‘The Holdovers’ writer David Hemingson on assuming it wasn’t really Alexander Payne on the phone but his friend pranking him [Exclusive Video Interview]
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It wasn’t as if “The Holdovers” writer David Hemingson wasn’t already a pretty successful writer and producer. He had built a solid television resume of going back to the mid-1990s on shows like “Just Shoot Me!” and the Bradley Cooper-starring series for Fox in 2005 and ’06 that he created, “Kitchen Confidential.” But he still wasn’t prepared for the phone call he received out of the blue in 2019 from director Alexander Payne. “I was running as series for ABC that I’d created called “Whiskey Cavalier” that we were shooting in Prague, and I’d just flown back into LAX. and was dog-tired to the point of delirium getting off this international flight. That’s when Alexander cold-called me, and I didn’t anticipate the call. When it came through, I somehow assumed that it was my buddy Bob playing a trick on me because he likes to call up and say things like, ‘David Hemingson? Francis Ford Coppola.’ And I once or twice have fallen for it. I give the breathless hello and get led down the garden path and he goes, ‘No no you’re an idiot. Why would Francis Ford Coppola call you?’ So, I tacitly assumed it was a joke.” Watch the exclusive video interview above.
SEEAlexander Payne interview: ‘The Holdovers’ director
Except that in this case, it was no joke. In fact, Hemingson had six years before written a series pilot called “Stonehaven” that he described as a “deeply personal” story about a lower-middle class kid who winds up at the prep school where his dad is teaching, set in 1980 and very much autobiographical. Little did Hemingson know at the time that his agent passed along his script to Niels Mueller, who gave it to his friend Payne. And that’s why Payne was calling. “I was about to tell the caller to F off when I looked down and noticed the Omaha area code. Then I paused and asked, ‘Are you really Alexander Payne?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, last time I checked.’ And he said, ‘I got your script. I love the script.’ Dream is born. He’s going to make my pilot! Then he immediately says, ‘I don’t want to make the pilot.’ Dream dies instantly. But then he says, ‘I have this film that I want to make that’s sort of set in the same arena, and it seems like you know the world very well.’ And I say, ‘I do’.”
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And so, Payne asked the TV writer to write his very first feature script for him, the screenplay that would become, “The Holdovers.” “I agreed immediately because when Alexander Payne calls you out of the blue to write a movie, you say yes immediately,” Hemingson emphasizes. “That’s sort of how it all happened. It just sort of erupted, kind of like Charlie finding the Golden Ticket in ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’.”
Hemingson understands better than anyone that this is not the way things usually work in Hollywood. TV writer-producers don’t get asked to write big budget studio releases for Oscar-winning directors. And beyond that, Hemingson found that Payne gave him “a tremendous amount of latitude” to write the film he wanted to write. He gave him the logline and overarching principle of of a professor and student stuck at boarding school over the Christmas holiday. “I started by roughing out some story ideas, which I would send to him. And he’d sort of say, ‘I like part of this one, but change the following elements or change the ending.’ He’s very much an emotional director, and he was directing me as a writer emotionally. It was like, ‘I want to evoke this feeling, I want to get this sense of anguish or of happiness or connection.’ And so I was kind of working through the plot machinations with those kind of emotional directives. That was kind of how he works.”
After a while, Hemingson stopped wondering “Why me?” and simply took the opportunity and ran with it. “He felt I had a unique kind of purchase on this world and on these emotional dynamics,” he says. “So I think for him, it was the right writer at the right time and the right project. I think the stars aligned for us, and I’m keenly aware of that. I’m just grateful for the opportunity and grateful that he let me really pursue the vision and shape the vision.”
“The Holdovers” from Focus Features is playing in theaters everywhere this holiday season.
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