Agony, Yes. Ecstasy? Not Yet.

He had waited his entire life for this moment, and now that all his work and (he didn’t mind saying it) suffering had paid off and his first movie began to un-spool in front of a small but charged gathering at the Sundance Film Festival, writer-director Miguel Arteta thought for a moment that all his suffering (he didn’t mind saying it) had caused him to be struck deaf, like Beethoven. The composer, not the Saint Bernard.

“All the actors were there, and everybody was anxious,” says Lysa Flores, one of the actors who make their debuts in “Star Maps,” the story of a young Latino who comes to Hollywood with dreams of stardom but ends up being sold into prostitution by his own father. “Miguel got up and said a few words before it started, but he was so nervous.”

In the darkened room, a blurred image appeared, half on the screen and half off, but for a long time there was no sound. Then there was a lot of sound, most of it coming from the back of the auditorium, where Arteta had just discovered a projectionist with whom he had a lot in common: this was only his second film. “His suggestion was to run it without sound,” says Arteta, who suggested that the film be rewound.

“They started again, and this time something came out that sounded like devil music,” says Flores, who put together the film’s innovative rock en espanol soundtrack. “Miguel literally jumped in front of the projectionist and was banging on the window, screaming, ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ But the projectionist didn’t want to stop it. So the movie kept going, but all you could see on the screen was Miguel’s fingers, banging.”

Six months later, Arteta is sitting in a chic French restaurant on Sunset Plaza, half a mile from the spot outside a Mediterranean mansion where a young Mexican who speaks no English sells maps to the stars homes.

“That’s what stood out for Miguel when he first started noticing star maps kids--they’re this very physical presence when you drive through the neighborhood,” says Matthew Greenfield, the 28-year-old producer of “Star Maps,” which opens here and in New York on Wednesday.

Arteta, who has been slumped over a plate of risotto, looks up with sad, tired eyes and points to a busboy, who it almost goes without saying is Latino.

“They’re made to dress in black right here,” he says. “The waitresses can wear whatever they want. It’s a very conscious effort to make us invisible.”

It took Arteta and Greenfield 4 1/2 years to bring “Star Maps” to the screen, and Arteta--gaunt, unshaven and looking considerably older than his 32 years--has spent the last three of those limping around on a knee with torn ligaments because he was too busy to stop for surgery.

“Miguel is pretty serious and tortured,” says Flores, 23. “I remember when we first stopped filming, I told him, ‘You need to do something to take care of yourself.’ The way he was not eating and not sleeping, he was headed down a really bad road. He’s gone through so much with this film. It’s been amazing to see him grow from it, realizing that he really did make something of his life.”

The filmmakers suffered lengthily and extravagantly for their art, and though no one actually lopped off an ear, Greenfield did have to make his bed every morning for 2 1/2 years after moving back in with his mother to save money. Whenever they were approached by someone wanting to invest large sums of money in their film, Arteta and Greenfield reacted like ingenues struggling to retain their virginity, resisting the temptation to think impure thoughts about such luxuries as a camera dolly to replace the skateboard being used by director of photography Chuy Chavez.

They made the film with a crew small enough to allow Arteta to shoot for 29 days--instead of the 18 or so that is typical for MasterCard movies--and spent under half a million dollars. Potential investors had to prove themselves committed to the cause--often by lending out their own cars--before their money was accepted.

“At times we thought it was foolish that we were asking people we knew could finance the movie if we could borrow their car,” Greenfield says. “We actually asked that before we asked for money. And we made it very clear that if they didn’t want to invest, we still really wanted the car.”

The moment of their greatest temptation--and ultimate salvation--occurred when a former television star, an actress whose home might actually have been featured on a star map in the ‘80s, offered to invest a million dollars if she could have one of the lead roles, a sex-starved TV actress eventually played in the film by Kandeyce Jorden.

“We turned down money left and right for this movie,” Arteta says. “Actors would be interested because they wanted to play these risky roles, and a lot of them came with money. But they also came saying they had to have some say in casting or they wanted final cut. We would suffer for three nights, lose a lot of sleep and then say no.”

