Seduction, Art, Obsession: Cory Wexler Grant on 'Painter'

Out playwright and actor Cory Wexler Grant has been writing, producing, and directing stage works for two decades. Now the Greenwich Village resident has made his first feature film, a dark and suspenseful psychological thriller called "Painter" that explores the strange relationship between Aldis (Eric Ladin), a young painter trying to break through in Los Angeles, and Joanne (Betsy Randle), an extremely wealthy woman with an eye for art and zero compunction about serving as Aldis' benefactor once she decides that, with a little guidance and molding, he could be the next big thing. Before long Joanne has installed Aldis in her mansion, giving him space for his own spacious studio; his friends warn him that she's only out to sleep with him, but there's a seduction of another sort happening, and the price might be far more than sex.

Aldis, for his part, is the sort of mild-mannered guy who wears himself out and rubs his soul raw trying to realize his ambitions, and it doesn't help that he'd psychologically hobbled at seeing a childhood tormentor outpace him professionally while producing art that's comparatively hackneyed and shallow. Ryan West (Casey Deidrick) is the sort of good-looking, effortlessly charismatic person who was born to be a celebrity; that he happened to make his name in art is a cruel irony, given that Ryan could have done a dozen other things. Is his success one more vicious jab at Alden, born from whatever hateful impulse propelled his bullying when the two were young? Or are the gods of fame and glory simply grinding Alden into despair and obscurity for their own inscrutable pleasure?

"Painter" is the sort of story you expect to write its own beats: Obsession, attraction, control, madness. In some respects, that's how the film plays out, but Wexler Grant follows the familiar story structure for the genre just enough to set your expectations and then blow them up. Joanne is written to be a multi-layered character whose strong, sometimes acerbic personality is leavened by profound personal losses. We know she's ruthless just from her offhanded manner of talking about the torments she used to train her dog, and we don't doubt for a moment that she uses the same sort of unsparing techniques to shape Aldis to her will; but as we learn more about her, her love of art, and her fixation on Aldis in particular, her actions make a heartbreaking kind of sense.

The characters' obsessions and frustrations do lead, however, to wild extremes, and "Painter" paves the way for its unsparing twists with plenty of knowing satire and dark comedy, much of it aimed at the art world and its hermetic mannerisms, language, and denizens – a kind of fun land where extremes are the norm. In that context, the film's shocks and surprises don't seem out of place in the slightest; rather, they seem organic, with the kinds of follies and fates shaking out that only seem inevitable in hindsight.

Made on a tiny budget, but with every element unerringly placed, "Painter" has the makings of a breakout film. EDGE had a chance to chat with the writer-director and find out more about this sexy, surprising puzzle box of a movie, his plans for the future, and how he spent his COVID lockdown time: Writing new movies when not looking after his husband and children.

EDGE: This is your first film, but the dialogue and the ways the characters are drawn feels in some ways like a play. Did "The Painter" start out as a work for the stage, or was it always intended as a film?

Cory Wexler Grant: I always intended it to be a film. I have spent my whole life in the theater, so I guess it was kind of destined that my first screenplay would be very heavily worded and full of dialogue. I also did that because when you're functioning on such a small budget, your writing is all you've got, so I went in hard on the writing.

Everything I've written since has really taken cinema into account, and being more cinematic; but I really did want to explore other subjects, and got some great actors who were very versed to tell me how to do it.

EDGE: I appreciate films that have a literary feel about them – films adapted from stage works or novels often seem to do more with the dialogue. "Painter" has that sensibility.

Cory Wexler Grant: Thank you. I feel the same. I always think about Tony Kushner writing "Lincoln," and how much I love that movie. And I'm also obsessed with the French Canadian writer-director Xavier Dolan. He is just a wordsmith. I envy his work; he pulls it off beautifully.

EDGE: That literary edge works well for a film like this, which is a psychological thriller, and also a character study of a painter and his benefactor. But it's also a critique of the art world.

