Jeffrey Blitz has directed two movies: Rocket Science and Spellbound.  Here is an interview with him:

Mr. Blitz, hello.

Hello

I understand that your time is valuable and to tell you the truth I may not be worthy of it. As a result, I will be as honest as I can right from the beginning. I am not very good at interviewing people. I am too self-absorbed to properly hear what others have to say. If that isn’t enough, If that isn’t enough I’ve never actually written anything for the magazine I’m interviewing you for. Over the last week I’ve tried multiple times to write a quality review of Rocket Science and have failed miserably every time. If you aren’t too depressed at this point I would like to start the interview.

Yes, please. I am anything but depressed.

Someone suggested I start you out with a cupcake question, so here it is: What did you eat for breakfast?

Cupcakes. No, actually I ate at the restaurant around the corner, the name of which I don’t know, but I got a poached egg and they were very good.

I’m glad Boston is treating you well.

So far, so good.

One of the characters I really liked, even though it was a minor role, was Josh Kay. Do you think he would be enough to save Saturday Night Live?

[It is Josh Kay’s goal to become the youngest cast member on SNL]

I would like to think so. He’s actually a very talented kid. Josh just sent me a screenplay he’s just written which is amazing that he’s gotten through an entire screenplay. It’s very good. I don’t know (cough) SNL in such a tailspin if one person can save it (cough) but if any thirteen-year old kid can, he can.

What’s the screenplay about? Is it something you’re interested in?

It’s not for me. (cough) [I didn’t put this cough in to allude to anything. Blitz just coughed. He took a sip of water. That seemed to clear up the problem.] It’s a very dark high school story. It’s very well written.

I’m interested to see that.

In the movie Rocket Science you have Hal who stutters and then you have the elite debaters who are at the opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to speech and communication. Even though they’re complete opposites of each other it seemed that the word meanings are lost upon the listener at both ends. Is that something you were aware of?

For me, so much of the movie is about the idea of voice, trying to find voice and trying to figure out what to do with it when you got it. I love the idea that all these kids are lost to it somehow. Even when they can speak incredibly fast and are packing their sentences with tons of SAT words, they still don’t know exactly what they’re talking about. There is still a question about whether their content of what they’re talking about matches up with what they’re feeling or trying to express. Whether it’s the kid who’s talking a million miles an hour, but saying nothing or the kid who isn’t able to get out any word at all they’re both at the mercy of not knowing how to express what’s inside them. Yeah, I thought a lot about voice when making this film.

After seeing the trailer I got excited about this film, but I sometimes worry with these kind of movies because they’ve almost become cliché to some extent. Is that something you worried about?

Yeah, absolutely. I think the coming to age genre is so well-worn at this point almost to the point that there’s become a certain formula to it. I was very aware of that danger. I might have been too aware of the formula when I was writing [the script]. I kept wanting to pretend it was going down that path and then step away. Then pretend it was back on that track and step away again. So, I was very aware of the clichés of the genre. I tried to undo them without wrecking them.

Kind of along those lines, I think one of the downfalls of the movies in that quirky, coming-to-age genre is that they start off on a good pace with humor and they begin to forget that’s what makes them good. Rocket Science never seemed to fall into that trap. Is that something you focused on?

I did. I think what you’re talking about is that many movies that start out as comedies end up as striped down, very simple romances.

Even guys like Jude Apatow seems to fall into this trap.

Yeah, I was determined for the movie that tried so hard not to be a Hollywood film, I didn’t want it two-thirds of the way into the movie to decide that it was acceptable to have a Hollywood ending all of a sudden. I wanted to have the story grow as organically as I could. These were all good characters and I wanted to be faithful to them and let the story go where it must go.

Another thing I noticed in the movie was the focus on young characters and how there really is an absence of a mature, adult presence in all the young peoples’ lives. Even when the young characters were getting in trouble, there was never really a consequence from the adults.

I love the idea that everyone in the movie is lost when it comes to figuring out love and sex and relationships. There’s no person, or father figure, that Hal can turn to. I think it makes it so much more interesting when parents have to battle through it themselves. Otherwise, I think we get the answers too easily when there’s the adult with the boiled down, Hollywood lesson about what life is like who steps in at some point.

One thing I really liked, that was small, was the guidance counselor in one scene was wearing Nikes. I felt like him just wearing those shoes fit the character perfectly, a typical guidance counselor. Is that something you picked out?

I picked the sneakers and then weirdly we got a letter from Nike thanking us. It’s so weird because it’s not a product placement. We didn’t ask Nike, we just kind of decided that those were the right sneakers for him to wear and then Nike thought of it as a product placement. Which such a funny thing because the guy is such an off-base, off-color guy in the movie. Why is that a good advertisement for Nike.

I just pictured the guidance counselor losing touch with his youth and buying those shoes was his attempt to try and be cool again.

Right, he’s trying to stay young.

I was doing a little a little research on you and I found that you don’t have a wikipedia page.

I know. I’m so proud of that.

So, you’re not upset that you don’t have one and Reece Thompson does have one.

No, that’s absolutely perfect. Although, I don’t think this will happen. I would love to go my whole career without a wikipedia page. For me, I don’t want to. It’s not that I don’t want to know about other film makers because sometimes I’m interested, but I used to have this fantasy when I thought I was going to be a fiction writer. I had this fantasy that I would write under a pseudonym and people could read a book not knowing anything about the person who wrote it at all so all they would have to go on is their own life and the book and that would be it. You can’t really make films like that, but I love the idea anyway.

Kind of like Pynchon, where no one knows who he is and he’s kind of disappeared.

Yeah, kind of, but I’m sure Pynchon has a huge wikipedia page.

