Awards season standout The Holdovers is all high-octane emotions ready to blow in an unforgivingly cold, white, and rich all-boys school. David Hemingson, a TV writer and producer who has credits on broadcast projects like Kitchen Confidential and Whiskey Cavalier, wrote the film’s script after Alexander Payne heard about his pilot based on his time growing up at Watkinson School in Connecticut. Early on January 23, Hemingson earned his first Oscar nomination, for Best Original Screenplay, for his debut feature project. “It’s been no food and solid caffeine since, but it’s been a delirious and beautiful morning,†he told Vulture a few hours after he got the news from a friend in Chicago. The retro film, soundtracked by Cat Stevens and the Allman Brothers Band, also earned nods for Best Picture, Best Actor for Paul Giamatti’s performance as a stinky middle-aged teacher, Best Supporting Actress for a terrific Da’Vine Joy Randolph, and Best Film Editing.
Set in the 1970s, Payne’s work is an intimate character study. For much of the run-time, only four characters, a curmudgeonly teacher (Giamatti), a grieving cook (Randolph), a troubled teenager (Dominic Sessa), and an affable janitor (Naheem Garcia), occupy the snowy frame. They’re forced together by the fact that they have nowhere else to go and no one else to be with for Christmas. As they begin to grapple with their respective traumas, the characters each find a way to make peace with their strife. And it made a lot of people cry, which is kind of what Hemingson anticipated.
You’re one for one now. One script, one nomination. How are you gonna top that?
[Laughs] Thanks for bringing that up. I have no idea. Look, this one was from the heart and I think that I got incredibly blessed and lucky, having Alexander reach out and ask me to do this. The film is sort of a memory play in many respects. I told as much truth as I could about these people as I remembered them.
Da’Vine took this character and filled that space for her so she could put her experience into it. The same thing can be said for Paul. And Dom, I mean this kid — it’s like he was built in a lab to be a movie actor, not just a star, but a great actor right out of Deerfield Academy. It’s like some Westworld shit.
Why do you think the film resonated with audiences, especially right now?
It’s an honest love story about broken people who find each other. They don’t find each other gradually; they reveal themselves to each other. In a world that is hyperpolarized and when everything is accelerating at the speed of light, the fact that a small movie about broken people who gradually learn to love and trust each other — I was trying to get to some truth but also have some fun with these people.
The film is an emotional roller coaster. At one point you’re laughing hysterically at Paul Giamatti, and at another point you’re sobbing at everyone’s loss. How did you fit such a gutting character study into a pretty conventional structure and script?
From a structural standpoint, there are certain tropes that I ran toward. In a story like this, you wanna hit on certain kinds of markers with the narrative to keep people engaged. I didn’t want it to be Dead Poets Society. I wanted it to be something else between these three people. So, I choppered the other kids off so I could create a sense of intimacy between the characters and, I think, a degree of unexpectedness. I very much wanted people to look at it and go, I think I know where this is going, and then surprise them.
Honestly, a lot of it was taken directly from my life. For example, the scene with the hooker was something that happened with my uncle when I was 7. We were walking dogs, and she approached him and said, “The kid can wait around the corner.†Or the cherries-jubilee scene — that happened at Anthony’s Pier 4 with my mom and her friend when I was about 9 years old. If I can resurrect the feelings I had, the sense of alienation, illness, and calmness that I received from the people I love, in the context of the school that I went to, then something special would happen in the script.
Speaking of this, you place the action in the hyperspecific environment of an all-boys school in 1970 at a time when it was only the poor kids and the Black kids getting drafted in the Vietnam War. At the same time, women’s lib and other civil-rights movements were going on. How did you decide what to put in?
It was a threshold of matter. We decided it was gonna be 1970. We toyed with 1958 for a hot minute. It was 2018 when I started working on it, and we talked, and I said 2018 has more in common with 1978 than it does with 1968, in terms of a forever war going on and the incredible racial injustice that we’re witnessing. I remember growing up around my mother’s brothers, who were janitors at Wesleyan and the courthouse, and I saw Black kids and poor kids going off to war. I thought to myself, This is something that needs to be brought to fore in this film.
How did you get into the heads of these characters?
Even though I was a young kid, you have these early memories that roost in you. I used those. Then, I needed tonal context for the seventies. Certainly Alexander encouraged this: I went back and watched so many of these seventies movies that dealt with the same topics to get a tuning fork so I could strike the right tone for the movie. A ton of Hal Ashby, a ton of Robert Altman, a ton of Francis Ford Coppola, a ton of George Lucas, François Truffaut, and Italian films. That sort of humanist vibe, which is largely absent I think, for many films today. Although, I think we’re going through a renaissance when it comes to humanist filmmaking right now. I think the nominees this year are incredible and resonant, such beautiful, human films.
Well, Paul Giamatti’s character smells like fish. You once described him as odiferous.Â
Alexander gave me this challenge: “Odiferous professor sticks around with five kids.†That was the log line. We wanted to give him as many impediments as possible and then watch him turn into a radiant romantic hero. Paul Giamatti becomes a knight in shining armor, and it’s just a wonder to behold.
And Da’Vine. I had to create space for her that I couldn’t directly commemorate because only she could. She could do more with 30 seconds of silence than most people can do with four pages of dialogue. She’s a remarkable actor.
The scene where she broke down at the Christmas party felt honest.
The emotional core of Mary … I love my mother deeply, and she was hugely important to me. I lost her tragically 25 years ago. And I thought, What if she lost me? It hasn’t been my experience — I know I’m not a Black woman and I can’t imagine the enormity of that loss, that grief. We knew from the get-go that something was gonna happen to this character because she, of all the characters, has made the greatest sacrifice and suffered the greatest trauma. There’s never any doubt from the moment we meet her that she is bearing the weight of a tremendous tragedy, and to see the way Da’Vine occupied the role and showed the entire arc of her — acknowledging that and having to deal with it, confront it, and still maintain that remarkable strength and sense of humor … So I wanted to make space for her in the script to be both incredibly eloquent and also completely silent and to have equal strength in these moments.
Did you think the movie would make people cry as much as it did?
I’m a big believer in no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. My wife would come to my study at one o’clock in the morning sometimes. I would be overwrought, and my wife would knock on the door and ask if I’m all right. I think the tears were just me trying to work through stuff that I always felt about the people who loved and raised me. I’m glad I was able to take some of that and put it in the movie.
What’s next for you?
I am honored to be co-writing a western with Alexander Payne. That’s top of my mind.