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.
How did you settle on Brian Geraghty, and how did the two of you settle together on a comfort level for those tougher scenes?
We probably saw like 200 people, but when I first started writing in 2006, I wrote down people I'd seen, even in commercials -- anyone I thought was interesting. And I'd had his name down all the way back after Jarhead. He was on one of my original lists. But there were a lot of tapes from New York, just so many people. It was really tough. But we knew we had to have a character actor who, at the same time, could have a little bit of a movie-star quality because he's onscreen all the time. It was tough to find someone that watchable. Brian really fit in.
After that, it wasn't really rehearsal, but we'd go through the script; I knew we had a unique situation where he'd be onscreen by himself a lot of the time, so it was my duty to make him extra comfortable. Even if it just came down to syntax. We did the improvising ahead of time, and I started modifying a lot of the dialogue around that. Just via that process, I hope I showed a lot of trust in him. I know he showed a lot of trust in me. Having said that, we scheduled almost all of the phone-sex stuff on the third of our four weeks. He had a strong sense of the character and the crew; I think everyone was nervous about it except for him.
What were your apprehensions as a first-time director?
It was just my general shyness. I was in the room next door watching it on a monitor. It was just so sexual; I think one of my student films had one kissing scene in it. Once. but it was only one scene, and we didn't really talk about it that much. Brian said, "Don't worry -- I'll have it covered." That's why I give a lot of credit to Brian, because he hit a lot of the beats that weren't even scripted. We just talked through them. The take in the film is like 10 minutes, 45 seconds -- it's the second of two takes, and the first one is totally usable. If everything shut down that day, it would have worked. And it was his birthday that day, too! He handled it really well. He knew exactly what to do, the crew knew exactly what to do. If any day went perfectly, it was that day. There was nothing to fix. It was such a good feeling.
Apart from the jury awards, what is your sense of how audiences are responding to Easier With Practice? What kind of questions are you getting as you take the film around the festival circuit?
I have that weird anxiety about making everyone happy or trying to make everyone like me or one of those things. But what I'm working through with this movie -- what I just had to accept when I started screening it -- was that not everyone will like it. Every movie I've loved, a lot of people have hated. But the response has been so positive and encouraging, and that's why I love the festival circuit. It does seem to revolve around encouraging people. And the audiences have been great. People in Vegas and especially the people in Woodstock have had really thoughtful questions. We were trying to make a commentary without throwing it in your face -- something about technology and modern relationships, and it's generally hit people. I think once people get through the first few minutes of it being shocking or not shocking to them, then people stick with it.
What kind of counsel, if any, did you solicit from Warren Beatty?
None, specifically. I definitely told him about it. We had kind of a funny talk about the subject matter, and he's always been really encouraging. But there was never any specific advice. I don't want to necessarily quote him on this, but he said something to me once that making a movie is like throwing up. It feels awful while you're doing it, but afterward it feels so much better. But I have to say I enjoyed throwing up this time! I had a really good experience with it, because you just have to keep the end in mind. I spent three years trying to get people to see this. And even with all the drama that comes with it, it ends up being so satisfying just getting an audience see it and watch them react to it. I just want to get another project going so I can be there again.