Director Alexander Payne returns to the golden age of Hollywood in the 1970s with “The Holdovers.”

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Long live the drama is the quiet rallying cry of director Alexander Payne.

For more than a quarter-century, the Oscar winner — whose credits include “Sideways,” “The Descendants” and “Nebraska” — has been one of the few directors responsible for keeping the comic book genre alive. Film zeitgeist.

His latest creation is the throwback film “The Holdovers,” which opens in theaters Friday and finds him once again teaming up with “Sideways” actor Paul Giamatti.

Set in the early 1970s, the narrative follows a miserly teacher (Giamattti) at a New England prep school who is forced to stay on campus during the holiday break to care for a group of students with nowhere to go.

Eventually, he forms an unlikely bond with a damaged but smart troublemaker (Dominic Sessa) and the school’s head cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who has just lost a son in Vietnam.

We recently spoke with Payne about dining at Sokolowski’s University Inn, his love of drama and working again with Giamatti.

Hello Alexander. Before we talk about “The Holdovers,” have you ever been to Cleveland?

In 2019 I was looking for a movie that was the only project I was involved in that was completely ready and ready to go and we had to stop it four or five days before production started. I was encouraged to reside in Ohio because of the tax incentives. So I flew to Cleveland and spent three or four days. I did the same thing in Columbus and Cincinnati. I ended up in Cincinnati but really enjoyed Cleveland. I had a 1930 WPA United States Guide, so I walked around downtown Cleveland with that guide in hand. I went down to the river, the lake, the museum (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) of course and some famous Polish restaurants (Sokolowski University Inn) on a hill where you have a tray and go down to the cafeteria line. I enjoyed that. In downtown Cleveland, I loved those beautiful arcades. I took a historical tour with a guide. It was well intentioned, but I ended up correcting it with things I read about in my WPA manual. I also remember that beautiful old bank that had a gourmet grocery store. I liked that.

We need you to shoot a movie in Northeast Ohio.

Well, you know the one who did it was Noah Baumbach, who filmed White Noise there. I was jealous of him. It was definitely Sophie’s choice when I ended up in Cincinnati.

Congratulations to the “retainers”. How did you come up with a story set in the early 1970s in a New England prep school?

I love old movies. At the Telluride Film Festival about 12 years ago, I saw a 1935 French film called Merlus, a lesser-known film by a famous director of the period named Marcel Pagnol. The story didn’t stick with me, but I came away thinking this was a good premise for a movie. I’ll have to look into that one day and try to write a version of it. When I say research, it means going to New England and spending some time in those (boarding) schools. I went to Jesuit High School in Omaha, which was all-boys, so I had that in common, but I didn’t have the experience of Choate, Exeter, Andover, Deerfield. I’ve never gotten to that. I was doing other things, and a few years ago, I read the script for a TV pilot by David Hemmingson, set in a boarding school. It was really good. I called him up and said, “Hey man, I have an idea for a movie set in the same world. I think you’re more qualified than me to write it, at least to put it on its feet. Would you consider doing it?” He did that, and that’s how the script came about.

Your films tend to have a classic 70s Hollywood feel, which is highlighted perfectly in the opening of “The Holdovers” with the old Universal logo followed by the 60s-like Focus Features logo and the old 70s MPAA rating card. How aware are you of how your films fit into the modern world of filmmaking?

This part is because I’ve been telling myself that from the beginning — I’m still trying to make ’70s movies. I’m 62 years old, graduated high school in 1979. My friends and I, who were movie nerds and watched everything, didn’t know we were in a golden age. You never know when you’re in the golden age. And it wasn’t until later that we looked back and said, “Oh, that was like the last golden age of commercial Hollywood films for adults and educated people.” Now they’re considered art films or something, but back then that was the movies. This was what was imprinted on me as the kind of film you want to make if you’re an American director. So when I dropped out of UCLA film school 10 years later, I didn’t change. The film landscape has changed. The culture has changed but I still want to make these films. Now I, and other directors like me who just want to tell human stories, human comedy and human drama, are rare birds. It’s just that, in the old days, it was car chase movies that had to have small budgets and adult movies had bigger budgets. Now it’s quite the opposite. If you have a car chase movie or a movie where people fly, you’re going to get hundreds of millions of dollars to make the movie, but if you just want a nice human story, your budget is going to be limited.

Paul Giamatti is great in The Holdovers. What was it like working with him again?

We have a rare creative harmony. We both understand the movie we’re making. I’ve had a lot of good actors to work with over the eight films I’ve made, but there’s something about Paul Giamatti that makes him a perfect vessel for the tone. He really understands the tone I’m going for, which is to do dramatic, if not tragic, things with comedic finesse and do comedic things with absolute seriousness. And you just love him. You just love looking at him.

Finally, considering it’s been nearly 20 years since “Sideways,” will we have to wait another two decades before she works again with Giamatti?

No, life’s too short not to work with Paul Giamatti.