![]() “I learned a long time ago that the best actors are also the best technically. You see all these people in New York taking classes on film acting. “What you see is some people are born with it. Sessa was a senior when he shot “The Holdovers.” He hadn’t acted in front of a camera before, though you’d be hard-pressed to tell by the naturalness of his presence on screen. We called up the drama teacher who said, ‘Oh, yes, we have quite a few who would be happy to try out for your little movie.’ And Dominic was one of them.” “One of the schools we were going to be shooting was Deerfield Academy in Western Massachusetts. He and the casting director decided to call up the schools they were going to be shooting in to see if their drama departments had anyone to recommend. After sifting through some 800 submissions, Payne felt like he still hadn’t found someone to play Angus. The three lead actors are likely to be in the Oscar mix.īut while Giamatti and Randolph are well-known performers, Sessa is appearing in his first film. Focus snapped it up for $30 million - far more than is typical - a sign of the indie distributor's belief in the movie as a crowd-pleaser and an awards contender. When Payne screened “The Holdovers” for buyers at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, it prompted heated interest. ![]() Not casting aspersions on others, I just think there’s nothing he cannot do.” I told (screenwriter) David Hemingson: ‘We’re writing for Paul Giamatti. “I was waiting for the right thing - and created it. “I wanted to work with that guy again for 20 years,” he says. If Giamatti’s “Sideways” character - a lonely unpublished writer with a manuscript no one wants to read - was in need of a road trip to jostle him out of a rut, his Hunham is likewise due for some self-reflection and maybe a little encouragement.įor Payne, it was a long-overdue reunion. Digging into each character’s life, “The Holdovers” ruminates on privilege in class and race, while steadily building an anti-authoritarian streak for the much-espoused supposedly high-minded ideals of Barton. Something remarkably tender and stirring follows. And while there is some of that, Payne pares the group down to Hunham, Angus (Dominic Sessa), a bright student who’s one mishap away from being sent to a lesser school (and thus likely to Vietnam) and Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), a grieving school cook whose son has recently died in the war. The set-up could be broad: a gang of outcasts and troublemakers sneaking joints while the widely loathed Hunham chases them down the halls. “The Holdovers” reunites Payne with Paul Giamatti nearly two decades after the actor’s memorable, merlot-loathing breakthrough performance in “Sideways.” This time, Giamatti plays a curmudgeonly Barton Academy classics teacher named Paul Hunham tasked to stay at school with a handful of kids without family plans over the Christmas break. I hope it lends it the warmth of nostalgia, the warmth of a lost time, maybe even some traces of memory.” “I don’t think it makes the movie quaint. “I was just trying to replicate the experience of the movies I love as much as possible,” says Payne. After decades of making contemporary films that in some way evoke a ’70s sensibility of cinema, he’s finally made the genuine article. Payne, the filmmaker of “Election,” “Sideways” and “The Descendants,” has long made “the kind of films they don’t make anymore”: smart, funny, melancholic dramas for adults. 10, is Payne’s first film in six years and it’s one of his best. “The Holdovers,” which Focus Features will release Oct. “We were trying to play the exercise of: We are in 1970 making this movie,” he says. Payne, 62, shot “The Holdovers,” set at a New England boarding school, largely with filmmaking equipment and camera lenses from that period. “We were very fully making a ’70s movie,” Payne says, recently speaking by phone from his desk in Omaha, Nebraska. Payne’s latest film, “The Holdovers,” isn’t just set in 1970, it seeks to imbibe the humanistic spirit of films like “The Last Detail,” “Harold and Maude," “The Landlord” and “Paper Moon" - all movies he screened for his cast and crew. But Alexander Payne wanted to take it a step further. NEW YORK – The great films of the 1970s have long loomed in the imagination of filmmakers raised during one of the most fertile periods of American movies.
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