The 17th annual St. Louis International Film Festival opens Thursday with a rare honor for a pair of local directors. The opening night slot, reserved for buzzworthy, commercially viable releases, has been awarded to “Humboldt County,” a sweet new film that was written and directed by native St. Louisans Danny Jacobs and Darren Grodsky.

Jacobs and Grodsky, who grew up in West County but now live in Los Angeles, are both 29; but their movie is clearly influenced by such ’60s and ’70s classics as “Five Easy Pieces” and “The Graduate.” It’s a drama-comedy about an emotionally anesthetized medical student (Jeremy Strong) who gets lured to a Northern California pot-growers colony by a free-spirited singer (Fairuza Balk). It co-stars Frances Conroy (“Six Feet Under”), Brad Dourif (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) and Peter Bogdanovich (the legendary director of “The Last Picture Show”).

Here’s the trailer:

I recently interviewed the talented twosome in advance of their homecoming.

Joe: How did the two of you get from suburban St. Louis to Hollywood?

Darren Grodsky: We often made videos as creative alternatives to school projects (going all the way back to a book report on “The House of Dies Drear” in elementary school), but we weren’t making Super 8 adventure films in our backyards. Making movies was basically a mystical process to us, done, we thought, by magical elves. (After making “Humboldt County,” it remains a mystical process.)

We fell in love with movies by going to the movies. Since we’re West County boys, we grew up at theaters like the Des Peres, the old Chesterfield Mall and Clarkson theaters, and occasionally (when we were feeling adventurous) the Esquire or the Tivoli. It was not until we were seniors in high school that they opened the West Olive. Had it been open sooner, we may never have graduated.

We graduated from Parkway North in 1997.

Danny studied International Relations at Stanford, and I studied U.S. History and Film at Northwestern. So film school was not really a part of our growth as filmmakers (which is perhaps why we have not yet grown as filmmakers. We prefer to remain stunted. We’re the Peter Pans of film).

When we were both undergraduates, I started taking film and screenwriting classes, and it was then that Danny and I first had the idea of writing together. I received permission from my screenwriting professor for Danny to co-write a screenplay with me, provided that I kept him up with lecture notes from class.

Danny: I should add that I came to film study from improvisation and the theater at Stanford. I was heavily influenced by the British dramaturge, Keith Johnstone, who wrote a book called “Impro.”

Darren: After we both graduated in 2001, we decided that we would move to Los Angeles to make films. Danny moved to LA immediately after graduating, and I joined him a few months later. (My father had been very sick, and I wanted to spend the summer after graduation in St. Louis with him. He and my mother drove me out to California that September, and he passed away the following February.)

While we started working as actors fairly immediately after our arrival in Los Angeles, as filmmakers we decided the best way to build a career writing and directing together would be by simply doing it: writing and directing films together. So we set out to write a script and get it made. Once we settled on Humboldt County (it was not the first script we worked on), we realized that in order for us to be able to direct it, we would have to make it independently.

Joe: How did you describe your movie to potential distributors or investors?

Darren: We said to them that while we knew the only way to ensure profitability was to make a five-hour documentary about the Holocaust (always a surefire box office smash), we had no choice but to tell the story we were passionate about: a 95 minute drama about pot growers living off the grid in the middle of the woods of Northern California. Throughout the process, they tried to steer us back toward the five-hour doc, but we held firm, and we’re proud of that choice.

Seriously, though, as you might have read, some of the characters in the film are based on my family members who moved into Humboldt in the early 80s. I love them, of course, and when I used to visit them as a kid I completely idealized that life. As I’ve gotten older, I have found them and their choices to be more complicated than I used to think, but there’s still a part of me that wants to buy land in Humboldt as soon as I can afford it.

Joe: What was the budget, and how did you raise it?

Darren: We had the good fortune of being left mostly in the dark when it came to actual numbers, but we’re 100% confident in saying that our film cost somewhere between $11.50 and $2 million. Feeding the two of us (we like food) probably counted for 40% of the budget alone. Also, my intense drinking binges and Danny’s gambling addiction most likely accounted for another 15% (though it’s impossible to know how much Danny cost the production, as he spent most of his time at the Indian casinos near set). As for how we raised the money, we tried to do it merely through positive thinking and yoga, but we found that those avenues didn’t even lead to enough to pay our rent, so we had to resort to schmoozing rich people across the country while dazzling them with a power point presentation.

