Several years ago, Courteney Cox’s love of true crime led her to the Netflix docuseries “Evil Genius,” which recounts the story of a woman who, with the help of an assassin, planned to force a pizza delivery man to rob a bank by strapping an explosive collar to his neck.
“This story was so insane and it was crazy, but there had to be reasons why they would do such a convoluted heist that had no chance of making it,” Cox told TheWrap at the Toronto International Film Festival. “So I wanted to know: who were these people and how did they do it?”
The result is Cox’s first feature film as director in 12 years, also called “Evil Genius,” which stars Patricia Arquette as the would-be criminal mastermind Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong and David Harbour as the assassin Kenneth Barnes, with whom they come up with a simple plot: make a pizza delivery guy rob a bank, Marjorie uses the money from the heist to pay Kenneth to kill her father, and then she gets a huge inheritance.
“It is truly the stupidest crime known to man,” Arquette said. “They think they’re smarter than everybody else. Thank God they think that, because they leave a trail of clues everywhere, and they actually out themselves.”
Harbour said that what he enjoyed most about working with Cox is that they were on the same wavelength about the dark, humorous absurdity of the grisly crime, driven by a macabre romance that emerges between Marjorie and Kenneth as they try to pull off their plot.
“There’s this very twisted comedy to cutting up and getting a body down the stairs and to the wildness between these two in this love story, and I think that kind of insanity is very apropos to the times we’re living in. I thought it was very specific to keep it comedic and almost farcical to a certain degree,” he said.
Cox said it was a challenge to balance the tone of the film, as she wanted to explore the mentality and the egos of Marjorie and Kenneth without allowing the relationship they form to cause the audience to get too attached.
“It’s not a redemption story. There can be two things at once. I can find something, you know, despicable, and also find the humor in it,” she said “We had to make sure that we told the truth, not glorify them. We were never laughing at them, but you know, life is messy, and sometimes it’s funny, even though it can be really not okay.”
Catch up on all of TheWrap’s TIFF coverage here.
