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Longtime friends and collaborators, director-screenwriter-producer Alexander Payne and editor Kevin Tent, ACE reunite for their eighth feature film, comedy-drama The Holdovers, which has been generating awards buzz.
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Set in 1970, The Holdovers tells
the tale of Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a curmudgeonly instructor at a New
England prep school who remains on campus during Christmas break to babysit a
handful of students with nowhere to go. He soon forms an unlikely bond with a
brainy but damaged troublemaker, and also with the school’s head cook, a woman
who just lost a son in the Vietnam War.
Since their first project together, Citizen
Ruth in 1996, the duo has made Election, About
Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants (for which
Tent was nominated for an Academy Award), Nebraska and Downsizing.
Payne was Oscar nominated for adapting the screenplays for Election,
Sideways and The Descendants (winning twice) and nominated
as best director for Sideways, The Descendants and Nebraska.
In keeping with these stories, The
Holdovers is character-driven so don’t expect car chases, gunfights or
explosions. “It is about people and the pain they carry in their lives and how
opening oneself up to others around you can help relieve that pain and
sometimes maybe even help you to grow,” describes The Rough Cut host Matt Fuery, who talked with both Payne and Tent for the
Avid-sponsored podcast.
Payne conceived the basic framework for the movie
about a dozen years ago after watching a restoration of the 1935 French comedy Merlusse. About five years ago, he received a TV pilot out
of the blue, which prompted him to call the writer, David Hemingson.
“I said, ‘Hey, you’ve written a great
pilot. I don’t want to do it, but would you consider writing a story for me?’
That’s how it happened.”
The Holdovers is
among the few occasions where Payne has not worked from his own script,
although Tent says this made no difference to his craft approach.
“On The Descendants we really
toned back the comedy because it felt a little forced, but here the tone kind
of came prepackaged into the cutting room. Nothing ever seemed forced.”
The Holdovers largely focuses on two or three main characters, which means that for an editor there aren’t a lot of places to hide when the director has shot long takes of dialogue and reaction.
“Sometimes it is tricky,” Tent
agrees, “because Alexander gets amazing performances, but I think it is because
he lets them take their time and find the lines properly.
“We try not to cut too much. It is a
challenge to keep things moving, picking up the pace, but keeping the
performances solid. We had some challenging scenes because we had a couple of
fairly long talking scenes, and we’re trying to condense them as the film was
evolving.”
He adds, “We tightened in a lot of
the scenes to get to where the boys were leaving sooner. And we’re always doing
that internally within scenes, dropping lines, that kind of stuff.
“But I think the screenplays really
is so amazing. Just the reveal of Paul, as you dig deeper into Paul, you find
out so late in the movie that he basically ran away from home, and then you
find out that his dad beat them. Normally, people try to set all those things
up right in the beginning, and I really appreciated the way things were slowly
revealed here.”
The film’s 1970 setting is evoked
with needle drops of classic tracks by The Allman Brothers Band, The
Temptations and The Swingle Singers, among others.
“Mindy Elliot, our associate editor
and assistant editor, started putting music in and then we work with music
editor Richard Ford, who helped us with both score and needle drops,” Tent
says.
“With needle drops you can’t get too
committed to anything because it costs so much money and it’s just such a back
and forth with [licensing]. But in the beginning on this movie, I couldn’t
really hear the music in it. Mindy suggested putting in one of the Swingle
Singers’ Christmas songs and that became something dramatic that we use a lot,
which was great.”
Tent also talked about the use of dissolves, a
signature Payne-Tent storytelling technique. “We use a lot of them in The
Holdovers, but we’ve always used them. It’s been part of our film language
all the way back to Citizen Ruth. There’s a couple of really
interesting ones in The Holdovers. I think that actually
people thought were mistakes at first, and we’re like, ‘No, we did that on
purpose.’”
With Jami
Philbrick at Moviefone,
Payne elaborates on the 1970s setting. “I don’t remember exactly the moment,
but connecting the dots, I thought it would be neat for the movie, to just give
it something special. Nebraska’s in black and white, which just
gives it something a little special formally. I just thought, ‘Well, wouldn’t
it give this movie something special if we make it look and sound like a movie
made in 1970.’
“But what it did, especially as my
first period film, was give us the idea that we’re pretending that we’re
working in 1970 making a low-budget contemporary film at that point. I think
that helped our sense of aesthetic, that the sets and the costumes look as
lived in, grimy and old as they would’ve been had we been making just a low
budget contemporary movie back then.”
He adds, “I always put a lot of thought into the
movies in terms of what car the protagonist drives. It’s always an important
thing to think about. It tells you as much about the character as their
apartment does. The good ones, I think, were Paul Giamatti’s red Saab in Sideways.
Then the best one is Matthew Broderick’s Ford Festiva, a little teeny tiny
pathetic Ford Festiva in Election.”
Seventies movies were formative for the 62-year old filmmaker, as he recounts to Jake Coyle reporting for AP News. Payne screened several classics for crew and cast including The Graduate, The Last Detail, Paper Moon, Harold and Maude and Klute.
“We weren’t trying to consciously
emulate the look and feel of any single one of those films but we all wanted to
splash around in the films of our contemporaries, had we been making a movie
then.
“My birthday parties, we’d go see Chinatown or One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But that’s the period when I was a teenager
and a sense of taste was being imprinted on me. And what I was told was a
commercial American feature film. Now they’re considered art films or whatever,
the last golden age. Well, you never know when you’re living in a golden age.”
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