Cory Wexler Grant: I grew up in a house of artists, and a family of artists, and all my friends are artists. I wrote this movie while I was begrudgingly living in L.A., and my very best friends are artists and work in galleries out there, so I spent a lot of my social time with them. As much as I lambast the art world in the movie, I also am endlessly fascinated and in love with the art world.

My favorite movies are often art movies. I'm deep in a book right now about abstract female painters in the 1940s and '50s; it's just, my heart lives there. I find the subject endless interesting, and a great horse to ride [when talking about] any other subject.

EDGE: There's an interesting nexus between painting and film; so many painters become filmmakers, and so many filmmakers are also painters. And, of course, there are so many truly great movies about painters, or painters and their models - that's such an interesting subgenre.

Cory Wexler Grant: Oddly, I keep coming back to it! I love Julian Schnable as a painter, and I love him as a director. I think "Basquiat" is gorgeous, with great genius performances in it. And I love "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." I just watched [the Ed Harris-directed] "Pollock" again for, like, the dozenth time – that makes me an absolute nerd. There's something kind of super-heroic about watching an artist find a thing that is uniquely theirs.

EDGE Even though this is your debut feature film, it feels so assured, and the camera work is so well executed. I understand you storyboarded this film to the last detail, and I think that comes through.

Cory Wexler Grant: When you don't have any money, all you can do is pre-production. I write really fast; I wrote the story in, like, eleven days, and then spent a year working on it with a producer to make it financially possible, so cutting tons of it. And then I knew I only had just over two weeks to shoot, and I couldn't take the time to find many things organically on set, so I did some 800 storyboard drawings and tried to execute every single one of them.

I happen to be a horrible photographer. I love photography, and I appreciate it, and as a director, I know what I want to see; luckily, Pierluigi Malavasi, who was the DP, literally took all my drawings and made them gorgeous and possible, every single day. He's like a young master. We love all the same movies and have the exact same aesthetic, and so I was really lucky to get to work with him.

EDGE: It's obvious you put a lot of time and thought into the pre-production side. For example – this is a small thing, but it drives me nuts when movies show us an artist's studio and lots of canvases that he or she has supposedly done, and the paintings are a hodgepodge of different styles that have obviously been painted by a bunch of different people. You avoid this: When you show us different artist's studios and their paintings stacked all over the place, the work has a unifying style and personality. We see that yes, this is the work of one artist, and that touch is super-effective at selling the idea of where we are and what's going on.

Cory Wexler Grant: I agree! Luckily, my cousin is a painter and has this gift of not only being able to paint in any style, but he also has thousands of paintings – so, I just ransacked his entire arsenal and decided which paintings would be Aldis', and which would be Bruce Courtney's, and what kind of paintings Ryan West would do.

EDGE: We touched on the cast a moment ago, and I wanted to come back to that because they really are terrific. Had you known some of these actors beforehand and written parts with them in mind, or were you just really lucky in being able to gather them up when the time came to shoot the film?

Core Wexler Grant: It was only good luck! I had very distinct celebrities in mind who could play these roles, and we cast the film only two weeks before we shot it. We just didn't have any time or funds to do it any other way, so we were just hoping for the best.

I happened to be watching "The Killing" on Netflix right before I went out to L.A. to cast ["Painter"]. I was watching Eric Ladin's performance in ["The Killing,"] which is just sublime; he's an incredibly talented, range-y actor. I mean, the guy just has that kind of Jack Nicholson emotional spectrum at the tip of his fingers. And I thought, "Wow, that guy would be a great Aldis Browne." And in some kind of insane piece of luck he walked in the casting room, had six pages of dialogue memorized, and absolutely just took the part and was kind enough to give us his time and talent. He's an incredible person to work with.

EDGE: This might just be a matter of a slight physical resemblance, but watching Eric Ladin's performance I was thinking, "There's some Ben Foster waiting to break out of him." And boy, was there ever!

