Blitz of documentary ideas

If a funny, touching movie can be made about a stuttering boy who, against all odds, joins his high school debate team, then maybe one should be made about the boy’s creator, a writer-director who was also a stutterer and is comfortably chatting with a reporter about his feature film debut.

“Rocket Science,” which opens in theaters today, follows the fortunes of Hal Hefner, a New Jersey high schooler who is persuaded to join the debate team by the girl of his dreams. Director Jeffrey Blitz, on a recent press stop in the District, reveals that the film is something of an emotional autobiography.

“There are certain key facts that are drawn from my own life. And then a lot of stuff is just completely fanciful,” he says. “I did stutter at that age and I still stutter now, but I stuttered intensely at that age.”

One would hardly know Mr. Blitz, a smart and friendly guy in his late 30s, was a stutterer. There’s little trace of it during our interview. It’s worse on the telephone, he says.

“If we were doing this as a phoner right now, it’d be a big headache for you and for me,” he says. “I think the psychology of it is the only thing I have to convey what I want to say or do on the telephone is my voice, so if I’m robbed of my voice, which I get worried about with my stuttering, there’s just silence, nothing. Whereas in person, if I take a long pause to think about something, you know I’m still here.”

Radio and television interviews can be hit or miss. “Stuttering is a circumstantial, random thing,” he says. “I go through periods of being good or bad with it.”

One of those bad periods, he recalls, was when he was writing the script to his film. But perhaps it just helped him get into the head of his main character, a boy who is finding his voice just as he’s dealing with the end of his parents’ marriage (one of the plot points that’s completely made up).

High school debaters are an intense bunch; it’s a milieu with plenty of dramatic — and comedic — possibilities.

“Kids can devote themselves to activities like that with abandon,” he says. “So much of their ego gets bound in it that it has great potential for drama. Certainly, we found that in ’Spellbound’ also.”

Mr. Blitz explored another group of passionate teenagers in his 2002 documentary debut. “Spellbound,” which followed contenders of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, was nominated for an Oscar.

He was tempted to start his documentary career, rather than his feature career, with a film about the debate world. But “I thought that the spelling-bee world is something people could connect to a little more easily than policy debate,” he says. “We actually slowed down the fast talking that kids actually do in policy debate. It’s such a blur and so much jargon gets used, it’s not accessible in the same sort of way.”

He says that as a teen, the fast debaters thought they were playing football compared to the mild table tennis of the more “Lincoln-Douglas”-style debaters.

Mr. Blitz didn’t join the team for a girl, like his creation. “I wanted to prove to myself, and I wanted to prove to the world that I could do the very thing that you’d think I’d be least able to do,” he says.

“My first year was very rocky, which is reflected in Hal’s experience,” he says. “We don’t know if Hal stuck with it. I stuck with it. It became my obsession, debate and public speaking, in high school. I did very little homework, I just did my debate research.”

By the time he was a senior, this stutterer won, with his partner, the New Jersey state debating championship and three different public speaking events, surprising his family, a couple other members of which also stutter.

Hal doesn’t do quite so well, which is surprising — often in films, the sad endings of real life get turned into happy endings.

“I wanted to mine my story for comedy and drama. The ending to it didn’t seem like the most important piece of that puzzle,” Mr. Blitz says, emphasizing it was the “emotional reality” that counted for him.

“We have Rocky 2 through 6. I didn’t need to make Rocky 7. Hollywood makes that movie again and again and again,” he notes.

Mr. Blitz’s film is a literate one, so it’s no surprise to learn that he studied creative writing at Johns Hopkins University amongst such talents as Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee, John Barth, Jean McGarry and Grace Paley.

“My approach to filmmaking is really informed by my studies in creative writing,” the director says. “A short story, even when you turn it in, you get a second and third draft. You keep making changes, boiling it down to its essence, trying to get it as close as possible to the thing in your head.”

Principles of storytelling apply even to documentaries, he says.

Mr. Blitz is about two-thirds of the way through shooting a doc-feature on lottery winners, who have proven more difficult to get access to than spelling-bee champs. He’s also directed a couple episodes of the hit TV series “The Office.”

“Spellbound,” “Rocket Science” and “The Office” do all have something in common. “All of these are about people on the outside,” he observes. “They’re either on the outside looking in or happily on the outside.” He notes that the high school world of “Rocket Science” consists entirely of outsiders: you don’t see the cool clique at all.