Director Alexander Payne harkens back to golden age of ‘70′s Hollywood with ‘The Holdovers’

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Long live drama is the quiet rally cry of director Alexander Payne.

For more than a quarter of a century, the Academy Award-winner — whose credits include “Sideways,” “The Descendants” and “Nebraska” — has been one of a few filmmakers responsible for keeping the genre alive during the comic book movie zeitgeist.

His latest creation is the throwback film, “The Holdovers,” which opens Friday in theaters and finds him once again teaming up with “Sideways” actor Paul Giamatti.

Set in the early ‘70s, the narrative follows a curmudgeonly instructor (Giamatti) at a New England prep school who is forced to remain on campus during the holiday break to babysit a handful of students with nowhere to go.

Eventually, he forms an unlikely bond with a damaged but brainy troublemaker (Dominic Sessa) and the school’s head cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who has just lost a son in Vietnam.

We recently chatted with Payne about eating at Sokolowski’s University Inn, his love of drama and working again with Giamatti.

Hello, Alexander. Before we chat about “The Holdovers,” have you ever been to Cleveland?

I was scouting in 2019 for a movie that’s the only project I’ve been involved with that was fully prepared and all ready to go and we had to pull the plug on it four or five days before production started. I was encouraged to base in Ohio because of the tax incentives. So I flew into Cleveland and spent three or four days. I did the same thing in Columbus and Cincinnati. I wound up basing in Cincinnati but I really enjoyed Cleveland. I had a WPA Guide to the States that came out in 1930 so I walked around downtown Cleveland with that in my hand. I went down to the river, the lake, the (Rock & Roll Hall of Fame) museum, of course, and some famous Polish restaurant (Sokolowski’s University Inn) on a hill where you have a tray and go down the cafeteria line. I enjoyed that. In downtown Cleveland, I liked those beautiful arcades. I took a historic tour with a guide. She meant well, but I wound up having to correct her with stuff I reading about in my WPA Guide. I also remember that lovely old bank that has a gourmet grocery store in it. I liked that.

We need you to shoot a film in Northeast Ohio.

Well, you know who did was Noah Baumbach, who shot “White Noise” there. I was kind of jealous of him. It was definitely a Sophie’s choice when I wound up basing in Cincinnati.

Congrats on “The Holdovers.” How did you land on a story based in the early ‘70s at a New England prep school?

I like old movies. At the Telluride Film Festival about 12 years ago, I saw a 1935 French movie called “Merlusse,” a lesser-known film by a famous director of the period named Marcel Pagnol. The story didn’t stick with me but I walked out thinking that’s a good premise for a movie. I’ll have to research that one day and try to write some version of that. When I say research, it’s to go out to New England and spend time at those (boarding) schools. I went to a Jesuit high school in Omaha, which was all-boys, so I had that in common, but I hadn’t had that Choate, Exeter, Andover, Deerfield experience. I had never gotten around to that. I was doing other stuff and a few years ago, I read a TV pilot script by David Hemingson that took place in a boarding school. It was really good. I called him up and said, “Hey man, I have this idea for a film set in that same world. I think you’re more qualified than I to write it, at least to get it up on its feet. Would you consider doing that?” And he did, so that’s how the screenplay came about.

Your films tend to have a classic ‘70s Hollywood feel, which is perfectly accented in the opening of “The Holdovers” with an old Universal logo followed by a 1960′s-looking Focus Features logo and a 1970′s vintage R-rating MPAA card. How cognizant are you of where your films fit into the modern filmmaking world?

That part I am because I’ve been telling myself that from the get-go — I’m still trying to make ‘70s movies. I’m 62 years old, I graduated from high school in 1979. My friends and I, who were movie crazy and saw everything, didn’t know we were in a golden age. You never know when you’re in a golden age. It wasn’t until later that we looked back and went, “Oh, that was like the last golden age of adult, literate, Hollywood commercial movies.” Now they’re considered art films or something, but at that time that’s what movies were. That was what was imprinted on me as the type of movie you want to make if you’re an American director. So when I got out of UCLA film school 10 years later, I hadn’t changed. The film landscape had changed. The culture had changed but I still wanted to make those movies. Now I and other directors like me who just want to tell human stories, human comedies and human dramas are considered rare birds. The thing is too, in the old days it was the car chase movies that had to have tiny budgets and the adult movies had the bigger budgets. Now, it’s completely the opposite. If you have a car chase movie or a movie where people fly, you get hundreds of millions of dollars to make the movie, but if you just want to have a nice human story your budget is shrink-wrapped.

Paul Giamatti is fabulous in “The Holdovers.” What was it like working with him again?

We have a rare creative harmony. We both understand the movie we’re making. I’ve had a lot of good actors to work with during the eight features I’ve made, but there’s something about Paul Giamatti that makes him a perfect vessel of tone. He really understands the tone I’m going for, which is to do dramatic, if not tragic things, with comic panache and do comic things with utter seriousness. And you just love him. You just love looking at him.

Finally, considering it’s been nearly 20 years since “Sideways,” will we have to wait another two decades before you work again with Giamatti?

No, life is too damn short not to work with Paul Giamatti.