Is Easier With Practice the Year's Best Phone-Sex-Identity-Crisis Drama?

It took a momentary fluke for Kyle Patrick Alvarez to discover the idea that would set him on his first filmmaking journey, and three years to arrive at AFI Fest tonight with the finished product. Perhaps fittingly, then, his debut Easier With Practice (which already won Best Feature prizes from juries at both CineVegas and the Edinburgh Film Festival) reflects an uncanny blend of fortune, intuition and assuredness that defies the customary rookie jitters. Not that his phone-sex-and-identity-crisis drama didn't give him pause to begin with, as he told Movieline.

Easier With Practice adapts the true story of Davy Rothbart, a GQ contributor whose 2006 article "What Are You Wearing?" recounted his experience with a stranger named Nicole -- a random night-caller who seduced him into an erotic encounter, later dangling him as he developed romantic feelings for her. Brian Geraghty stars here as Davy, on a book tour with his brother (Kel O'Neill) and haunted by a relationship over which he has no control. As Davy pleads with Nicole to meet him, Easier With Practice folds his schlubby, road-weary heartsickness into an increasingly gripping suspense narrative: Who is this girl, anyway?

Last seen as Jeremy Renner's high-strung fellow bomb-squadder in The Hurt Locker, Geraghty thrives in a breakout leading role, anchored in an epic, one-take phone-sex sequence that mirrors its director's own faith in the chancy material -- and himself. Alvarez spoke to me ahead of tonight's L.A. premiere about do-it-yourself story options, festival anxiety and what Warren Beatty taught him about filmmaking.

So you're finally home at AFI Fest. What are you looking forward to?

The biggest thing is just being able to screen it in L.A. Party because of industry, but partly because I have so many friends here who haven't seen it, and I've been waiting for this opportunity. Secondly, I'm really humbled by the films that we're with in this new category. It's just exciting to be considered in the same category as them. And then the fact that it coincides with the American Film Market, and we're just starting to get the film out into the international market.. I hope that all of that works in tandem and promotes the film.

As far as Easier With Practice itself goes, there's an interesting back story here. You weren't really a GQ reader, yet you wound up just kind of discovering this piece almost accidentally?

Yeah, well, I was working as a personal assistant for Warren Beatty. I was about a year in -- I'd only been living in L.A. for a year -- and I knew I just needed to go and try to make a film and take that risk. So it was actually during my two weeks' notice. It wasn't really that I didn't read GQ; it was that I'd subscribed to another magazine that just folded, and Condé Nast just filled my subscription with GQ. Just one of those strange things like that. I was definitely hungry for a story that I loved, but it was also the kind of story I could tell. I felt really lucky to have found it, but I didn't have any way to reach Davy Rothbart, who wrote it. A friend of mine who was an assistant at agency made some calls for me -- not really lying, but saying, "Hey, I'm calling from such-and-such to inquire about this." Which definitely helped us; otherwise I would have just been some guy calling to buy the rights.

So eventually I got in touch with Davy, and we had a couple of phone calls. I pitched my perspective on it, and he was gracious enough to say yes and trust me with it. He could easily have had cold feet and just said no. But the legal process took so long; I'd never read a contract in my life, and I kind of had to learn along the way. I'd never negotiated anything. But by then I'd lived with it for so many months, and writing it wasn't really that much of a process. I'd already outlined it and worked out the issues. It was just a matter of getting the words on the page. Then I spent a year and a half just trying to raise money and getting the script to everyone I could.

So why this story? What compelled you to spend three years developing it as your debut?

I can't totally put my finger on that. I know I wanted to tell the story of a character who fit my age range -- something I at least knew. I didn't want to go do something that I couldn't immediately connect to. In that sense it was comfortable, but it was still really uncomfortable. I knew I had to take the phone sex relatively seriously and be real about it. I think just imagining that scene -- and how hard it would be to write and to watch -- was exciting in a weird way. That scene and the last scene were the core. They were the things that always had to be there. Everything else around it was just, "What makes those two moments work?" It just made sense to me, and that had never happened to me before. And it's taking time to happen again.

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