Alexander Payne (‘The Holdovers’ director): ‘The gods would curse me if I asked for more’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

One of the most interesting things about two-time Oscar-winning director Alexander Payne‘s new movie “The Holdovers” that’s set in 1970 and ’71 is that it doesn’t just look like a period film but one that was actually shot back then and pulled from a vault more than half a century later. It has the old grainy look that films back then had. Even the Focus Features logo flashed at the beginning has a vintage appearance. It was all part of the plan to create a throwback feel. “God is in the details, as they say,” Payne says. “Don’t forget it’s what’s being shot that helps produce a convincing effect. So locations, production design, costume design, even selection of extras who have the right hair (all contribute). All of that’s important to produce a convincing period film. And then on the technical side, we did shoot digitally. But then of course (we) used period lenses. And then in the post-production process, (it was) in the coloring and the techniques used to lend it a genuinely – to our eye, anyway – filmic effect.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.

“The Holdovers” centers on three damaged people who are stuck inside a fictitious elite New England boarding school over the holidays in 1970 and trickling into ’71:  cantankerous history professor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a cafeteria director named Mary Lamb who’s grieving her son’s death in Vietnam (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) and a brilliant but brooding and troubled student, Angus Tully (newcomer Dominic Sessa). The genesis of the idea was Payne’s having seen a 1935 French film (“Merlusse’) with a similar premise, “which I did nothing with,” he recalls. Then he happened to read a TV pilot that took place at a boarding school “and a bell went off in my little noggin. I called up the writer (David Hemingson) and introduced myself and said, ‘Would you be interested in writing a feature film in that same world of boarding schools?’ This guy had that life experience.”

Why set “The Holdovers” in 1970? “The answer’s probably simply because I was a teenager (during that decade).” he believes. “I graduated high school as a movie-crazy kid in 1979. Just as my parents had movies from the ’30s and ’40s imprinted on them as to what a good movie is, I had movies from the ’70s. And then in 1990 when I graduated UCLA film school, I still wanted to make human-scale comedy-dramas like I had grown up with.”

It took nearly two decades for Payne to work again with Giamatti after the two collaborated so memorably in 2004 on “Sideways,” which netted Payne an adapted screenplay Academy Award win. When the fact it’s been so long between their projects is pointed out, Payne grimaces and offers, “It kills me. You’re pouring salt in my wound. Paul Giamatti and I have spent the last 18, 19 years throwing flowers at reach other, really looking forward to the time when we could work together again.” The stars finally aligned with “The Holdovers,” and the director’s gratitude is palpable. “He and I have a very good, instinctive, shared communication. We’re kind of on the same wavelength when it comes to the creative work we’re doing together, and I have very little to say to him when we’re shooting…Between takes, I might say just a couple of monosyllables or grunts or a gesture and he instinctively understands.”

Payne places Giamatti in the same class as Meryl Streep, Gene Hackman and Laurence Olivier in terms of greatness as a performer. With actors of that level, he notes, “The director really has to say only one of four directions: louder, softer, faster, slower. You just calibrate what they’re doing.”

The director also had great praise for newcomer Sessa, whom he found at Deerfield Academy in the drama department after his casting director Susan Shopmaker fielded some 800 performer submissions. In Sessa, he had an actor who had never been in front of a camera before outside of an iPhone and had never even auditioned. “He was a duck to water,” Payne marvels. “I was doing a Q&A with Dominic the other day. I said, ‘On the first day of shooting, he had to act to a little piece of tape attached to the map box. And he was able to do that.’ And he pipes up and says, ‘Well actually, in some cases, it’s easier.’ That’s a film actor.”

Besides Giamatti and Sessa, Payne also was blessed with a singular talent in Randolph. “I’m so grateful she did the part,” he emphasizes. “I love what she brought to it.” Thinking about how things turned out on the film as he looks to awards season, Payne was moved to add, “Listen, the gods would curse me if I asked for more.”

“The Holdovers” is playing in theaters everywhere this holiday season.