ALEXANDER PAYNE IS on-brand from the off. He’s with family in Athens, which is a glorious city, we comment. He fixes us with a deadpan stare: “People suffer here, too.”
From the beginning of his career, with 1996’s Citizen Ruth and 1999’s Election, and later taking in the likes of Sideways and Nebraska, Payne has carved a wry and acerbic path. His films chronicle desperate, broken human beings, with hope always trying to break through the cracks, and his latest, The Holdovers, follows through. Pitting together an unlikely pair in an all-male boarding school — unruly student Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) and the grumpy, unpopular history teacher Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) charged with supervising him over Christmas — it’s set almost entirely in the prestigious Barton Academy.
Payne has education in his bones. “I’m so stupid, I was in school until I was 29. Like, half my life,” he laughs. “Yeah, I didn’t get out of graduate school with my master’s degree ’til I was 29.” The idea for The Holdovers came to him after he watched Marcel Pagnol’s 1935 film Merlusse, which has the same premise. Payne was excited about the idea and, having let it percolate for years, commissioned writer David Hemingson to work on a screenplay, Payne inputting his own ideas and rewriting it. His own experiences found their way in.