AFI FEST: Out filmmaker Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s debut feature “Easier With Practice” screens today

When Kyle Patrick Alvarez decided to leave his job as an assistant to Warren Beatty, he told the Oscar-winning-director that he was doing so to make his own independent movie even though he wasn’t yet sure what it would be.

Between the time he gave his two-weeks notice and actually left the gig, the 26-year-old picked up an issue of GQ magazine he had lying around and read an autobiographical article by Davy Robart called What Are You Wearing about a guy on a road trip to promote his unpublished novel who finds himself falling for a mysterious phone sex caller.

Once he was ready to make the movie, it was a nice moment when he was able to let Beatty know what he was about to do: “I told him because I have an amazing amount of respect for him. I had followed through with my intentions.”

Tonight at the AFIFest, that movie – Easier With Practice – will have its Los Angeles debut.

“I’m really honored because it’s AFIFest,” Kyle said when we spoke last week. “It’s so respected and something I’ve gone to every year, To have my film play in that is really, really amazing. It’s really an honor.”

Kyle says his movie deals frankly and honestly with a man’s complicated sexuality. By sexuality he means comfortableness with one’s self than gender preference. The lead character (portrayed by Brian Geraghty) has a lot of fears about maturing – especially when he’s thrown into situations that are threatening to him.

“It’s based on a true story but the character is invented. He’s a writer but the similarities stop there,” he said. “The article is a lot funnier but there’s all this human intimacy at the core of it.”

I don’t want to spoil the ending of the film but I will tell you it left me wondering if Davy is gay.

“We didn’t want to explicitly state one way or another. My whole perspective is that there’s a lot of things that come before orientation and (Davy) hasn’t gotten that far. A gender preference is probably out of his league anyway. I wanted it to be about sexuality as opposed to sexual preference. From the get-go, the nature of the phone relationship, is sexually charged within his comfort zone.

The movie is well-acted but the opening scene is not for anyone squeamish about seeing masturbation. When I watched it on DVD with a friend last week, we wondered how people in the audiences were reacting to it!

“I always sit through the first 15 minutes and am curious to see how audience responds…to see how many people walk out. Iusually find it they make it past the word ‘clit’ they’ll be okay.”

The movie certainly hinges on the performance of Garaghty whose credits include Art School Confidential, Jarhead, Conversations With Other Women, We Are Marshall, Bobby,  The Guardian and I Know Who Killed Me, among others.

“We saw like 200 people for that role,” said Kyle. “He’s on screen literally every frame. We had to find someone who we felt you could be comfortable watching for that period of time. He committed himself so much to it and worked so hard,. I’m really grateful that he took such a chance.”

By the end of the year, the film will have played in nearly 20 festivals and Kyle is hoping for a theatrical release sometime during the first quarter of 2010.

As a gay man, Kyle said he has no qualms about having LGBT themes in his films: “I think I always want to find the stories that have some kind of connection to queer film but are universal.”

Here is the film’s trailer: