on the cover / By Robyn Hillman-Harrigan

In The Green Room

dJ: Yeah, it is one of the things we were trying to show. There is a moment in the film where Peter realizes that Max has been getting high since he was 7 or 8 and says, “When I was 7 or 8 I was drinking Kool-Aid and watching The Smurfs.” Then Max says, “You had your drugs and I had mine.”

I think there is something to the idea that what is termed a drug can be a very loose definition, and really a drug is any way in which we numb ourselves from the world. It could be an actual drug, television, baseball, anything we use to check out.

DG: I know one thing that we talked about in the writing process is this idea of the complexity of characters, not letting anyone off the hook. We didn’t want to over-sentimentalize or judge the pot growers in any way. We were really trying to present them in a fair and balanced manner.

RHH: The film juxtaposes the idea that Peter finds freedom in Humboldt with the concept that Max, who was born into the lifestyle, feels trapped here. He grows more marijuana than his parents know and risks being busted by the feds. His aim is to raise enough money to leave Humboldt and provide a different sort of life for his daughter. There is also some confusion over whether the ‘back to the lander’ Truman grandparents have run away from their responsibilities in coming to Humboldt or are admirably working towards a communal living ideal. Are they hiding, creating or both?

dJ: The answer to that question is that it is complicated. I don’t think there is an objective truth to whether the lifestyle that Max’s family leads is a good one or a bad one. It all depends on what the human being wants and needs. That lifestyle may create freedom in one person and inhibit it in another. We wanted to capture how individualized people are. What works for one person will not necessarily work for another.

RHH: Does Peter’s coming-of-age experience in any way reflect your own experiences of moving to L.A. from a different lifestyle in Missouri?

DG: Could be. I don’t think it was a conscious effort, but I do look at the movie now and see this whole battle between the more conservative choices that you can make for your career and the more high-risk choices that Peter made in deciding to give up the medical profession. As upper-middle class Midwestern suburban Jews, we did ask ourselves “Are we really going to go to L.A. and make films?” Neither Danny nor I started college as film majors. It took being away from home for a while to give us the confidence to believe that we could really make this our life choice.

RHH: And you are doing a good job of it.

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