Maybe it’s because I’ve never toked up, and never really had an interest in it, but stoner comedies are something I’ve never really been drawn to. It is a genre that has held only a passing interest for me, mainly to try and understand what my friends are talking about when they riff on them.

So when I first saw the description of Humboldt County on the SXSW film schedule, I didn’t initially think I’d give the story of an overachieving medical student (Jeremy Strong) who inadvertently gets introduced to a community of pot growers sounded a spin. Schedules changed and it wound up being the first thing I would see at the festival, a fact that in retrospect I am thrilled came to be.

The movie isn’t a “stoner comedy”, but rather a comedy with depth, warmth and real human drama that I could relate to and understand. It was possibly the most unexpected surprise I had at the festival, and my hope is that the film gets picked up so that others can experience the same surprise that I did.

After taking the film in I got to sit down with Danny Jacobs and Darren Grodsky, the co-authors and directors of Humboldt County. What I thought would be a simple talk about their movie turned into an enjoyable explosion of film geekiness in talking about the films that influenced them, some interesting discussion about the potential new meaning of “slacker”, and the surprising sexual allure of “Six Feet Under”’s Frances Conroy, amongst various topics.

Enrique Gomez: Confession time: this movie wasn’t initially on my radar when I first looked at the SXSW schedule. I had something else scheduled for the first day, but my schedule changed due to some conflicts that I was able to work it in and make it the first thing I saw. I have to say it’s a hell of a way to kick of the festival, as it’s a great, fun little movie, with a lot more depth that I would have imagined. Talk about how this project got started for you guys.

Danny Jacobs: Well, thank you. I suppose you could say it got started in kindergarten when we met. We’ve been best friends since we were six. We started writing together, acting together, directing together as we grew up. This project in particular came about, we were working on another script in Los Angeles, had been working on it a while. And we were feeling a little frustrated with the city and the distractions of it. We went up to Humboldt, got an inn on the ocean for a month and a half with the intent to be totally isolated and focus on this other script.

Darren Grodsky: I should say that the way we got to Humboldt County and knew of it is that I have a familial connection to the place. That was the inspiration for the film. I have an uncle who was a physics professor at UCLA. He and my aunt almost 30 years ago got fed up with society. They had been hippies in the 50s, 60s and 70s, and they left his tenured position and moved into the woods in Humboldt to settle and live off the grid. So when I was a kid growing up in St. Louis, my family would send me up to visit them. I fell in love with the place, so Danny and I decided it would be a good place to isolate ourselves to work on this other script, having no idea that in fact we were going to shift gears and wind up making Humboldt for our first feature.

DJ: When I got up there for the first time, it just proved to be too fascinating to let go. So we literally abandoned the other project and just started research and writing. I think by the time we finished that first month and a half we had like…50 pages done.

EG: Your appreciation for the area is pretty evident in the way this film is shot. You have some scenes in here that are as beautiful as anything I’ve seen in any movie in the last five years. Roger Deakins captured the west Texas scrubrush so perfectly in No Country For Old Men and makes me miss it. Your movie just makes me want to fly out to northern California tomorrow and get lost in the forest for a few days.

DJ: That’s a huge compliment. We were always very excited to visually capture the area.

DG: I wish we could take credit for it, but really it’s just one of the most beautiful places you’ll ever see.

DG: He embraced the 70s aesthetic very much. I think that’s reflected in the theater going experience.

EG: It’s most mesmerizing the first time Peter (Jeremy Strong)...tokes up (a smile formed on my face at the memory)

DJ: (smiling) Right!

EG: …that scene is brilliant. Figuratively and literally, actually. That moment encapsulates so much why this film works for me.

DG: The filmic gods were smiling on us that day, because I don’t know you may recall in that scene, the sun starts to turn on Peter…

EG: So that’s all natural light?

DG: Purely accidental.

EG: I wasn’t sure if you’d augmented at all in post-production in some way.

DG: No, it was one particular take, and Jeremy improvised the line there at the end.

DJ: Actually, before we shot that scene, we were nervous because we had shot so many beautiful things up to that point in the film. I remember talking to Ernest and saying, “This scene needs to be more beautiful, more interesting, more stunning in some way than anything that’s come before.” Because this is the moment where he decides…

DG: …where he decides to stick around for a while.

DJ: He was like, “Don’t worry about it.” And then we shot the scene and that happened, and he’s like “Huh, did I tell you!” It was really great.

EG: So let’s talk a little bit about Jeremy as Peter. Another part of why I think the film appealed to me is because there is something about the way Peter is so tightly strung out at the beginning that reminds me of how uptight I was in high school.

DJ: (laughing) Us as well.

EG: So how much of his character is drawn from your own personal experiences given you’ve known each other for so long?

DG: Well, we were both suburban Midwestern Jews who lived in a fairly competitive high school area, drawn to the areas of competitive academia, we went to very competitive colleges and felt that pressure a lot. As a result, we have a lot of friends we observed in the development of this script who we took little pieces of them to construct Peter as our idea of this composite mid-to-late twenty-something in this decade of his life trying to figure out what exactly he wants to do, trying to appease his parents and find happiness and success in the same place.

DJ: I remember watching The Graduate at some point when we were writing the script. Noting how in that film, you have Benjamin Braddock representative as the slacker of that generation. What he’s doing is sitting by the pool during the summer. We looked around at our friends, and we kind of felt that the modern day slacker is someone like Peter, who is not slacking at all, but earning multiple degrees and doing a lot of things, but not emotionally connected to it and not passionate about anything. They just feel like they need to be in the hamster wheel without any real connectiveness.

EG: That’s an interesting concept. The anti-slacker actually being the uber-slacker.

DJ: Exactly.

EG: Touching off your mention of The Graduate. Fairuza Balk as Bogart…initially I thought she was going to be the central female character in the film, and she’s not. She’s actually a bit of a red herring, which I liked a lot. Instead, the central female figure turns out to be Frances Conroy as Rosie. How did you get her involved with this film?

DJ: Well, quickly on the Bogart thing…we were very intent on continually subverting expectations. One of the films that inspired us to do it in that way was a Bob Rafelson film called The King of Marvin Gardens.

EG: I’ve heard of it, haven’t seen it.

DJ: Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Ellen Burstyn…

DG: It’s the follow-up to Five Easy Pieces, it wasn’t a big commercial success.

DJ: It’s a film that continually pulls the rug out from under the audience. It’s a challenging film to watch, but we think it’s brilliant. It was part of the inspiration to make that choice. Now, Frances we’ve loved forever.

DG: Frances was someone we talked about early in the process and thought we could never get her.

DJ: And then we forgot about her…

DG: And then we forgot about her as we were going to other people, and literally was similar to Brad (Dourif, who place Conroy’s husband Jack), a couple of weeks before shooting…in independent film, that’s when a lot of things start to move, when you’re in pre-production and shooting is in two weeks. We sent her the script, she was interested. I got a call from Frances Conroy, we had a conversation for about 10-15 minutes when she’s asking me all these questions about the script, my family, how she responded to the character, her interpretation. Listening to her inqusitiveness and how specific she was in her questions, it was done. We knew we had found Rosie…Tha inquistiveness continued, that’s one of the things about Frances I noticed. The entire time she was there, she would go to the crew, she’s asking questions, she’s really curious to know about people. That might be one of her methods to prepare as an actor, to inquire about people and genuinely know about them.

EG: She has three defining moments in the film it seems as you’ve laid the script out. The Mars conversation is the goofy, lighter side. The revelations about her husband towards the end which are the more powerful, emotional moments for her. In between you’ve got that other connection to The Graduate, when she’s singing to Jack…I don’t care that she’s old enough to be my mother, she could have me in a heartbeat.

DJ: Us too.

DG: I remember when were shooting that scene, there’s that long tracking shot lit by all these kerosene lanterns. She sang it live, that’s not a recording. It actually felt, to sound a little cheesy, magical to me. The lighting, her voice, and the way she was looking at Jack…she’s beautiful in that scene, absolutely beautiful.

EG: Madison (Davenport, who plays Charity, Bogart’s daughter) is another really nice find for you in this film. As strong as Jason is as Peter…and he is strong, I’ll be interested in what he does from here forward…but Madison…

DJ: We mentioned this in our Q&A, we have Emmy winner Frances Conroy, Oscar nominee Brad Dourif, but she required the least amount of direction of anybody.

DG: Literally.

