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Q & A : Rocket Science
By Sarah Keenlyside

Jeffery Blitz, director of the breakout documentary hit Spellbound, takes us on another amusing journey into adolescent hell in his latest film Rocket Science. Canadian Reece Thompson plays 14-year-old Hal Hefner, a teenaged boy with an excruciating stuttering problem, who is convinced by the girl of his dreams to join the high school debate team. The film clearly struck a chord with Festival Director Geoff Gilmore. “We’ve seen lots of coming of age stories here,” he said before the film’s premiere last night, “but we’ve rarely seen one with the nuance, integrity, and I think quality that Rocket Science brings to us.”

Blitz, Thompson and the rest of the cast took to the stage after the screening to talk about the process of making the film and the challenges of learning how to stutter.

“We’ve seen lots of coming of age stories here, but we’ve rarely seen one with the nuance, integrity, and I think quality that Rocket Science brings to us.” — Festival Director Geoff Gilmore

Q: Was the transition from documentary to narrative film difficult?
BLITZ: I actually think making a doc is a great tool … in a doc, you’re having to shape things into drama that aren’t playing according to any script. I think the most difficult part, in working with Spellbound, it was just me and Shawn out there on the road. But now it’s so strange to have an idea in your head about where something ought to go, and then suddenly there are a ton of people that need to find an articulate way of sharing it… I couldn’t just go out there and shoot it, but there was a whole team of people that wanted to help me. I just had to figure out how to find those words – that part was the trickiest part for me.

Q: Did you always intend for the main character to stutter?
BLITZ: Yeah, the stuttering part was drawn from my own life and it just felt like a vital part of it. Personally, so much of the idea is finding your voice, not just in terms of speech, but finding your voice in how you meet the world. And I thought that stuttering was a really nice way of suggesting someone who had to navigate a lot of tough things.

Q: The main character’s stutter seemed so organic and real. Was all of that was scripted or was much of it improv?
BLITZ: I think that at the start of shooting, we tended to stick to the way the stutter was scripted, and the script [was written] in a way that I knew I would have to come at those sentences myself. But then very quickly Reece got so good at stuttering in the exact manner that I would, that he would bring all sorts of other stuff into it. [He stopped] going by the script and just started going by [his own] intuitive sense of the way that I would stutter. And sometimes when he was feeling particularly funny, he would ask me to say the line to him, and he would know exactly how to say it.

Q: (To Thompson) Was it hard to stutter, and how did you prepare for the role?
THOMPSON: Well, Jeff has a stutter – I’m sorry! [Apologizes to Blitz.] Jeff had a specific idea of how the stutter was going to be. It wasn’t the typical blocking type of stutter, which is what you see oftentimes in the movies. The idea was that Hal knew that he was going to be blocking on a certain word and he would try and find ways to work around it. And then we actually had a speech therapist come in who thought it was really weird that he had to teach me how to stutter – normally he was hired to teach kids how not to stutter. [After a while] it just basically became a part of me. I couldn’t stop doing it. I would go to a restaurant and be like, “I’ll have the, the, the… steak!” It was awesome; it was great with the ladies.

Q: The relationship between the main character and the brother – that was very dynamic. Was there any personal thing there?
BLITZ: No, I wish that I could say I had a brother as entertaining as Earl, but I had two brothers who were my friends growing up, and they both did better academically than I did – so, no, I don’t know where Earl came from. That’s my fantasy about what high school should have been like for me.