Yahoo Finance Alexander Payne Taps His ‘Sideways’ Star Paul Giamatti For ‘The Holdovers:’ Hot Cannes Package
EXCLUSIVE: Alexander Payne has set Paul Giamatti to star in The Holdovers, a David Hemingson-scripted film that Mark Johnson is producing. FilmNation will rep international rights and CAA Media Finance will handle domestic as the film is shopped in the Cannes Virtual Market next week. Production will begin early next year in New England.
Payne and Giamatti teamed memorably on the 2004 wine tasting road-trip comedy Sideways, which won Payne and Jim Taylor Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay. The Holdovers is a comedy, with the poignancy and grounded characters of past films including Nebraska, The Descendants and Sideways.
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Giamatti plays a universally disliked teacher at the prep school Deerfield Academy. His non-fans include his students, fellow faculty and headmaster who all find his pomposity and rigidity exasperating. With no family and nowhere to go over Christmas holiday in 1970, Paul remains at school to supervise students unable to journey home. After a few days, only one student holdover remains — a troublemaking 15-year-old named Angus, a good student undermined by bad behavior that always threatens to get him expelled. Joining Paul and Angus is Deerfield’s head cook Mary, an African-American woman who caters to sons of privilege and whose own son recently was lost in Vietnam. These three very different shipwrecked people form an unlikely Christmas family, sharing comic misadventures during two very snowy weeks in New England, and realizing that none of them are beholden to their past.
Payne got the idea after watching a 1930s French film, but he had no background in the boarding school life.
“I came across a writing sample for a pilot set in a prep school by David Hemingson,” Payne told Deadline. “I called him, told him the idea, and he jumped at it. Ever since I worked with Paul in Sideways, I’ve wanted to work with him again, and this role is tailor made for him. I continue to think now as I did then. … I hate to use the term the finest actor of his generation because there are so many wonderful actors. But when I worked with him on Sideways, I was astounded by his range. As a director you want actors who can make even bad dialogue work, and he can do that. He can just do anything. I think it’s a matter of time before he gets his Oscar.”
He becomes the fulcrum for the unlikely trio.
“The story focuses on one kid in particular, a real smart-ass troublemaker who’s 15 years old and a good kid underneath,” Payne said. “His widowed mother has recently married a rich guy and she wants to use this vacation as her honeymoon. At the last minute she breaks the kid’s heart and tells him he has to stay at the school. Selected this year [to watch the stranded students] is Paul Giamatti, this curmudgeonly walleyed disliked history teacher. Eventually, the other three or four boys find other places to go and it becomes a two-hander, but actually a three-hander because of the cook who stays behind and it becomes about the adventures of these three over a very snowy Christmas holiday in New England.”
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