Courteney Cox on Her TIFF True-Crime Drama ‘Evil Genius’: ‘The Story Is So Unbelievable’

“I notice everything,” she says. “I love actors, I love people, I love human stories.”

Cox is best known for acting — including marquee roles in “Friends” and in the “Scream” franchise. But she’s long had a hand in directing, from episodes of her sitcom “Cougar Town” to music videos to the 2014 feature “Just Before I Go,” and she stepped behind the camera once again for “Evil Genius,” which debuts as a gala presentation at the Toronto Intl. Film Festival Sept. 12.

With “Evil Genius,” which dramatizes the people and plots behind the “pizza bomber” tragedy in 2003, Cox says she was inspired by “what I would consider my first film,” the Lifetime movie “TalhotBlond.” That film, which Cox directed, was adapted from a 2009 true-crime documentary of the same name by Barbara Schroeder, which probed a love triangle that ended in death. Tapping into true crime again, Cox was inspired by Schroeder’s 2018 doc series “Evil Genius: The True Story of America’s Most Diabolical Bank Heist,” which tackled the infamous pizza bomber case, in which the compelling and clever Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong seemed to mastermind a plot to send a patsy in to rob a bank outside Erie, Pa., with a bomb strapped around his neck.

“The choices these people made were so absurd,” Cox says. “I really wanted to go deeper and find out, Why? Why were these their choices?” But Cox’s vision hewed away from the darkest version of the story: “I wanted to have some sort of understanding for these characters, and I wanted the film to be really bright.”

What results is a snappy modern noir in the vein of a Coen brothers film: Patricia Arquette, as the overseer of utter mayhem, is at her snappy, domineering best, alternately alluring and terrifying. “We weren’t reduced to either loving or hating her,” Cox says. “We were uncovering all parts of her.”

Cox had the good luck of access to “hours and hours of tape” from the Schroeder documentary series, and they informed Arquette’s performance — as did a certain inherent humanity.

“I can see Patricia’s heart,” Cox says. “It beats right out of her chest. Every time Patricia laughs, it’s absolutely real.”

In order for the film to work, the main schemer couldn’t solely be, well, an evil genius. “You don’t want to just hate someone the whole time,” Cox says.

Recent Emmy winner David Harbour, as the man still trapped in Arquette’s thrall even after their romantic relationship has ended, has, Cox notes, “a boyish charm” — a quality the film harnesses to tragic ends, as Harbour’s overgrown boy is susceptible, still, to manipulation.

Constructing the cluttered homes through which Arquette’s and Harbour’s characters romp and plot, Cox was in a sort of heaven. “I suffer from acute awareness,” she says, “because it’s very hard for me to not notice everything around me. It’s a blessing and a curse — I call it my superpower, but it also keeps me late.”

The plot to rob the bank is hatched in a home in which very few things have ever been thrown away. “Lifetimes of collections of junk,” Cox says with glee. “It was perfect for me, because I was able to get in there and actually make it look the way my vision of a hoarding house would look.”

In the end, though, the film came down to the human story. Arquette’s character “can be a very over-the-top, me, me, me, selfish lady,” Cox says. The tapes aided in providing a lens into the side of her she didn’t share with her conspirators. “We needed to find the humanity, and her vulnerability.”

Though the film is drawn from a notorious crime story, Cox is hopeful that at least some of the audience will come in fresh: “Anyone I’ve shown this film to,” she says, “says that the story is so unbelievable, it drives you to want to know more.”