DJ: We do a lot of improvisation in our auditions, we spend a good hour with people, which helps us to get a good gauge on them. Maddy, from the moment we met her, is just this super, hyper-intelligent…

DG: Old soul…

DJ: …old soul, yes. And that’s what we needed, because in a lot of ways, Charity is the wisest person in the movie. We needed a kid that could make that believable. She’s like a seasoned actress. She comes in with ideas, they’re all really awesome…

DG: And we anticipated needing to mold and guide her and build her performance, because we had heard that’s how it is with kids so often. We’ve worked with kids before and had to do that. With her, it was working with a season actress.

EG: How much of her character is written and how much it is just her being her?

DJ: Most of her dialogue is written. A lot of the little behavioral things she would do are her. The scene that happens Peter’s first night in Humboldt, that really sort of crazy party. All that stuff was her improvising, that whole cat thing. She improvised all those things in the wake call, the ketchup scene in the morning. So there’s a lot that she really did.

EG: You talk about how you tapped into the feel of that area of Humboldt, that hippie, free spirit feeling. Were there any problems or did they push back any when you started shooting there?

DJ: There was always an element to that. We were aided by the fact that Darren has such a long history there, that he knew a lot of the people in the community. It gave us a lot of access. But there’s always a great deal of apprehension about any outsider that comes into that area. And there still remains a great deal of apprehension until the see the film, they’re going to be worried. There have been a number of films about the area that have come out over the years, and they all have missed the mark. They give a more…exploitive depiction of what their lifestyle is.

DG: We also shot in northern Humboldt, in Eureka and Arcada. Eureka is a city of like 20,000 people and Arcata is where the university is (Humboldt State). We were shooting there because of logistical reasons, and we were trying to make it look like southern Humboldt, which is where you go off the grid. Where the people that we were depicting live is a little further away from where we were actually shooting, so that helped.

DJ: Pretty much everything in the movie is based on a real aspect of life there or a story that was told to us or a character that we met.

EG: Your respect for the area and the mindset is very evident in the way you’ve done this film.

DG: We love these characters very much. What we wanted to do was present them very honestly. We didn’t want to judge them, we also didn’t want to praise them. We really wanted to show them for their glories and their faults. That goes for Peter and the L.A. urban type characters, and for the Humboldt characters.

DJ: I think we got lucky in a way. A lot of times, if you approach a narrative film with the mindset of “oh I want to be respectful of these people” it might not be best for the story, it might wind up hurting the film. In this case, what was interesting to us was the complexities that existed in the reality. So there was a mesh that if we respected the reality, it would heighten the story. There was a fit there that made the approach for the film.

DG: One of the things that we were drawn to initially, it was not just the locale of Humboldt, it was the fact that it is sort of hard to say whether the lives that these people are living is bad or good. On the one hand, you say “They’re pot growers, that’s bad.” Then you start to talk to them, they’re really intelligent, passionate, interesting, and you’re like, “No, wait, I like these people.” And then you see the little girl rolling a joint, and you’re like, “No, I don’t like these people.”

DJ: And they self-medicate and they’re high literally 24 hours a day, but they’ve banded together to form a greater sense of community.

DG: And we liked that back and forth, the idea of not making it easy on the audience to say whether these are good people or bad people.

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I find myself wondering if fate pushed me to transcribe this particular interview this week. Having recently found myself rejected in my application for graduate school, I found myself last week feeling more than a bit disconnected from life as Strong’s Peter was at the opening of the film. It is all too easy to view that kind of rejection as some kind of pronouncement of judgment on my own self-worth.

Listening back to my talk with Danny and Darren, I find that I realize that the graduate school is not any more a validation of rejection of my accomplishments any more than their film is of the people of Humboldt County that their characters represent. This film is a beautiful example of trying to make the viewer realize that life really is about the journey, the people you meet along the way, and the experiences that you have and learn from in that process.

They’ve made a film that not only feels personal for them, but that they communicate so deeply how and why it is personal. Though I’ve never visited Humboldt County in California, I think Danny and Darren have made me understand just what kind of experience going there and dropping off the map might be like. That is both deeply alluring, and a little bit frightening to consider. With some luck in finding a dsitributor, the film may let other people make that same long strange trip with Peter into the beautiful hypnotic world of green.

More about the film and potential future screenings can be found at the official website for Humboldt County.

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