Director - Alexander Payne and Editor - Kevin Tent ACE Longtime friends and collaborators, Alexander Payne and Kevin Tent, reunite once more for their eighth feature film, THE HOLDOVERS!

THE HOLDOVERS tells the tale of Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a curmudgeonly instructor at a New England prep school who remains on campus during Christmas break to babysit a handful of students with nowhere to go. He soon forms an unlikely bond with a brainy but damaged troublemaker, and also with the school's head cook, a woman who just lost a son in the Vietnam War.

Alexander Payne

Director, producer and screenwriter Alexander Payne attended Stanford University, where he majored in Spanish and History. He then went on to study film at UCLA Film School. His university thesis film was screened at the Sundance film festival, which led to him being backed by Miramax to write and direct CITIZEN RUTH (1996).


Kevin Tent ACE

Editor Kevin Tent has the distinction of having edited all of Payne's feature films (as well as a TV pilot); including films such as CITIZEN RUTH (1996), ELECTION (1999), SIDEWAYS (2004) and THE DESCENDANTS (2011) for which Tent received an Oscar nomination. Kevin is currently serving as president of the American Cinema Editors.

In our discussion with Alexander Payne and Kevin Tent ACE from THE HOLDOVERS, we talk about:

The benefits of being an amiable, affordable, and available editor
Demonstrating your abilities to not edit
Coming out of the Criterion closet
Giving a hall pass to laugh early in the film
How it takes an audience to complete a film