Interview: Jeffrey Blitz

Rocket Science takes teenage angst to new heights. It explores the pubescent hell of Hal Hefner, a skinny teen who decides the best way to overcome his sizable stutter is by joining the high school debate team.  The film’s writer and director, Jeffrey Blitz, grew up a stutterer, a condition that created an obsession with language and storytelling. Like Hal, Jeffery joined the debate team, a courageous, if embarrassing method for overcoming his speech disorder. 

The film is ripe with hilarious, yet painful moments. Like Jeffery’s previous film, the documentary Spellbound, the film focuses on the quirky details of ambitious kids. Competition becomes a magnifying glass on their strengths, flaws and blind spots. Tongue-tied at the worst possible moments, Hal oscillates between soldiering through with awkward charm and retreating to the janitor’s closet.

While Jeffery did not stammer and start during our interview, he had some wonderful stories about the effect stuttering has had on his life and what it took to get ROCKET SCIENCE made.

Jeffrey Blitz

Laura Newman: So you’ve obviously overcome the stuttering.
Jeffery Blitz: I go through phases, sometimes I’m very fluent, sometimes I’m not fluent at all. Actually, on the telephone I’m usually a complete disaster. Sometimes when I have to speak in public and I have a microphone, I’m really bad. When I was at Sundance, the very first screening, when I had to introduce the film, I was petrified. I knew from the days that I had volunteered at film festivals that the volunteers never get thanked and so I wanted to thank the volunteers. But when I was getting up there to introduce the film my brain would not let me say “volunteers” and would not let me say “unpaid staff” and I went through all the various permutations and in that instant when I was saying who I really want to thank somehow “small people” was the only thing my brain would let me say. So there is this look out from the audience like, “What did he just say? He’s thanking the midgets out there?” And then after the screening we’re out at some bar and I can’t get out of my own head that I thanked the small people. What a retarded thing to do. So I happen to tell some guy the story and he was a writer for the Globe and Mail and he wrote this article “Rocket Science Director Did Not Mean to Thank the Little People”, this whole article about how I’d blown it up there.

LN: How do you think your stuttering influenced your process of becoming a director?
JB: Well I’ll tell you, I think for the most part the personality of the director is someone who does not like to be told no. My whole life when someone says no I hear it as maybe, or I hear it as I have to try harder. So, I think stuttering is like God’s way of telling you no, in a way. You can’t speak. You’re not meant to be out in this bigger social scene out there, articulating yourself or sharing your voice and I was so upset that the world would tell me that I’m suppose to not speak, that I decided I have to make it my life to just talk and not shut up. So I got involved in debate in high school, not because I was lured onto the team by an attractive senior, I got on because I felt like the world was telling me this was the one thing I could not do. I wanted to prove to everyone that I could do it, although it was a complete half ass way to go about it. I really couldn’t do it. My first year of debate I was really very dreadfully bad. I ended up getting very good at it because I was single minded in my desire to win at the debate, at public speaking.

LN: The debates were very fast. Were the debating scenes pretty accurate as to how they really are?
JB: Yes we had to slow them down a little bit. They talk faster than that, they really do. But we had to slow them down just to get any sense of being able to comprehend any of what they said.  They really go mile a minute and I did too at that age. You “spread”. It’s called spreading which Anna Kendrick, who plays Ginny, speculated was from “speed” and “reading” although I’d never heard that as a debater and I was incurious enough to ever ask where the term ever came from.
 
LN: So you maintain that the story is not autobiographical?
JB: Well there are certain key facts that are autobiographical for sure.  The extent to which Hal stuttered is similar. That I joined up with the debate team; Hal joined the debate team. I grew up in New Jersey; Hal grows up in New Jersey. I destroyed a flute; Hal destroys a cello. But there are so many things that are different. I wanted to know the emotional truth I was dealing in. I know the experience of trying to say something in front of a classroom and having your voice be completely robbed of you. So I could get that. But the world Hal lives in is not the world I grew up in at all. Hal’s family is a complete invention. My parents are happily married after 40 plus years. I’m very close to both of my brothers, neither of which are oddball obsessive compulsives. So I wanted there to be a foundation of emotional truth I could build on but then take as many steps away from autobiography as I needed to take to really shape the drama and let the comedy come through in the way it does.

