Twenty years after glowering under the Napa Valley sun as a dyspeptic wine snob in Alexander Payne’s “Sideways,” Paul Giamatti is back with the filmmaker in “The Holdovers,” this time in the unforgiving Massachusetts winter of 1970. “Everyone’s had a Mr. Hunham Guy,” Giamatti says of his haughty, disdainful character, an irritable high school teacher stuck on campus during Christmas break. “I had a biology teacher very similar to this guy.” The actor’s familiarity with East Coast academia extends beyond simply attending schools like the one in the film: His father was a teacher. “My father was not like [Hunham], but there were my father’s companions who were very happy with their own wit and intelligence, when no one knows what they are talking about. That forgetfulness makes me laugh.”
At first, Mr. HunhI’m not all Scrooge, am I?
He’s not a bad guy. I don’t think he’s wrong about much of what he says directly to the director. He tells that racist little idiot to shut up. Alexander Payne makes a great distinction between kind and kind. And this guy, he may not be nice, but deep down he’s nice.
But he does enjoy the meanness he exerts in the classroom.
I think he likes being an idiot. He introduces himself as one of those British schoolteachers, he’s right up there with that guy. They’re acting a little for you. That’s what he likes. That pedagogy where you transmit ideas through a kind of harsh cruelty. But my biggest concern was making it clear that he wasn’t such a bad guy from the beginning. I’ve had to play a lot of unpleasant people like this, and sometimes I feel like I’ve played it too hard. And I wanted to make sure, because it was important to the tone of this Christmas movie, which is about empathy, that as much as the guy is unpleasant, you’re okay with it.
We are, because you make HunhI’m funny antagonism. When he insults the students, I imagine he thinks his favorite historical figures are laughing with him in spirit.
That’s exactly what he hoped to convey, the great geniuses of classical history brought together, and he belongs to that lineage. Those are his friends; they are the ones who are alive and vibrant to him. He lives in the wrong century. Deeply.
“Everyone’s had a guy like Mr. Hunham,” Paul Giamatti says of his haughty, disdainful high school teacher in “The Holdovers.” “I had a biology teacher very similar to this guy.”
(Seacia Pavao)
Aside from what the script gives you, what inspires you to add in a given scene?
It’s all there. It’s so well written that I don’t know what I bring to it other than what I get from the script. I don’t know, whistle “Ride of the Valkyries” when I give them the papers back? That just happened. He thinks he’s whistling a happy tune, but it’s Wagner. That was something I thought about, I guess. Alexander asked: “What do you want in [his study]?” I said, I think this guy’s vice is mystery novels. You don’t see them, but they are everywhere. The shitty mysteries of paperbacks are their porn. Those things can give you a lot of energy and imagination.
That funny Hunh insertComing across a soccer ball and throwing it with confidence and without any skill is like a joke from the silent film era. Was that written?
Was. Enjoy it. Again, it’s a fantasy to be like Cicero on his morning walk through the Forum or whatever. Alexander Payne is a great silent comedian. He always tells me to keep an eye on Harold Lloyd. We had to shoot several times because Alexander kept telling me that he was throwing it too well. Finally, I thought, in his mind, that he was a shot putter, like the Romans.
Huham’s self-importance is wonderfully undercut by Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s character, Mary, the school’s head cook.
She sees past all that, yes, and that makes everything so much more fun to do. Maria is more open to me. She admits that I’m a mess, but I’m not a bad guy. There is already a relationship with them that is very good and subtle. We talked about that, about the fact that she [thinks], “You’re probably the only person who knows my name.” What I love about Alexander’s films is that those details happen very quickly and you won’t necessarily notice.
It is more believable that these characters reach somewhere that affects but not radical. HunHam learns to care about two people, not all.
And it facilitates a kind of liberation of himself, because I think he’s a guy who wanted to be free without even really knowing that he wanted to be free or knowing how to be free. That’s also Alejandro. This is not a big sudden transformation. It is an incremental change. With any of them you don’t know what’s really going to happen.