Cory Wexler Grant: Totally! It's funny you're saying that; I haven't connected that for a long time in my head, but Ben Foster was one of the other young actors who I wrote all this and thought, "Who could play him?" I think they both have that kind of incredible American male actor [quality], where there's a current of rage just under the surface all the time. They both have that gift. Eric Ladin is a very humble, sweet person to know, but they both have that rage on hand, which is amazing.

EDGE And Betsy Randle just owns the film as Joanne.

Cory Wexler Grant: Betsy Randle I grew up watching play a sitcom mom on "Boy Meets World"; her story's the complete opposite. I saw that she was coming in; I thought it was really kitschy and fun that she was showing up to read this very dark, sexual, demonic, devil's bargain kind of a role, and I didn't have any inkling that she could pull it off. But the second she opened her mouth it was a whole new person – a whole new character. She is nothing like Joanne in real life; that's not her hair, that's not her walk, that's not her voice. She has somehow, in this movie, given a performance like she's never given before, and something completely different than is her natural being. I feel so fortunate and so blown away [to have had her in the film].

EDGE: The crux of the movie is the relationship between Joanne and Aldis, but there's also a great deal of tension that arises from there being both a mother-son vibe between them, but also a sexual undercurrent. Was that part of the story from the first stages, or was that something you added in later on?

Cory Wexler Grant: No, that was implicit in the first draft of the screenplay. As an actor, I had various experiences with older men and older women who seemed to be enamored, shall we say, with me as an actor, despite maybe a thirty or forty year gap [between our ages]. Even though these relationships were utterly platonic, there was always a hint of sexual tension. I definitely wrote that in from the get-go. It was in many ways the catalyst for those two characters.

EDGE: Watching the movie, I kept thinking: Is there going to be an LGBTQ element here? And yes, there is – a couple of them, and they come from the most unexpected directions! So do some of the straight elements, like the woman who wears a stocking over her face.

Cory Wexler Grant: To a certain extent, those are my friends, and those are the people I've come across in the art world in L.A. and New York and London. Those people are not rare; there are a lot of "stocking faces" out there. I remember Eric Ladin coming to the set one day, looking around, and being, like, "Am I the only normal person in this movie?" And I said, "Yes! Yes!"

[Laughter]

Cory Wexler Grant: To me, the art world is chock-full of personalities; LGBTQ doesn't even cover it. I mean, it just runs the gamut. It seems to set up a structure for people to be uber-themselves, themselves to the extreme. If I could have gotten more drag queens into the film, I would have – but we couldn't afford it.

EDGE: Speaking of sexual tension, part of the plot of the film – and the tension behind it – grows out of a history of abuse that the characters have endured; childhood bullying for Aldis at the hands of his art world rival Ryan West, and domestic violence for Joanne. In the case of Aldis and Ryan, though, there seems to be a sexual undertone, something troubling and unresolved between them.

Cory Wexler Grant: I like where that lives in the movie. Both Casey Deidrick and Eric Ladin – I don't even know how conscious they were of this, but there's definitely a sexual BDSM layer [that comes into play between them]. I definitely intended it, and they pulled it off – they do it beautifully.

EDGE: What other projects might you be working on? Have you already started thinking about your next movie?

Cory Wexler Grant: Yeah, I've done nothing over these COVID months but write screenplays. I can't say I am so drawn to any specific genre [but] I wrote a psychological sexual thriller, yet again, set in Umbria that I would love to make there. I wrote another kind of sexual con movie called "The American Ambassador to Japan" that takes place in Tokyo. I think I have spent all of these months trying to escape my home [during the pandemic] by writing this as far away from me as possible.

EDGE: That's the great thing about being a writer. Your imagination can take you anyplace!

Cory Wexler Grant: Yes, hopefully every day, if my baby will allow it.

"Painter" arrives on VOD and digital platforms Oct. 13.