LN: For Hal it’s just an utter mystery how people connect and don’t connect. It’s as much about not understanding girls as it is about not understanding adults. Were you that confused?
JB: Was I that confused? I think I was a little ahead of Hal’s curve. But I think that within the world of ROCKET SCIENCE it’s not just Hal that’s at a loss there, the adults are completely at a loss and there’s no one who has it figured out. For all of them it’s just a total mystery. It’s just that some of them, Hal in particular, and Ginny and Ben, are trying to understand it. And the adults in the movie are people who have given up trying to understand it at all. Shit just happens to them and they feel there’s nothing that can be done about it.  And that’s just what life is all about. It’s always that love, and the understanding of love and a mastery of it is always illusive to them.

LN: You were talking a lot about emotional truth and you were dealing with young actors so how was that for you?
JB: It was great actually. To work with actors that weren’t jaded at all. They were so eager to hear what I had to say to them. There was no like: They were more experienced than I was and I should just shut up and let them do their thing. They would actively come to me and say, “Am I feeling this in this moment. Am I thinking this?” It often turned into Jeff Blitz Story Hour where I would share stories from my own life with them and they would say to me on set, “Okay, so is this scene like when you got arrested for blah blah blah?” Yes, it’s exactly like that, or no it’s not like that.  “Is this when the algebra teacher said that thing to you?”  Yes, absolutely it’s like the algebra story. So my own stories became like the touchstone for them in some ways. One of the things I learned in SPELLBOUND is that you get kids to open up when they feel like you are respecting them as real human beings and you’re not respecting the age difference.  So I wouldn’t interview these kids in SPELLBOUND and think that I know so much more than they do. I would go in really wanting to understand what their experience was like. And I tried to do the same thing in ROCKET SCIENCE. To create a space on set that felt really safe for them to be and act.

LN: What’s next for you?
JB: Well I’m about ¾ of the way through a documentary about people who win the big jackpot in the lottery.

LN: What made you go back to documentary?
JB:  I’d love to go back and forth if I can.  When you’re working on a documentary you crave having a crew to support you. On SPELLBOUND it was just me and Sean Welch who is my producing partner. I would operate the camera and he would do sound and we were just dying for support.  ROCKET SCIENCE we had tons of support and you’re just dying for everyone to leave you alone and make the movie. So I love the idea of going back and forth.

LN: How long have you been working on the lottery project?
JB: Well it’s sort of a tricky answer because we started shooting it at the end of 2004 and then we went on hiatus for a year and a half to work on ROCKET SCIENCE and then went back to it. So all told we probably shot for about a year on the lottery project but it’s been spread out.

LN: You have made a movie where in another context all your characters would be considered nerds. But you can’t think of them as nerds because there is nobody else. It’s a complete nerd world. We don’t see the cheerleader or the quarterback or whatever.  I’m wondering is that a conscious part of what you’re doing?  You basically exclude a lot of the characters that would in fact make a lot these kids feel bad about themselves.
JB: Absolutely.  I was adamant about casting extras that fit. Sometimes I’d say nerd sometimes I’d say average kids. They should look like average. They should look like real kids. I don’t want the cheerleader click, the jock click. I don’t want the goth kids you know all the stupid Hollywood formula ways of indicating what the groups are in high school. For me this is a whole world. It’s just the world that Hal perceives. Hal perceives the world that is important to him, a world where everyone is an outsider. But in some ways it’s a gratifying place to be because everyone is an outsider, there’s no inside and other side.

LN: It must have been tough to cast all these people.
JB: It took 6 months.  It took forever. We almost didn’t get the movie made because we couldn’t find our kid to play Hal. It was just in the last two weeks. HBO gave us two mores weeks to cast Hal. Someone was walking out of the production office in Baltimore with a box of tapes that had been sent unsolicited and they said, “We’re going to throw these tapes out unless you want to see them.”  I said I absolutely must see them! What do you mean you’re going to throw them out!  So my afternoon became going through these unsolicited tapes, which everyone said would be impossible to find a good kid in the unsolicited batch. Reece [Thompson] was in that batch of tapes. His agent read it in the breakdown in Vancouver and put him on tape. It’s true. In fact we had found another kid, an actor that was on TV show called FATHOM. I was desperate to cast this kid and I convinced HBO he was the right kid. We flew him out from LA to Baltimore and when he was in the air NBC said we’re not going to let him spend his hiatus working on this movie. Insurance won’t cover it. So he’d landed in Baltimore and we had to meet him at the airport to say we’re putting you back on a plane to LA. And we thought the whole movie was going to fall apart.

LN: Why were you in Baltimore?
JB: We shot the movie in Baltimore. We picked Baltimore because the movie is set in New Jersey but the child labor laws are too restrictive in New Jersey for us to shoot. In Baltimore they’re like China. We could shoot deep into the night and no one would tell us not to.

Picturehouse Films releases Rocket Science on August 10th.