruth and Election, which can be seen as political metaphors in some way. If they are still relevant, if they’re still watchable, I think it’s because, as a director, I’m more interested in the human dynamics, not in the specific politics of it. In Citizen Ruth and Election, Jim Taylor, my co-writer and I were consciously more interested in how people’s individual psychodramas are played out in a public arena, often political. And we certainly know that from our former president, where we were all victimized by personal psychodrama.
How did The Holdovers coalesce as your follow-up to Downsizing, which was six years ago now?
After Downsizing, this one happened because another one I was going to do in 2019 fell through just the week before production was to start. That was heartbreaking, but okay, so be it. And then it was simply the script that was ready. [Writer] David Hemingson is a pretty good and fast writer so the script was ready. Of the two, three, four [scripts] that were kind of percolating on my stove top, that was the one that was ready.
The Holdovers very much feels like a ‘70s film plucked from that time and released now. What was the appeal of telling a story so specific to that era, and was it a particularly nostalgic time that you and David wanted to dig into?
The fact that it was a period [piece], it just came coincidentally. Early on, we had pinpointed 1970 as the year in which this was to be set. We knew it had to be a period film because there are no more single-sex boarding schools to think of. And then, it was not in the ’50s because that’s too much like a Peter Weir movie. So, how about 1970? I think David thought that the political winds going through a year like that gives us something as screenwriters. There are just some good chew toys there that informed his conception of the cook character, Mary. What’s she going through? Because of class and race, her son had to go to war and has just been killed. She has that. And then the boy, he’s a troublemaker. If he gets kicked out again, he might go to military school and might go off to war. It just gave us good, meaty stakes to surround some of the characters with.
Your collaborations with screenwriters are so interesting in that they’re often new associations that aren’t born of years of writing together. What were your connection points with Hemingson that clicked so well that it produced The Holdovers?
First of all, it was a complete surprise, how we met and that it would work. It’s always a roll of the dice because I’ve worked with a couple other writers in the past—the distant past—that just didn’t pan out. How he and I came together, I had this idea I hadn’t done anything with. I read a pilot script he wrote set in that [academic] world. I contacted him and said, “Would you be interested in writing something for me, but with this idea?” He had only been doing TV, but he kind of wanted to do a feature. And so, all those logistics worked out and were heaven sent. The fact that our sensibilities matched was a real gift. The other key component to a creative partnership is egolessness. We both have to have the freedom, any creative partnership does, to say the stupid ideas without fear. Now, we’re even starting to conceive a second film to work on together.
Did he come to set during the shoot to help with changes?
You know, he was around because he also asked to be a producer on the film. Mark Johnson, the producer, agreed. There was a budget for him to be around for a few weeks on the set. There usually wasn’t much for him to do. But certainly, maybe a turn of phrase, or from time to time, a location change meant we had to nip and tuck the script a little bit. Not major work, but even for the minor stuff, he’s a trusted collaborator. It was nice to have him around.
There’s a very specific alchemy to making a successful holiday film, figuring out how to toe the line of sentimentality and honesty. The Holdovers has a spikiness to it that keeps it grounded. This feels like a film a lot of people are going to pop in annually.
I certainly never conceived of it as a Christmas movie. I just liked the idea. The Christmas [watching] of it is certainly not under my control, if people will return to it. But it certainly makes for a melancholy backdrop, doesn’t it? Its supposed warmth makes loneliness stand out even more, in relief. And let’s not forget, we always read about the high number of suicides at Christmas and New Year’s.
You were supposed to reunite with Giamatti on a prior project that fell through, so it’s been two decades since Sideways. Getting to revisit his talent after so much time, what did you glean that’s remained the same about Paul and what’s changed?
All I can say is, even on a superficial level, we couldn’t get over the fact that it had been so long since we had had that happy collaboration on Sideways. And at the same time, the feeling that we just wrapped that the day before. The quality of our communication is always so good and the quality of our shared sense of what a movie is, at least the movies that we work on together. I don’t know him well enough to know if we have the same taste in everything. But we have very similar tastes. He’s so brilliant, well-read and a good student of the directors he works for so that he can plug himself thoughtfully and responsibly into the movie that’s being made.
