on the cover / By Robyn Hillman-Harrigan

In The Green Room

When I was growing up my parents sent me to visit my aunt and uncle for many summers and I really fell in love with my whole Humboldt experience. I was in southern Humboldt, completely living off the grid in a rural pot-growing environment. This experience is only one small part of Humboldt, but it was what I knew. I took Danny up there several years ago and we were actually working on a different script at the time. After he met everyone, we were both so affected by being there that we decided to start writing about Humboldt.

dJ: After Darren brought me there, I quickly fell in love with Humboldt. We got a little motel room in SoHum and we pounded out the first draft. Then during the next couple of years as we continued to write, we kept going back there for research and inspiration sessions.

RHH: I have heard a lot of people say that it is really hard to write and create art in Los Angeles. It is not uncommon to go to other places to seek inspiration. Humboldt is not a bad choice — definitely stimulating and appealing.

dJ: L.A. is not the real world. It’s a fantasyland, and it is easy to get disconnected from human beings here.

DG: We find in L.A. it is really easy to get caught up in what I call “the meeting culture.” You just sit down and have a bunch of meetings and you feel like you accomplished something, but really you haven’t. You have just talked about accomplishing something. L.A. is a non-creative, not inspiring place. That has been our experience thus far. While Humboldt, whether it is the natural beauty, the isolation or the interestingness of the people, it was definitely a great source of inspiration.

While we were in Humboldt, just the sheer messiness of trying to define the place and understand people was really appealing, and made it seem like the right story to tell. We have long been influenced by ’70s Hollywood filmmaking. That is our favorite era of cinema and we wanted our first film to follow the inspiration of character-driven films like Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, The Graduate, and Harold and Maude. The situations and people we were exposed to in Humboldt were so appealing that is felt like the perfect backdrop for that ’70s aesthetic, which is why we really shifted focus on that trip.

dJ: Our main character Peter’s arc really represents my own journey. Before coming to Humboldt, I had preconceived notions about what the place was and how the people were going to be. Then as I met them and started to understand that world, I was kind of conflicted with feeling both above and below them at the same time. It was a conflicting feeling.

RHH: The film — although clearly about pot smoking and growing — is more about a man who is stoned without smoking. Before coming to Humboldt, Peter is living in a constantly numb daze, despite the fact that he is actually sober. Then he leaves the uptight confines of the city and meets this group of down-to-earth pot smokers and growers, who help him to connect with nature and community. They inspire him to stop being a passive participator in his own life. Is the film essentially trying to say that the experience of being in Humboldt serves as a metaphoric, not merely physical high for Peter?

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