Director Jeffrey Blitz, Movie Rocket Scientist

Jeffrey Blitz claims he's "allergic" to autobiographical films, but his latest movie, "Rocket Science," which he wrote and directed, makes you wonder how much of Blitz is in the film's main character, Hal Hefner.

Reece Thompson plays Hefner, a high school freshman in Plainsboro, N.J., with a frustrating stutter, divorcing parents and a bullying older brother (Vincent Piazza). When the debate team's star, Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick), asks Hal to join the team, he is smitten. His pursuit of Ginny lands Hal on the debate team and leads him to seek out her former debate partner, Ben Wekselbaum (Nicholas D'Agosto), who dropped out of school after botching his speech at the debate championships the year before. (See review on Page 34.)

Blitz admits he lifted some of the basics from his teenage years. "I stuttered at that age, and I still stutter now, but I really stuttered then. And I joined the debate team, and I'm from New Jersey -- only a different part of New Jersey [Bergen County] -- and the rest of it is largely invented. I didn't join the debate team because an attractive girl asked me to; it was my own bad idea." As for the family aspects, Blitz says his parents have been married for more than 40 years and never fought in front of the kids. And he claims he was the one bullying his two brothers.

Blitz doesn't consider "Rocket Science" a change of gears from his 2002 hit movie, "Spellbound," the Oscar-nominated documentary about kids competing in the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee. "In film school I remember seeing documentary films that were incredibly powerful and fiction films that were incredibly powerful, and you don't distinguish between the emotions you feel or the thoughts that you have when you see that kind of movie. . . . I just think of it as visual storytelling."

But one aspect of "Rocket Science" that's more audio than visual is Hal's speech impediment, which Blitz lifted from his own experiences. "What's so funny is when I was writing this script I was going through a really difficult stuttering period myself. I was having so much trouble communicating that I would resort to spelling words when I would get really blocked in some awful way. Then I was like that [jerk] who made the spelling bee movie who thinks he has to spell everything now," he says with a laugh. "So it was really accessible to me -- the frustrations that Hal feels at not being able to speak in a moment that you must speak."

A key scene in the movie is Hal's torturous attempts to order pizza at the school cafeteria. "Most stutterers have the experience that you want to order something that you can't easily say, or you can't say at all," Blitz explains. "And I had very recently had the experience where I had gone to northern Africa to visit a friend of mine who was shooting a movie there. When I first got to the hotel, I called room service, and I was starving. I wanted to order a hamburger off the room service menu . . . but 'hamburger' was the one thing I could not say. So I was on the phone for what felt like three months -- it was probably five minutes -- just trying to say hamburger, trying to say hamburger, and not being able to. Then the room service woman I was talking to decided she was going to read the whole menu, and I would just tell her stop when I got there, a really clever thing. But she read the whole menu and skipped hamburger! So she got down to the bottom, and I was like, 'Nope, not that either, absolutely not.' It was terrible."

To help Thompson understand that feeling, Blitz took the young actor to ESPN Zone for a little in-character practice. "I thought it would be a great experience for Reece to understand what stuttering was like by going to a restaurant and not being able to say what you want. I also took away his ability to point at the menu, so he had to find some other way to indicate what he wanted. Then we had some of the other actors join us because we thought it would be funny." Did the waitress think it was funny? "I think because [ESPN Zone is] owned by Disney now, the waitstaff are like corporate robots and you can't fluster them. So with all the [stuff] we threw at her, she just smiled through the whole thing. It was really kind of freaky."

While Blitz's next project is about adults who have won the lottery ("I've graduated from high school now, at long last!"), "Spellbound" and "Rocket Science" are immersed in the world of adolescents, a world he likes to mine in part because "at that age you haven't learned to protect yourself from your own emotions or other people's emotions," he said. "It's all just kind of raw. When you feel love, you don't know how to put it in a place so that if it falls apart, you can survive it somehow. . . . That quality, when you're that young, makes for really great drama and really great comedy."

Plus, he adds: "One of the great benefits of having done a couple of projects with kids of a certain age: If you treat them with respect and don't condescend but you actually want to know about them and are interested in their ideas about what to do with a certain scene, they're so excited and they're so interested in giving it their best shot. They're not jaded one bit."

Neither is Blitz. He's just realistic about life as a filmmaker: "I'll have some films I like and some I won't, and some films will get off the ground and some won't, and I need to steel myself to that."

With "Rocket Science," he also has come to realize that sometimes the differences between the movie he writes and the movie he makes are surprising. "When I wrote this script, all of the main characters -- Hal and Ginny and Ben -- had curly hair. And none of them [the actors in the movie] have curly hair. I imagined a curly-hair movie and ended up with a straight-hair movie. I have such a vivid sense that these characters in my head have curly hair. There's something about the spirit of a curly-haired person that's different from the spirit of a straight-haired person," he says, his own brown curls bobbing as he shakes his head.

"The weird thing is, that movie that plays in my head will always exist for me. When I think of 'Rocket Science,' I think of two different movies. . . . There's a part of me that kind of wants another crack at 'Rocket Science' to try to come close to that, and I don't think I could. But you know what? I think the movie that I ended up with is better than the one that plays in my head, actually."