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Long before his hit independent feature Napoleon Dynamite (2004) gained him instant cult cred as a creator of oddball outsider comedies, Jared Hess was a 19-year-old Mormon missionary in Venezuela. He learned Spanish, which came in handy working with Mexican crew and actors on his second film and first studio picture, Nacho Libre (2006), which starred Jack Black as a monastery cook-turned-wrestler.

Three years later, Hess is back in the saddle again with Gentlemen Broncos , which opens in Canada Friday. During a promotional visit to Toronto last week, the affable, 6-foot-5 writer-director was chatting animatedly in Spanish with a Globe and Mail photographer before sitting down for a more relaxed conversation about his latest, strangest film. If he's smarting from the first wave of U.S. reviews – mostly pans except for a glowing New Yorker capsule – it certainly doesn't show.

Napoleon , about an extreme geek who helps a new classmate run for high-school president, wasn't a resounding critical success either. But it struck a major chord with a sizable group of teenagers who donned Vote for Pedro T-shirts and committed dialogue to memory. Whether fans will pony up for Broncos remains to be seen. If they do, they'll discover a similarly detailed, insular, geek-powered universe filled with the flotsam and jetsam of the filmmaker's youth—sci-fi book jackets, modest nightgowns, prolific juvenile VHS movie-making, enormous popcorn balls.

Looking beyond Broncos ' thrift-store aesthetic and crude, sometimes cruel humour (feces-tipped blow darts, a vomit-smeared kiss, an incontinent boa constrictor), the story is actually about competing creative visions and the various forces that motivate artistic endeavour. Home-schooled 17-year-old Benjamin (Michael Angarano), an aspiring science-fiction writer, lives in a geodesic dome in Utah with his mother (Jennifer Coolidge), an aspiring nightgown designer. While attending writers' camp, Benjamin submits his best manuscript, Yeast Lords: The Bronco Years, to a contest being judged by the pompous fantasy novelist Dr. Ronald Chevalier (Jemaine Clement of HBO's Flight of the Conchords ). Benjamin's new friends Tabatha (Halley Feiffer) and the prolific teen filmmaker Lonnie (Hector Jimenez) love his manuscript so much they “option” it (with a postdated $500 cheque) for their next movie. Meanwhile, Chevalier, under pressure from his editor, plagiarizes the teen's story and publishes it as The Chronicles of Brutus and Balzaak, which becomes a bestseller.

As Benjamin's story unfolds, so do the three different “versions” of his novel – two of which star Sam Rockwell as Bronco/Brutus, who rides gun-packing stags (inspired by Hess's youthful sketches), dodging cyclops fire as he tries to defeat an evil yeast-factory overlord. “The Yeast Lords scenes were the most fun to make and the most accurate representation of my early home movies,” says Hess, laughing, adding that his boyhood interest in film stemmed from his love of sci-fi special effects. His early films were mostly fight scenes and experiments with matte paintings and models. “It was a very auteur experience,” he says.

Nowadays, Hess co-writes all his screenplays with his wife, Jerusha Hess, whom he met while they were students at Brigham Young University's film school. Based in Salt Lake City, Utah, the couple talk through ideas for a long time, fill up a notebook, then hire a babysitter – they have two young children – and write at the office. “We're never sure who's responsible for what when we're done,” Hess says.

The initial spark for Broncos came from Jerusha's 15-year-old cousin, who lives in Alaska and writes “really disturbing sci-fi fantasy stories.” Story elements drawn from Hess's childhood are split between shy Benjamin and gregarious Lonnie. “I relate to the misunderstood creative type,” he says. “The mother character is based on my mom, who worked for a modest nightgown company and sold homemade popcorn balls – a real entrepreneur.

“My dad passed away when I was very young,” he adds. “That mother-son relationship in the film is very close to my experience. We may not have understood each other, but we supported each other completely.”

Unlike Benjamin, Hess has no experience with plagiarism nor can he imagine handing over something he's written to another director. “Our scripts have a specific vision, some of which is not on the page,” he says. “With Napoleon Dynamite, we were trying to get financing and everyone we met had very different ideas.” That's when he'd show them his nine-minute short Peluca (2003), on which Napoleon is based. “As soon as they saw how the dialogue was spoken and what the characters were like, they suddenly got it.”

Hess isn't concerned that sci-fi geeks will be offended by the film's portrayal of fandom. “We premiered Broncos at Fantastic Fest in Austin, and the reception was awesome,” he says. “Diehard fans love Blade Runner as well as Logan's Run – it's all sci-fi. And they appreciate the charm of the sillier stuff, too.”

Special to The Globe and Mail