Santa Barbara Film Fest: Paul Giamatti Talks ‘The Holdovers,' ‘Sideways' and Everything in Between, Joking, "I've Played a Lot of Snakes, Haven't I?"

Santa Barbara Film Fest: Paul Giamatti Talks ‘The Holdovers,’ ‘Sideways’ and Everything in Between, Joking, “I’ve Played a Lot of Snakes, Haven’t I?”

Adding to his awards season accolades, Paul Giamatti was honored with the Cinema Vanguard Award at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival on Wednesday, where he sat down for a conversation about his long career and journey to The Holdovers.

In a 75-minute chat moderated by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg, Giamatti walked the Santa Barbara audience through his pivot from wanting to study primate anthropology to pursuing acting after his father died. He reflected on early roles in Private Parts, Planet of the Apes (“I was really disappointed I couldn’t play a gorilla. I was like, ‘I can’t be a gorilla, why not?’ They’re like, ‘You look more like an orangutan'”) and eventually American Splendor, where he said, “I remember at the time thinking, this is probably the first and last time I’m gonna lead [a movie] like this.”

Despite the critical success of that film, Giamatti said it didn’t result in many job offers, and he had a fallow period until meeting with Alexander Payne for 2004’s Sideways – which particularly resonated with the crowd, as it’s set in the surrounding California wine country.

“It changed everything – the parts I got were different and I think people’s reaction to me was different,” the star said of Sideways. “American Splendor was one thing, but it was a very kind of bizarre character in a lot of ways; this is a more, not standard leading man or something like that, but I think it made people see me differently. The parts got different, and in an interesting way – a lot of the supporting parts got more interesting.” Giamatti also never had to audition again after the project, though he noted he sometimes misses auditioning because it’s an important part of the acting process.

He also admitted that although he thought Sideways was a special movie, he isn’t as sold on his own performance. “I hardly have ever felt like I’ve gotten it right, which is why I think I keep doing it, because one day I’m gonna get it right,” Giamatti explained. “I almost never look at something and go, ‘yeah, I nailed it.'”

Throughout the conversation he also touched on roles in Cinderella Man, John Adams, 12 Years a Slave (“I’ve seen that movie once and I don’t know that I can handle seeing it again”), The Ides of March, Straight Outta Compton and many in between, a journey down memory lane that forced the actor to realize, “Good lord, I’ve played a lot of snakes, haven’t I?”

That trend continued with his seven-season stint on Billions (which wrapped in October of last year), something he’d never done before in playing a character for years but “was a lot of fun. It was a strange character to play for that long. The S&M stuff was great, I enjoyed doing that, I actually did it. I was a little disappointed when they got rid of it, I was like, ‘Where’d the S&M stuff go?'”

That brings Giamatti’s acting timeline to current day: reuniting with Payne for The Holdovers, which has landed him a best actor Oscar nomination.

It’s been 19 years since their last collaboration, though Giamatti said the director had wanted the actor to join his 2017 film Downsizing, but “then the budget for that movie was such that it was fiscally irresponsible to cast me, so they went with Matt Damon. That’s what you do: you can’t get me, Damon’s phone rings,” Giamatti deadpanned.

Giamatti and Payne have remained friends throughout the years – and have hopes of working together on “a private detective thing, because Alexander says he wants to see me get beat up and shot at” – and after a number of scheduling delays The Holdovers finally came together. In the film, Giamatti plays a curmudgeonly teacher at a New England prep school who stays on campus during Christmas break to babysit the students who have nowhere to go for the holiday.

“I went to one of those schools, I went to one only about 10 years after the movie takes place. It’s hard for me to even really parse out all the different things going into this. It’s a lifetime of being around people like this,” the star explained. “When I watch the movie, it’s like they say life flashes before your eyes – I see all of these people manifesting in this performance and it’s almost hard for me to watch sometimes, because it’s just weird to see my life manifesting in some ways that’s really kind of cool.”

He also joked about the 1970-set film being considered a period piece (“I was alive!”) and spoke about the process of creating his fake eye for the film, courtesy of makeup artist Cristina Patterson. It looks so real, Giamatti said, that “a guy I grew up with since I was five years old saw the movie and he said to me afterwards that the first 20 minutes he was like, ‘My god, have I never noticed the poor guy has a screwed up eye?’ I was like, ‘Are you an idiot?'”

Giamatti also touched on his current awards moment, noting it makes him feel like “maybe I did the right thing with my life. That’s the nicest thing about it, that it’s like I did the right thing and what I do seems to matter to people.” Following the conversation, Sideways costar Virginia Madsen presented Giamatti with his SBIFF honor, as Giamatti told the crowd, “It’s really nice to get this from the hands of Ms. Madsen and it’s really nice to get it here, because we left a little piece of our heart and soul in this place.”

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