The trailer for “Standards of Ethical Conduct,” which premieres Saturday at the Bug Theatre.

Who among us loves our office job? Let’s see a show of hands.

That’s what I thought. Of course, the evil qualities of most corporate, cubicle-based jobs has been the subject of many exemplary pieces of entertainment. I’m not talking “Working Girl” or “9 to 5″ but “Office Space” and TV’s “The Office.”

It’s also the subject of the movie “Standards of Ethical Conduct,” a scrappy film cast and shot entirely in Denver, guerilla-style. We talked to Baltimore-based writer-director Roman Hardgrave in advance of the movie’s Denver premiere at the Bug Theatre on Saturday about filming this low-budget lark and the qualities of not burning down your place of employment.

So you say you shot this movie in 2005 at your LoDo employer’s office — without their knowledge. How hard was that?

I was actually worried I was going to lose my job because of the way I shot it. I couldn’t afford to find anyone to let us use their fully-furnished office, so I shot it on the weekends, although I didn’t think that many people in my office worked on the weekends.

And it turns out they did?

Yeah. I tried to shoot it all in one weekend, although we were all there on a Sunday night and we shot all through the night, so people actually started showing up on Monday morning and we were still there. Even during the weekend, people would stumble upon our set just going to get coffee.

Chuck Roy, a Denver comedian who stars as Binger in “Standards of Ethical Conduct.” Photo from MySpace.com.

And this was totally guerilla-style?

I didn’t have permission, so I was going for the whole “ask for forgiveness” thing. Monday morning I came in and I had to talk to the office manager. He actually knew about it because people had told him about it around the office. He was nice about it, so we actually shot the whole next weekend as well.

Was it otherwise painless?

We did a little damage to the office, unfortunately.

Like what?

We had a light that broke on the floor and melted the carpet, which was ironically right outside my cubicle. We also popped a fuse and shut down a bunch of cubicles’ worth of machines and things, and we set off several alarms.

Nice. So you shot this in 2005 and since then the American version of “The Office” has become a network hit, and “Office Space” has become a modern cult classic. Does that mess with the freshness of the jokes?

I can watch (“Standards”) today and it doesn’t really look any different than it did then because things really haven’t changed from a corporate standpoint. In some ways it’s probably gotten worse for some people.

But did “The Office” steal any of your comedic thunder?

I’m a huge fan of “The Office,” but there were definitely times when I’d watch it and say “Damn it, that was my joke!” I felt like nobody had ever really talked about a lot these things, like Human Resources departments at big corporations. You get these funny personalities, like overzealous people that take their jobs way too seriously. It can be painful for the rest of the employees.

What about the movie “Office Space”? It seems like it would be hard to make a movie about the workplace that isn’t indebted to that in some ways.

That was definitely an inspiration for me. I thought the way it captured computer programmer talk was so funny and accurate. I came from a computer science background so I’ve been around a lot of progammers. I guess I didn’t realize how much it had inspired this movie until after I watched it recently.

I get the sense it was extremely low budget.

It was a very, very low budget and self-financed, which was one of the main reasons it took so long to complete. I had a full-time job, so it was kind of the classic thing they talk about in film production: the triangle of quality, speed, or price, and you can really only get two of them. So I went with cheap and good, but really slow.

Why did you choose the Bug Theatrr for the Denver premiere?

I’ve been at the Bug before and it’s very indie-filmmaker friendly. They have an emerging filmmaker kind of thing there and it seems like a lot of the the indie events end up going there. I really wanted a theater that wasn’t so multi-purpose, but rather a good theater for screening a film.

For more information on the Saturday premiere of “Standards of Ethical Conduct,” check out the Bug Theatre’s website.

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