Filmmaker Alexander Payne doesn’t exactly have the corner on curmudgeonly Paul Giamatti performances, or unexpected road trip movies that result in deeply emotional bonds, or stories about found families, or even tales about high school teachers who really, really need to get their lives in order. Still, those do tend to be his most recognizable hallmarks.
They’re all on display in his latest, the Christmastime dramedy “The Holdovers,” which stars Paul Giamatti as, yes, a curmudgeonly high school teacher who needs to get his life in order, and ends up (sort of) doing that by way of an unexpected road trip and the forging of a found family (including Da’Vine Joy Randolph and newbie Dominic Sessa).
“The Holdovers” sounds like pure Payne, right? It is, but it’s also a David Hemingson effort, with the longtime television writer picking up his first film credit with the script, which may also land him in the Oscar race. But say it sounds like a Payne film, and Hemingson (who also produced the film) couldn’t be more pleased.
“When you say it sounds like he wrote it, I take that as a colossal compliment,” Hemingson said during a recent interview with IndieWire. While Hemingson is the only credited screenwriter on the film, he’s all too happy to talk about Payne’s contributions to the script, many of them by way of good, old-fashioned process.
“He would guide me toward specific character revelations and character terms, but not by telling me what to write, by gently looking at what I was doing and saying, ‘Can we go further here? What aren’t we saying here? What do we need to say without words here?’” Hemingson said. “This is one of my favorite examples of what happened: We were looking for a specific mood for a scene, and the mood and the steps of the narrative in an Alexander Payne movie go hand in hand, the feeling you get and the personal revelation are inextricable. He said to me, ‘We want to feel that there’s a sense of loss, but there’s also a sense of hope.’”
Then Payne said, “It’s like ‘The Breaking Point,’” which Hemingson heard simply as “the breaking point.” But Payne meant “The Breaking Point,” Michael Curtiz’s last studio picture, a crime drama from 1950. “I’m writing all this down,” Hemingson recalled. “And Alexander goes, ‘There’s something [in it]. Anyway, just take a look.’ I’m like, ‘Take a look? OK.’ This is so emblematic of our relationship.”
He got the film, started watching it, and had no idea what the hell Payne was referring to that would apply to “The Holdovers.” “I’m watching it, and I’m 40 minutes in, and then all of a sudden, I’m like, ‘Oh, my God!’ I remember seeing these characters, and there was a twist that you did not see coming that completely illuminated the emotional landscape of one of the characters. I’m like, ‘Oh, oh, oh, that’s what he wants. He wants that kind of revelation.’”
Hemingson, best known for his television work on everything from “Whiskey Cavalier,” “Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23,” and “Just Shoot Me,” wasn’t even looking for a movie-sized revelation when he first wrote what would become “The Holdovers.” In its infancy, the film was actually a TV series that Hemingson hoped to call “Stonehaven,” after the fictitious school at its center.
“The origin story was a pilot that I wrote, called ‘Stonehaven,’ which is the exact story of me going to this school in Hartford — which, by the way, is a brilliant school, and I have nothing but incredibly fond memories and complete and total devotion and loyalty to [it]. [Payne] read it and he called me up out of the blue,” Hemingson said. “It’s like you’re a session musician being called to play with The Beatles. He’s like, ‘I read your piece, and I really loved it, but I don’t do TV. Should I do TV?’ and I said, ‘Yes, you should. You should do my TV show.’”
Payne didn’t bite on the TV thing (Hemingson recalls him basically saying, “I don’t think so, but I would like you to write a movie for me in this arena”). Beyond that, Payne had one other ask: He wanted it to be set in the ‘70s, all the better to feel like a Hal Ashby film (Hemingson also recalls him saying, “I want to make a Hal Ashby movie”).
First step: find out what that means. “I was an attorney. I trained as a lawyer, and I quit my practice to be a writer, so I have had to teach myself along the way,” Hemingson said. “And then I had this incredible opportunity to work with this brilliant, Oscar-winning filmmaker. It was like going to school. I had to start really researching and understanding.” (He boned up on Ashby films, plus Amy Scott’s 2018 documentary “Hal,” moving quickly into Robert Altman and Bob Rafelson films, too.)
It wasn’t just Hemingon’s exuberance toward learning what Payne gravitated toward. It was also something impossible to teach: experience.
“It doesn’t seem to make any sense, but this was more like he saw, I think, in the Stonehaven pilot, ‘Oh, this guy can write,’” Hemingson said with a laugh, when asked how he snagged Payne’s attention. “Thank God he thought that! But also, he saw this very specific experience, and he was like, ‘I didn’t have that experience. I didn’t go to that school.’ Alexander’s got a lot of integrity as a person and as a filmmaker. He’s like, ‘I want to do this accurately. This guy seems like he knows how to do it.’”
Despite how crisply Hemingson writes of the private school experience — and how often the film’s fictitious institution Barton Academy has been billed as a stand-in for Massachusetts’ lauded prep school Deerfield Academy — the writer attended a day school located in Hartford, Connecticut. But he knew a lot of Deerfield types, and he got to understand the personalities who populate schools like it.
“Barton Academy is only very loosely based, in the most general possible sense, on Deerfield. It’s not really based on Deerfield as much as it is the idea of that classic New England prep school,” he said. He was amused when Payne, building out on this “idea” of a school, told the writer that they would be filming at five different locations to best capture “Barton Academy” on film. A real Barton doesn’t exist; it had to be invented.
