Courteney Cox thriller explores ‘dysfunctional love story’ behind pizza bomber case at TIFF

Courteney Cox's true crime thriller "Evil Genius" recounting the infamous U.S. pizza bomber case premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday.

The film, starring Academy Award winner Patricia Arquette and "Stranger Things" actor David Harbour, is the "Friends" star's first feature film as a director in 12 years, following the 2014 black comedy "Just Before I Go." It is based on the 2018 Netflix documentary series "Evil Genius: The True Story of America's Most Diabolical Bank Heist."

The movie centers on the convoluted plot in which pizza delivery man Brian Wells robbed a PNC Bank near Erie, Pennsylvania, in 2003 with a homemade bomb locked around his neck. The device detonated after his arrest, killing him.

Arquette plays Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, a woman with bipolar disorder who was later convicted of the robbery. Prosecutors said she masterminded it to raise money to hire a hit man to kill her estranged father over an inheritance dispute.

Harbour co-stars as Bill Rothstein, her former fiancé and accomplice. His call to police - reporting the body of Diehl-Armstrong's boyfriend James Roden in his freezer and implicating her in the killing - broke the case open.

Cox said on the red carpet she was drawn to the story by the unusual relationship between Diehl-Armstrong and Rothstein.

"There's a dysfunctional love story that's really the catalyst for this heist," Cox said at the premiere. "There were some really humorous moments and also tragic, but I just thought 'I'm going to walk the line, tell the story with a tone that's ... not identifiable with any specific genre.'"

Arquette said she strove to capture what motivated Diehl-Armstrong, who died in prison in 2017.

"Oftentimes, people who are bad guys, they don't really see themselves as that. They have their reasons why that person's their enemy, or that person let them down, or they should have that thing, or how the world screwed them over," she said. "Understanding those underpinnings, I think, was the most important to me."

-Reporting by Ryan Patrick Jones in Toronto; Editing by Alistair Bell/Reuters