They became like some Bizarro Bialystock and Bloom, offering shares in what must have sounded like the Latino version of “Springtime for Hitler”--a Mexican American father who sells his own son to both men and women as a prostitute--and then refusing as much as $75,000 from one potential backer who seemed only interested in the film’s commercial prospects. Artetaand Greenfield didn’t want just his money, they wanted his heart too.

“They made so many decisions like that, not accepting the money of people they didn’t really respect,” Flores says. “It was important to maintain the integrity of this film, because it was a Latino project and the Latino community had already been so involved. It was a responsibility to those people not to make something trashy.”

They got nowhere trying to boil the story down to the sort of three-sentence synopsis that has made Hollywood a hostile workplace for filmmakers attempting to deal with emotional complexity.

“We showed the script to one agent,” Arteta recalls. “He said, ‘This is disgusting. I can’t understand what kind of life you have that you could even write this.’ ” After “Star Maps” was accepted to appear at Sundance last winter, the same agent called back. “He wanted to be my agent,” Arteta says. “He called me and said, ‘I take it all back. You’ve taught me how to read scripts. I didn’t know what I was saying.’ ” Arteta got another agent.

All of this artistic high-mindedness might have come a lot easier if, almost a year after he had finished shooting the film, Arteta had not declared it a failure.

“When they first screened it for their friends, nobody would look them in the face,” Flores says. “There were definitely things missing that were really obvious, things that were never explained. To have released the film the way it was would have been to accept the fact that it had failed. Miguel’s whole life had been this film, and he thought that he had ruined his life because it didn’t work.”

After 11 months trying to make the pieces fit together in an editing room, Flores says Arteta was “almost delusional, not showering for days,” and Greenfield differs only to the extent that he describes the director as “almost catatonic.”

He was almost something, and it wasn’t good.

“Miguel is extremely critical of his work,” Greenfield says. “After having risked everything to shoot the movie, to have shot it and not done it right is a terrible, terrible thing to feel.”

“We’d been editing for almost a year,” Arteta says, “and the movie just didn’t work. Our investors and our friends were sick and tired of us. Even my family wasn’t taking my phone calls. At that point everybody was looking at us and saying, ‘Guys, you have an emotional problem. Just move on.’ We had to find ways for people to sympathize with these characters without taking the easy way out, which would have been to preach about the evils of prostitution.”

It wasn’t the evils of street prostitution that Arteta was after anyway, of course. It was the making of an entirely different type of hustler: the American Film Institute directors program graduate.

“AFI is a very Hollywood film school,” Arteta says. “Shockingly Hollywood. It’s very cliquish, very favoritist. While I was at AFI, I was shocked to see what a desperate culture Hollywood was. Fellow students were making half-hour films with Mel Gibson for $200,000. It seemed like everybody was willing to sell their soul to the devil to make a movie.”

After being accepted to return to AFI for a second year, Arteta says, he learned that another student who wielded considerable political influence at the school had unsuccessfully tried to lure away members of his crew, leading to a dispute between that student and Arteta. “AFI’s answer to that was to just kick him out,” Flores says. Arteta fought the expulsion with the help of a lawyer, who worked pro bono, and was eventually reinstated.

(“There was an issue at the time as to whether his script would be approved to be made into a movie,” says AFI spokesman Seth Oster. “In the end, it was approved and the film was made, and he went on to graduate. AFI is pleased that his career is moving forward so well, and that he is making worthy films.”)

Arteta says “Star Maps” is a direct result of his disillusionment with AFI.

“He saw people stabbing each other in the back to get their projects made,” Flores says. “I think for Miguel, that incident brought up the whole question of how far you would go to make your dream come true.”

For Arteta, that was the distance between Puerto Rico, where he grew up the son of an auto parts salesman, and the leafier precincts of AFI, where, he says, he was one of only two Latinos enrolled in the film school.

“At AFI, everybody was sure I would do a gang film because I was Latino,” he says. Defying the stereotype, his first short film was called “Lucky Peach,” about a turn-of-the-century woman who played the tuba in Wisconsin. “When people heard I was making a film about a female musician, they would go, ‘Ah, a salsa player,’ ” Arteta says.

