Light and dark are a good mix in Lee's "Inspector 42"

The scene is an everyday factory that makes shirt. Inspectors check out every shirt and insert their tag marking there job number. Inspector 42 is trying to make his quota and lets some bad shirts go through, but how important is a good inspection? What’s a bad shirt going to do?

Find out in the award-winning “Inspector 42,” which will be shown Friday and Saturday at the Temecula Valley International Film and Musical Festival.

“I got the idea about five or six years ago when I bought a new shirt, and I looked in the pocket and lo and behold it had been inspected by Inspector 42,” said director Nathan Lee. “I kept thinking that somewhere in the world this guy really exists and this is his only job. I thought what is he like and what an interesting character he would be.”

Of course, he also contemplated the possibilities.

“What would his biggest nightmare be?” he asked.

Lee, a recent graduate of Brigham Young University, shot the film in two weeks in Salt Lake City.

“It’s an oddball concept, and as the script went through draft after draft it took on a more serious, dramatic element, but it certainly kept the comedy,” he said.

Lee has always been a devotee of movies that use a degree of fantasy to carry a very serious message.

“The movies and stories I have always loved are closer to ‘The Twilight Zone,’ he said. “Anything that does that ‘stranger than fiction’ angle to tell a cool story in a fantastical setting has always connected with me.”

Of course, when coming up with an idea like “Inspector 42,” there may have been a concern that it would not be that easy to get others interested. For Lee, that was not the case.

“Before I had the story developed, I was just telling people I wanted to do a black and white movie based in the ‘50s, and I was surprised how many got on board with just that,” he said. “There wasn’t even a script or anything.”

Once he started getting people on board, Lee had to get moving on the story.

“Jeff [Parkin] and I got them excited, and now we had to make sure the story lived up,” he said. “After various drafts of the story it got darker and we did lots of test reads with audiences with actors reading it and acting it to an audience. We went through a good 40 drafts.”

The complexities of the story idea were proving to take a bit of time to get on paper.

“I had never done something like this that was a balancing act between dark and comedy,” he said.

The comedy was present through the entire process, even though in Lee’s mind the darkness was what was most memorable as he was making it.

“It was interesting that as we shot the movie, it stayed ridiculous through the shooting, the rehearsal and the editing,” he said. “When we premiered it, there was an audience of 700 people and there were lots of laughs. “It was kind of a reminder to us that there was comedy in the film.”

There was a true mix of reactions.

“What’s cool about it is there were 700 people laughing, then we heard sniffles,” he said.

But did he think it was going to be a big hit?

“I think no matter what project you work on, you figure it’s the best thing ever,” he said. Then there are moments on the same project that you figure it’s not the best thing ever. When we finished it, I felt very satisfied that this was the kind of movie I wanted to watch and love. I also was hopeful that there were enough people out there who would watch it.”

The end result was a pair of “student Emmys” for top director and top drama.

“That was the immediacy of the success, when we got the Emmy and were there at the awards show,” he said. “I was there with Paris Barclay [“NYPD Blue,” “ER”], who is a big time director and producer. He had watched the show that morning and I was backstage after I won best director. I went backstage and was talking to him and he couldn’t stop raving about it. To me it was ‘I won an award, but all of a sudden industry professionals are praising this film.’ It caught me off guard.”

That said, Lee is not resting on the success of “Inspector 42”

“I just finished a draft of a future script,” he said. “Our goal is production in February.”

And how similar will it be to the style of “Inspector 42?”

“It will be a slightly different direction, a contemporary Christmas film actually,” he said. “There are certainly fantastical elements told quite seriously. It is different in tone, style and story, but there are some similarities.”