Giamatti’s character, Professor Paul Hunham? Well, he’s real. The “cranky” (per Focus Features’ own official synopsis of the film) professor isn’t the warmest of fellows when we first meet him, but as he bonds with Angus (Sessa) and Mary (Randolph), we start to see other dimensions. Hemingson based the character on his own Uncle Earl. As the writer explains it, when his parents — a registered nurse and a merchant seaman who ended up going to Yale through the G.I. Bill — got divorced in the ‘60s, it was his uncle who stepped in to help raise young Hemingson.
“Into the breach stepped my uncle, my mother’s sister’s husband. He’s not my uncle by blood, but by marriage,” Hemingson explained. “He was this incredibly brilliant, colorful, hard-nosed World War II vet who had been forced to leave school himself in Washington state because he got marshaled into the war effort, fighting in the Pacific Theater.”
Hemingson can’t say enough about him, and much of what he loved about Earl found its way into Paul Hunham. “He was an autodidact who spoke seven languages, worked for the United Nations as a press officer, but was conversational in about seven languages, had lived in England, traveled all over the world after the war,” he said. “He was this incredibly smart but also down-to-earth guy. He taught me how to hunt and fish. He gave me this strange but beautiful gospel of how to approach life that was entirely his own. He had this Roman philosophy thing going on, but it collided with this deep reverence for Dickens and Thackeray. He was just this incredible raconteur who also, without a doubt, spoke in a very strange patois. He cursed in the most baroque and fantastic way. A lot of that beautiful vulgarity that comes out of Paul that’s both critical and loving at the same time toward Angus, that’s him.”
And he had a unique outlook on life, which Hemingson is still trying to articulate. “He had this, at once incredibly jaded, almost post-World War II vision of the world that was undercut by this deep romanticism and belief in humanity,” he explained. “The best way to describe him: hard-candy shell, chewy caramel center. The guy was tough on the outside but incredibly sweet and accessible on the inside. He very much is at the core of who Paul is.”
When the film opens, it doesn’t seem immediately clear how anyone will find that sweet and accessible inside of Giamatti’s character, let alone Randolph’s heartbroken school cook Mary and Sessa’s spiky student Angus. Also a concern: Hunham is tasked with overseeing a group of Christmas holdovers (plural) who are left at Barton during the holiday break, with really only Paul and Mary to keep them from disaster.
“As much as I love this particular wild bunch of kids stranded at the school, I’m like, ‘It’s got to get down,’ because I kept going back to my relationship with my uncle and my disconnect with my father and my intense emotional moments with my mom,” Hemingson said. “Alexander’s whole thing is, where’s the emotional breakthrough? What is stopping these people from communicating? What is stopping them in their lives? Where are the stumbling blocks? Where are the points of connection? Where are the points of disconnection?”
Hemingson eventually chopped down the core group, sloughing off the other students late in the first act and drilling down on Paul, Mary, and Angus. “Then it became a challenge of, ‘OK, how do I reveal these things about them in an organic way?’ That was always going to be the journey, how these three broken, stranded people made this family,” he said. “As incredibly disparate and different as they are from each other, they find a way to love each other and save each other. That was always the goal. I felt like that was the arc of my own life, that I found this, for lack of a better term, salvation in these relationships.”
Without spoiling too much about the end of the film, the three do bond intensely, but it’s not the sort of bond that’s sustainable outside their little holdover bubble. Even if the trio won’t be together again, they’re all forever changed by their experience. I told Hemingson that I found that theme to be incredibly fulfilling, if bittersweet.
“They’re changed forever! Thank you for picking up on that. They won’t be together,” Hemingson said. “One of the most poignant things for me was to write that goodbye scene where Paul and Angus are saying goodbye to each other. What I wanted them to do was hug initially and I’m like, ‘You know what? I don’t think so,’ and Alexander’s like, ‘Absolutely not. Those two men would not hug in 1970.’”
Still, there’s an unscripted moment in the film in which Giamatti and Sessa make the tiniest of movements toward each other. “Paul does this thing that’s just so incredible, where he looks at the kid and they almost take an eighteenth of a step toward each other,” Hemingson recalled. “Then the hands come out, they’re both choking back tears, and the kid just turns and runs and over his shoulder shouts, ‘See you!’ You can see on Paul’s face, like, there goes this kid, there goes this one person that I was able to connect with. He’s watching the kid run away and he’s seeing so many things collapse, but he’s also seeing the possibility. That sense of fulfillment that you mentioned, I’m so deeply gratified that you said that, because that’s exactly what we’re going for. There’s an inevitability to that ending, there’s a beautiful inevitability to that ending, because it’s loss.”
Hemingson attributes that look on Giamatti’s face to an “abbreviated” chat the actor had with Payne during the lensing of the scene (the pair have an “almost telepathic relationship,” he said). But that’s the sort of the heart of it all: a little push from Payne got Giamatti to something glorious, another prod on Hemingson got his script to somewhere deeper. “He never laid a hand on my work in a way that was anything but … [in service to having] me do it,” Hemingson said. “He’s like, ‘I really need you to think about this.’ That way, the film became an organic expression of what I was trying to accomplish.”
So, what’s next? The pair are already working on another script together, a Western, and as far as Hemingson can see it, he’d just like a lot more of that. “It was really this once in a lifetime, ideal collaboration,” he said. “If I never made a movie with anybody but AP again, I’d be happy. Who knows if that’s possible, we’re all polyamorous these days because the market requires it. I consider him to be an incredibly close friend, and he’s a great artist, and I’m just honored to be in his company, honestly, and to be working with him. I hope it goes forward for many years to come.”
A Focus Features release, “The Holdovers” is in limited theaters now, with expansion to follow.