For me, he’s like the perfect vessel of the kind of tone I want, that mixture of comedy and heartbreak and drama and hilarity. He just has it all. He can do funny things with utter seriousness and dramatic things, tragic things, but still with a sense of comic panache, as needed. I just feel so lucky to have found him.
Because he can do all of that so well, what scenes of his grab you the most?
It’s the emotional scenes and I can tell you exactly what they are. They reminded me of working with him on Sideways 20 years ago. In this movie, it’s the one-two punch towards the end of the movie. Him falling on his sword, defending Angus and lying to Angus’ parents about what had happened. And then the final goodbye between him and Angus by the U-Haul. The quality of emotion he brought to those scenes reminded me of the work he had done in Sideways, especially when he bumps into his ex-wife in the parking lot of the Armenian Church. The audience knows he’s been hung up on her the whole movie and he tries to keep a good face on, but he gets a gut punch when she lets it be known that she’s pregnant with another man’s kid. He’s very good in that scene. The great actors have ready access to their emotions. As brainy a guy as he is and as intellectual a guy—he’s the single most well-read human I know—he also has that ready access to emotion.
Having that kind of talent with Paul and Da’Vine, does it make it easier to cast a literal newcomer like Dominic Sessa because you know you’re placing him with the best teachers, or do you work overtime to make sure he’s not overwhelmed by their credits?
He didn’t have that many scenes one-on-one with Da’Vine. It was much more a two-hander between Paul and Dominic. The good thing about Paul, in my experience with him in both movies, is that one of the things that makes him such a wonderful actor is that he’s a good team player. Twenty years ago, he gave so much to Thomas Haden Church and Virginia Madsen. Not that they’re not wonderful actors already, but playing tennis with equally, if not more adept players, makes you a better player.
And the same thing happened too with Dominic Sessa. We all went into it thinking, “Oh, Paul, you’re going to help him out and give the kids some tips.” First of all, Dominic has a great talent, inchoate as it is. It’s just a natural talent to do it, so he had that going for him. But then when Paul looks you in the eye, in character, and is completely real, you can’t help but be realer yourself. It’s so corny when you hear on talk shows, “Oh, he’s such a generous actor” and that crap. But that’s how an actor is generous.
At the recent Lumière Film Festival in Lyon, you spoke about how midrange adult films are so difficult to finance for theatrical release. A lot of your peers have moved over to streaming to finance those kinds of stories. Is that in your future, or do you want to fight to stay in theatrical releases as long as possible?
I’d be really happy to do a series, but my brain still defaults to movies. Like I don’t think about creating a series. If somebody approaches me, or wants me to do a classy pilot or something, I’d be just overjoyed. But in terms of what I think about, my brain still—for better or worse—defaults to movies.
But Martin Scorsese, with Killers of the Flower Moon, and Noah Baumbach, with White Noise, and others seem to have been able to broker both with their streaming financiers.
It’s gonna have to be on a case-by-case basis. Plus, it’s changing now that we’re coming out of the pandemic, which finally allowed TV to win. From the late ‘40s, [it’s been] TV / movies, TV / movies. Movies have stayed in there and have always won to some degree. Then TV won with cable.
But we have to take our hats off to streamers, too, for financing so many things that otherwise wouldn’t get made. In that same talk in Lyon, I used El Conde as an example, Pablo Larraín’s film which is just wonderful. It’s visually stunning and spectacular. I’m so grateful to Netflix for financing. I don’t know what the budget was, but it wasn’t small. But it was in the theaters for a moment and it’s a movie which should be shown theatrically to really fully appreciate the brilliance of its conception and realization. I don’t have a conclusion to say about it. I’m so happy it was made and maybe it wouldn’t have been made at that scale without a streamer’s support. And I lament that it didn’t have a bigger life in theaters, and by extension, be a bigger part of the conversation.
The Holdovers goes into limited release on November 3rd and nationwide exclusively in theaters on November 10th.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, Total Film, SYFY Wire and more. She’s also written books on Sons of Anarchy, Outlander, Fringe, The Story of Marvel Studios and The Art of Avatar: The Way of Water. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraDBennett or Instagram @TaraDBen