Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti will meet again in The Holdovers , a film that will try to find a distributor by selling in the virtual market of the Cannes Film Festival. The two have not met since Between the Cups , the film that won 5 nominations at the Oscars in 2005. The return of both to a joint production will be written this time by David Hemingson, who is best known for being a screenwriter on television series comical like Whiskey Cavalier . The Holdovers will begin production in early 2022.
The story synopsis, provided by Deadline tells of a professor, played by Giamatti who is hated by the majority at Deerfield Academy . But his detractors are not only students, since his colleagues and the director of the center find his rigidity and his constant demand for attention annoying. Set in Christmas 1970, the character who has no relatives stays at school during the Christmas break to keep an eye on students who cannot travel home. In the end, the Academy is left with only him and among the students Angus, a boy who is a good student but has a bad behavior , threatened by Giamatti with expulsion. They will be joined by Mary, an African-American woman who is a cook at the school and who recently lost a son in the Vietnam War. This unlikely Christmas family will bond with comic misadventures for two snowy weeks in New England . The association between Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti promises to be another gamble aimed at the great awards circuit.
The director praised the actor in the interview for Deadline: “Since I worked with Paul in Entre copas I have wanted to collaborate with him again and this role is tailor-made for him (…) I hate using the term best actor of his generation because there are so many wonderful actors. But when I worked with him on Entre copas I was surprised by his level. As a director, you want actors who can make even bad dialogue work, and he can. It can do anything. I think it ‘s a matter of time before he gets his Oscar. “
