In the movie “Sideways” Paul Giamatti worked with Alexander Payne and stayed in a little house in the middle of a large vineyard where he would drive home in darkness with the hills of Napa Valley surrounding him.
“I remember Alexander saying, ‘You two guys are going to do it,’ Giamatti recalls of himself and Thomas Hayden Church. “And we were like, ‘Seriously?'”
Though at the time, Giamatti was a respected character actor this was one of his first times as a lead. Now, 20 years later, he is a leading man in indie gems like “Private Life” and acclaimed series like “John Adams” and “Billions.” These days, his ability to carry a movie is well-known but “Sideways” remains lodged in Giamatti’s memory. “I remember every second of making it,” he said on a recent afternoon in Manhattan.
Giamatti and Payne have now reteamed for “The Holdovers,” marking the long-awaited reunion of the two. The movie is set in a 1970s boarding school in snowy New England and features Giamatti playing Paul Hunham, an irascible classics professor. The film is a broad comedy at first but it peels away to reveal a tender humanistic drama around the trio of Hunham, a bright, less well-off student, and the school’s grieving head cook.
For Giamatti, “Sideways” and “The Holdovers” inevitably prompt reflection on the distance he’s traveled in the intervening decades. “All the stuff in between, I mean the life changes, the professional stuff – it’s just insane. My whole life changed. I got divorced. Massive change,” Giamatti says.
The character of Paul Hunham, like Giamatti’s struggling writer Miles Raymond of “Sideways,” is a prickly misanthrope stuck in a midlife stasis. In Giamatti’s hands, the dialogue of an erudite grouch sings. “Christ on a crutch, what sort of fascist hash foundry are you running?” he says in the film.
Payne and Giamatti have talked for years about making another movie, including a private-eye film and a Western. It wasn’t until Payne got together with screenwriter David Hemingson with the idea of loosely adapting the 1935 French comedy “Merlusse” that they hit on the right project. “I told David Hemingson: We’re writing for Paul Giamatti,” says Payne. “He’s just the best actor. He’s the finest actor. Not casting aspersions on others, I just think there’s nothing he cannot do.”
Giamatti’s father, A. Bartlett Giamatti, was an academic and the movie portrays a setting similar to his upbringing. “He knows I went to a school like that and I had a background like that,” says Giamatti. “A lot it was kind of a big gift of like: You kind of know all of this.”
Asked for an example of how he and Payne work together, Giamatti describes a scene from “Sideways” and his collaboration with Payne on “The Holdovers” as they had their first disagreement. But ultimately, their mutual trust and respect brought a great performance and the movie to completion.
Twenty years ago, Giamatti was surprisingly passed over for an Oscar nomination for “Sideways.” This time, many are predicting he’ll receive his first Academy Award nomination, for the best actor. “That would be lovely if it happened. I’m not counting on anything,” Giamatti says. “But for the first time, I do feel like putting myself behind it because I’d like it to get acknowledged in some way. Whether it’s me or not, that’s fine.”
If Giamatti is nominated, it would be an overdue acknowledgment of one this era’s finest actors. Calling them “schlubs” wouldn’t do justice for the justice he does them. So good at it is Giamatti that you might mistake the very down-to-earth actor for a regular guy, too.
But don’t be fooled. Take Giamatti‘s new podcast, Chinwag, in which he and author Stephen Asma follow their fascinations with things like Sasquatch. Regular guy? “I’m really into weird (expletive),” Giamatti says, cackling. “I’ve always been into really weird (expletive). I said to my friend, ‘I’m tired of not talking about Sasquatch and sitting on the fact that I’m fascinated by UFOs and ghosts.’