He got the idea for “Star Maps” on his daily drive to school along Sunset Boulevard, where young Latino men peddle maps to the stars’ homes, advertising their wares with hand-painted signs along one of America’s most glittering thoroughfares.

“It’s such an absurd job to begin with,” says Arteta, who spent two days on a lawn chair observing the tricks of the trade. “Who the hell cares where Sylvester Stallone lives? But it was a perfect metaphor for somebody who wasn’t where you expected them to be. To sell your dignity outright seemed like the most physical way to make use of that metaphor.”

Also the most fictional, inasmuch as the film portrays as hustlers some of the most honest, and most often exploited (earning as little as $2 an hour in many cases), members of the very Latino community that Arteta says has been “misrepresented” in movies directed by non-Latino filmmakers. However, for reasons of his own, Arteta acknowledges misrepresenting this particular group of Latinos.

“We wanted to push the boundaries of what is expected of you when you are a Latino filmmaker,” he says. “I always feel pressure to make these gangbanger, drug-dealing, very one-dimensional movies. Or from the liberal and minority communities, to set a good example, and make strictly positive images to show people how great we are. I think those movies are important. But I also think there comes a time when it’s important to have different kinds of voices. As Latinos, we are not one thing.”

Says Flores: “I think there will be a lot of people who will ask, ‘Is that all Latinos are, a father prostituting his own son with males, females, whatever?’ I’m terrified of when my father sees the film. Maybe he’ll be completely disgusted.”

Even Arteta was disgusted with the original version of the film, though in his case it had less to do with the grittiness of the story than the murkiness of its narrative.

“I had to accept the possibility that I had failed as a writer,” he says. “So with a lot of humility, we showed the film to people we respected and said, ‘We want brutal honesty.’ And when the faxes came and they said, ‘Here is why the core of what your movie is will never work,’ we had to stare that in the eye. Luckily, I’ve blanked out that whole period.”

Using the rest of the post-production budget to re-shoot about one-fourth of a movie they now had no money left to finish, Arteta and Greenfield somehow pulled the film together with the new footage, and four months later they were showing the film at Sundance in Utah.

After the disastrous first screening at the film festival, star Douglas Spain--who plays Carlos, the young Mexican American who dreams of being a movie star while selling maps, and himself, on the street--spent the next three days standing in the cold on Park City’s main street with Arteta and Greenfield. Holding hand-painted star map signs, they handed out invitations to the second screening, desperately hoping their own dream--and the work of four years--wasn’t on the verge of disappearing without a trace.

But the word of mouth at the festival for “Star Maps” was strong, and a capacity crowd showed up for the screening, among them executives from Fox Searchlight, who sat next to the filmmakers. Throughout the film, the Fox people would intermittently get up, disappear for a while, then just as suddenly return.

“I thought it was too bad, that their attention was obviously somewhere else,” says Arteta, whose suffering had by now reached such exquisite perfection that it was audible on UHF channels and to certain breeds of dogs.

“Later I found out they had decided to buy the movie about a third of the way through,” he says, “and they were going into the bathroom to contact our lawyer on their cell phones.” A deal for a reported $2.5 million was quickly struck with Fox Searchlight for the distribution rights to the film.

The studio soon followed that with a first-look deal meant to tie up Arteta and Greenfield for the near future. But Arteta--who was kicked out of high school, nearly kicked out of film school and left Harvard’s documentary program after a misunderstanding of the curriculum (he wanted to make a musical comedy!)--admits chafing at the bureaucratic wrangling that has come with the studio’s money.

“It’s been very frustrating, and we’ve learned from it,” Arteta says. “It is our feeling, and feel free to quote us, that we have concerns about working in a studio system. We don’t like having other people decide who we’re going to be working with.”

“They totally didn’t expect to be bought up the way they were by Fox, which kind of rode in a white horse,” Flores says. “They never had to answer to anyone before, and though they still have final cut, everything has to be discussed with a whole group of people.”

“I’m very confused,” Arteta says, almost mournful. “We really thought we had ruined our lives. I want to keep making interesting movies, but I don’t want to get too deep in the misery of feeling like you need certain things to make a movie. Movies are wonderful, but they’re an art form. They’re not something that you should have to hurt yourself to get them done.” And with that, he limped off into Sunset.