20 facts you might not know about 'The Holdovers'

Payne directed this period piece, which is set in the early 1970s, but his inspiration came from an even earlier movie. He said he was watching the 1935 French film Merlusse when he got the idea of doing a dramedy set at a boarding school.

While Payne had the idea and directed The Holdovers, he did not write the screenplay. Instead, he recalled the pilot for a TV show set in a boarding school written by David Hemingson that he had read. This led Payne to contact Hemingson to have him write the script, which he did. Hemingson is the sole credited writer on The Holdovers.

The Holdovers was Hemingson’s first screenplay, or at least the first that was produced. However, he’s had a long, eclectic career as a TV writer. Hemingson, a former lawyer, first wrote for the classic Nickelodeon show The Adventures of Pete & Pete. He would write for kids' shows and sitcoms, such as Just Shoot Me! and Kitchen Confidential.

Hemingson did, indeed, go to a prep school when he was a kid, though he was in Hartford, Connecticut, not Massachusetts. The writer mined his life for some of the moments found in the screenplay. Evidently, the cherries jubilee incident happened to his mom, and when Hemingson was seven his uncle was indeed solicited on the street, right down to the line, “The kid can wait around the corner” in the film.

One of the biggest roles for Paul Giamatti came in Sideways, the dramedy set in the world of wine. Payne directed that movie. The Holdovers marked the second time Giamatti and Payne have worked together.

Giamatti’s character, the curmudgeonly teacher Paul Hunham, has a lazy eye. The actor does not. Thus, to achieve that effect, Giamatti had to wear a “big, soft contact lens,” which, unsurprisingly, made it quite hard for him to see. Effectively, Giamatti is acting with sight in only one eye throughout The Holdovers.

Payne had the idea to have Paul Hunham’s lazy eye shift throughout the film. This was an effort to attune the audience to the personal confusion of the characters and to try to help visualize the idea of seeing yourself in somebody else’s situation.

In the 1980s, Giamatti attended Choate Rosemary Hall, a boarding school in Connecticut. He is the son of the commissioner of MLB A. Bart Giamatti, after all. While there, the actor had a teacher who was strict and, in his memory, “not a happy man.” Giamatti drew from this experience in crafting the character of Paul Hunham.

Randolph, who plays cafeteria worker Mary Lamb, tried smoking fake cigarettes for the role but did not like the way they looked. She decided to smoke actual cigarettes while filming. However, not wanting to take up smoking in real life, she opted to have her character smoke American Spirits because they were the brand she disliked the most. Randolph managed to avoid taking up smoking long term.

When Paul and Angus go to the liquor store, the clerk behind the counter who rings Paul up and says, “Here you go, killer,” was easy enough to find for the role. Joe Howell is not an actor but an actual employee of the actual liquor store in the scene.

Kai Quinlan, the location manager for The Holdovers, grew up in Massachusetts and worked on films set there such as Spotlight and Black Mass. Barton Academy, a fictional school, is actually comprised of five different Massachusetts schools. Groton, Northfield Mount Hermon, St. Mark’s, Fairhaven, and Deerfield Academy all helped make up Barton.

Since part of the movie was being shot at Deerfield Academy, casting director Susan Shopmaker opened the door for students at the school to audition. One of those students was Dominic Sessa. Not only was Sessa cast, but cast as Angus Tully, one of the three primary characters in the film. The Holdovers was Sessa’s first professional role.

There’s a snowstorm in the script for The Holdovers, and snow can be created artificially. However, sometimes, the weather does the work for you. While the film was shooting at Fairhaven High School during its February break, the area was hit by an actual snowstorm. That allowed the production to use that snowstorm for the movie.

These days, the opening credits of films are short to non-existent. Instead, the credits are saved for the end of the movie, where they can go on for 10 or 15 minutes as people leave the theaters. Back in the day, films had opening credits. The Holdovers, keeping with old-school sensibilities, goes with opening credits. It begins with nearly nine minutes of credits before the film “starts” properly.

Payne's movie is not just set in 1970 and 1971. He decided he wanted the film to look like a movie of that era. Eigil Bryld was hired to be the cinematographer and camera operator. The Danish craftsman described his intent to The Hollywood Reporter: "There's a sense of a spirit of the '70s movies — breaking away from your studios. And all the DPs of the period that I really admired would push the film stock, or they would do handheld or whatever. And then I started thinking, 'That's really what I should be going for.'"

You can’t have a film with a classic look having modern title cards! For the international release, Universal was the distributor, and it has an old-school logo. In America, though, Focus Features was the distributor, and Miramax was one of the producers, and they did not have vintage logos. Graphic designer Nate Carlson (who also created the Barton logo) thus created logos for Focus and Miramax that felt like ‘70s title cards. Miramax was so happy with Carlson’s work that it had him design its new modern logo.

A character study and a dramedy, The Holdovers is not, on the surface, Oscars fodder. However, the movie got five nominations for the Academy Awards. In addition to Best Picture, Hemingson was nominated for Best Original Screenplay. Giamatti was nominated for Best Actor, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph was nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Ultimately, while Randolph won, she was the only one.

For his first film, Sessa came out of the gate getting rave reviews. While the young actor didn’t get an Oscar nomination, he’s received several nominations from different groups. Usually, they are of the “young” or “breakthrough” variety. Indeed, Sessa won Best Young Performer at the Critics’ Choice Awards and Best Breakthrough Performance at the Independent Spirit Awards.

The first take for one scene in The Holdovers was flubbed by Sessa. To be fair, it’s understandable. It’s a scene where the actor had to dial a rotary phone, and he had no clue how to do it. After all, he grew up in a world mostly lacking in landlines, much less rotary phones.

The boost of all the good notices from his first work surely gave Sessa a choice of follow-up projects. His next reported role has already arrived. Sessa has been announced as a member of the cast of the film Tow , which stars Rose Byrne and will be directed by TV veteran Stephanie Laing.