Is it something where if you got a wikipedia page you would delete it?

No, no. I’m just proud that it’s lasted this long. I think that when Rocket Science comes out someone will put up something. I also like that the few things that I’ve seen about me online there are all sorts of facts that are wrong. About where I grew up and what year I was born. I like that stuff. I don’t feel the need to correct any of it.

Yeah, I was looking you up online because I saw in the movie release that you got an MFA in fiction, but I couldn’t really find anything except that you won the fiction award while at Johns Hopkins.

Yeah, you found it. That’s crazy that you found that. Where did you find that?

I just looked. I had to dig through google like to the forth or fifth page because I’m interested that you used to write fiction. Do you still write fiction?

I haven’t. It’s turned into screenplay writing.

Is that just a form you’ve found that works better for you?

No, no. There’s a part of me that believes I’m a fiction writer, not a filmmaker even though I have nothing to show for it. Sometimes I just feel that. The way that I approach movies tends to…it feels very much like reworking a short story for me. The mental process feels very similar to that. Yeah, I haven’t written a short story in a long time. I would like to get back to it someday. I kind of feel that if I were ever to fall out of favor with the powers that be when making a movie that I would try my hand in fiction writing again.

That’s interesting the career path you took, from a creative writing background into movies. That’s actually what I’m looking to do, is get into an MFA program.

Oh yeah, well I highly recommend Johns Hopkins. It was great. I went there as an undergrad and I stuck around and did the one year masters program and I thought it was great.

What was the name of that story that you wrote for them that won the award?

It wasn’t just one story.

It was like a volume of work?

Yeah, it was a bunch of things. It was a kind of senior thesis.

Oh, I was interested in how you ended up working with the Junior Philosopher, Jonah Hill? He’s like the big name right now.

Yeah, I know. I have to say that I’m really bummed about that because when we shot Rocket Science it was in the summer of 2005. Nobody knew who Jonah Hill was. And he just came into the audition, for a different part actually, and he’s awesome. He’s incredibly funny and a very good actor and a great screen presence. So we cast him as a little part because he was shooting another movie at the time so we had to give him a smaller part. Hence, the Junior Philosopher is only on for a few scenes. So we only shot for one day. And that was it, so Jonah could work with the schedule. Then, of course, in between shooting the movie and now, suddenly he becomes a better known guy. He was in Knocked Up and Superbad. Now, all of a sudden it feels like a cameo by a well known actor. But when we cast him he was an unknown guy.

So, I get the feeling that if Ben Stiller read your script and wanted to play the father that you would probably say ‘no’.

We talked a lot about whether or not we were going to do celebrity cameos in the adult roles. And I, from the beginning, felt like it would be a terrible mistake. It just throws it out of wack. Ben Stiller and Meryl Strepp as the Mom. There not onscreen long enough for them to become someone other than the celebrity. So then you’re just looking at Ben Stiller. Oh, there’s Ben Stiller. There’s Ben Stiller saying the line. There’s Ben Stiller being funny. That’s completely distracting to me.

I was wondering about that. I figured you might say that. I think we’re running out of time. Anyway, the movie deals a lot with the first kiss or dealing with the kiss Hal got. Do you remember your first kiss?

It was in prison.

It was?

No. I can’t think of a worse place for that to happen. My first kiss…I remember I was in a play, in some play and I must have been in seventh grade and it called for me to kiss another girl in the play. I remember there was a lot of talk about how long to kiss for. We discussed, you tilt your head to the left, I’ll tilt my head to the right. It was all very carefully planned out. And it was very public. That was my first kiss.

Do you still keep in contact with her?

I don’t. I lost track of her in college. She went to Yale and started kissing boys who were brighter than I am.

I did find a dime on the way here and I heard that you had some money trouble with the first movie. Do you want the dime.

You know, you should hang onto your dime. We ended up doing quite well with that.

I’m glad to here that.

We went into massive credit card debt on that, but were able to get ourselves out of debt and pay the people who worked on the movie for free.

I guess I am just going to ask one more question. It’s kind of long. So the question is basically about the cello through the window scene and what that represents in Hal’s life. I’m going to give my view of it.

Yeah, go for it.

I kind of saw it as the cello symbolizing female attraction. To get at the issue deeper, the cello is a symbol of the power women can have over men even though they are lacking the male phallus or source of overall sexual power. Basically, when Hal tosses the cello through the window he is giving up his male lust of the female and choosing a life of first asexuality and then homosexuality as seen in the friendship that develops between him and [another male character] which then leads to them entering the debate as a team of homeschoolers. This odd grouping seems like it is going against the accepted technique in debating society. So, when Hal does throw the cello is he then saying that females are not the answer for his stuttering which makes him turn inward and then to another male before he finally reaches to what may be the real source of his stutter, his father?

Wow. Dude that’s awesome.

Yeah, I kind of just went with it.

The thing is, when you put together or when I write scenes you try not to think of them in those terms, but I love how they can be interpreted in those terms. For me, the appeal of the scene is a much more tangible sort of thing. There are all these scenes of Hal looking through glass at other people and he chooses the safety of being an outsider and looking in. All the characters are kind of outsiders. Even when he sees Jinny often times he sees her through the glass of her own window. So for me the cello scene ends up being all that pent up emotion that you feel when you’re sitting watching the object of your attraction through the window. When all that goes wrong he lashes out at the role of being a spectator. So those are along the lines of what I was thinking. One of the great things about movies is that they can be interpreted on the surface and others believe in the unconscious level.

It’s also pretty humorous that it took him a half a dozen throws to actually get it in the window.

Right.

I guess that’s about it.

Do you think we should wave goodbye with our feet.

Hopefully it all got on tape.

Cool.

Well, thank you very much.