Joe: In making this film, who were your artistic influences?

Darren: Ever since we met in kindergarten, we’ve always kind of aspired to have a career like Homer, who’s a huge influence on our work. Something about oral storytelling; it’s just a dying art. Of course, there are also the usual filmmaker inspirations, such as Saturday morning cartoons (“Gummi Bears” in particular) and Sunday political talk shows (Jim Lehrer’s narrative sense is akin to D.W. Griffith, we feel). One era of cinema we were definitely NOT inspired by was that of 1970s Hollywood. We certainly weren’t watching movies like “Five Easy Pieces,” “Harold and Maude” or “The Last Picture Show,” and getting to work with Peter Bogdanovich in our film was NOT a big deal at all.

Joe: From conception to final edit, how long did the film take you complete?

Darren: Our typical answer to this question is two weeks, but since this is our hometown paper, we feel we owe you the truth. It took just over 5 years, and if you add the festival and theatrical run, it has been nearly a 6 year journey. We’re pretty sure we started this film when Whitey Herzog still managed the Cardinals and Neil Lomax still manned the quarterback position for the Big Red.

Joe: What other festivals have screened your film?

Darren: We premiered this year in March at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Tex., which was an incredible experience and led to our distribution deal with Magnolia Pictures. We also played in Humboldt County (in Eureka, Calif., more specifically), at the Wild Rivers 101 Film Festival, as well as a number of other festivals around the country. It is likely that the St. Louis Film Fest will be our last festival appearance in the United States (we’re presently beginning our search for an international distributor which means we’ll likely play some festivals around the world).

Joe: Has it won any awards?

Darren: “Humboldt County” won the audience award for best feature at the Idaho International Film Festival this year. We think we won because it was one of the only festival screenings we did not attend personally. People tend to find us rather unlikeable. In addition, we won the award for “Best Movie Ever Made,” a prestigious prize given only once in a lifetime by Mrs. Gloria Grodsky and Mrs. Sondra Jacobs.

Joe: Do you think it’s possible to build a film career in St. Louis?

Darren: We didn’t know anyone in the film industry, so we moved to Los Angeles in 2001. After all this time, we still don’t know anyone, so we’re not sure it was all that worthwhile. But truthfully, we think it’s possible today to build a film career from anywhere, provided that you make good films that people want to see. The reality, of course, is that the industry is based in Los Angeles and to a lesser extent New York, so if you want to eventually work with actors who can get your movie released in 1000 screens by their mere presence in your film, you’ll at least have to travel to one of those cities to meet with said actors. But good movies can be made anywhere. Well, they can’t really be made in Cleveland. But that’s the only place.

Joe: Do you have day jobs?

Darren: We try to sleep as much as possible during the day, but we also like to eat, so we’ve had to perform various odd tasks to survive. We’re both actors, so acting work provides the bulk of our income, but we’ve been everything from restaurant hosts (they wouldn’t let us wait tables because we didn’t have enough experience – L.A. is a tough town) to poetry readers and even SAT tutors. People in California will pay a lot of money to help their kids learn the secrets of 30-60-90 triangles.

Joe: I’ve heard that your next project might be an adaptation of the Buzz Bissinger book “Three Nights in August,” which profiles Tony La Russa. Is that true?

Darren: We consider ourselves to be the luckiest St. Louisans alive right now because we’re working on a film about Cardinal baseball. As of right now, we’re writing it and also planning to direct it. Whether or not any of that happens is beyond our control, but if it doesn’t it won’t be for lack of passion about the project. As far as the narrative arc, the skeleton is right there in Buzz’s book, which is structured entirely around a 3 game series against the Cubs in the heart of the pennant race. The beauty of this film is that it’s not a championship season.

Joe: Finally, which one of you guys is the real genius?

Danny: Neither of us is particularly intelligent nor talented.

Darren: Well, except for Tuesdays.

Danny: It’s true. On Tuesdays, something just clicks.

Darren: I’m sure it has nothing to do with the whiskey.

Danny: The truth is we both get by on our incredible good looks.

Darren: We’ve been doing it for years.

(”Humboldt County” screens at 7 p.m. Thurs., Nov. 13, at the Tivoli. Tickets are $10. The film will be available on DVD Jan. 13)