Alexander Payne makes 'em like they used to: Fall Movie Preview
The great films of the 1970s have long loomed in the imagination of filmmakers raised during one of the most fertile periods of American movies
NEW YORK (AP) — The great films of the 1970s have long loomed in the imagination of filmmakers raised during one of the most fertile periods of American movies. But Alexander Payne wanted to take it a step further.
Payne’s latest film, “The Holdovers,” isn’t just set in 1970, it seeks to imbibe the humanistic spirit of films like “The Last Detail,”“Harold and Maude," “The Landlord” and “Paper Moon" — all movies he screened for his cast and crew.
“We were very fully making a ’70s movie,” Payne says, recently speaking by phone from his desk in Omaha, Nebraska.
Payne, 62, shot “The Holdovers,” set at a New England boarding school, largely with filmmaking equipment and camera lenses from that period. He mixed it in mono. “We were trying to play the exercise of: We are in 1970 making this movie,” he says.
