One of the things I like to do at film festivals — especially at Sundance, with its lineup of relative neophytes — is to walk into every movie with as little foreknowledge as possible. It's always instructive to see how something plays when you haven't been promised "a wise and witty romantic comedy" or "a horror story disguised as a sophisticated family drama," or even just "Dakota Fanning sings Elvis, gets raped." (Alas, even I couldn't avoid bumping into that last one.)

So while I knew that Rocket Science, one of the breakout hits at Sundance last January, was the dramatic feature debut of Jeffrey Blitz, who'd made the engaging hit documentary Spellbound a few years back, I had no clue whatsoever about the film's subject matter. Picture me sitting bolt upright in my seat, then, when the first few words of spoken dialogue were "Topicality. Significance. Inherency. Solvency." If that litany means nothing to you, then you weren't on your high school debate team. But I had been —

and so, I quickly suspected, had Jeff Blitz. There was just no way a filmmaker who hadn't been immersed in the aggressively insular world of policy debate could have represented it so accurately onscreen. That he managed to do so without letting the milieu overwhelm the characters or the comedy was doubly impressive.



As a general rule, I don't like to do interviews, mostly because I can never think of any good questions. Maybe I shouldn't have agreed to do this one, either, because Blitz and I wound up having a conversation so geekily nostalgic — turns out we were both class of '86, and hence were debating the same annual resolutions, which we remembered in pretty frightening detail — that I wouldn't dream of inflicting some of it onto the public at large. As it is, even after heavy editing, I've had to annotate certain references; you'll find those remarks in [closed brackets]. — Mike D'Angelo

So you were a debate guy, right? This wasn't just something you researched.

No, I did policy debate all through high school. And I tried really hard to be faithful to that world, though in a way that wouldn't alienate people who aren't familiar with it.


You actually have them spreading! [Debate jargon for "speaking incredibly fast"]

I know! Well, sort of. I couldn't do the full-on spread or audiences would just flee. I did want to maintain some level of comprehension. But people who don't know debate often ask, "Did you just invent that rapid-fire way of speaking?" And I have to tell them, "No, and as a matter of fact we actually slowed it way down." And they just cannot believe it.

Did you ever see Listen to Me? [Laughably bad 1989 debate movie starring Kirk Cameron]

Yeah. [laughs] I remember because I was in college when that movie came out, and my debate friends and I railed on it. It was such a piece of crap. So with Rocket Science I set out to make a movie that debaters could see and really embrace. I wanted to be sure I wasn't making another Listen to Me. I mean, don't they end up debating in front of the Supreme Court?

Yeah, and Kirk Cameron wins by introducing a slew of new arguments in 2AR. [Don't even ask.] Did your script for Rocket Science predate the making of Spellbound?

No. Actually, the whole idea was inspired by Spellbound. When I was shooting that film, all these questions kept coming up. Okay, so this kid turned out a certain way, but what if she'd turned out to be a different sort of kid entirely? There were just so many what-ifs. What if I met a kid who got lured into a spelling bee by a girl he was in love with? I'd jot down some notes on that. So by the time I finished Spellbound, I had all these hypotheticals swirling around as to what that movie could have been. And Rocket Science sort of became my way of realizing those hypotheticals. Testing them. Letting the story just be what popped into my head rather than what the world presented to me.

So you don't think of yourself as primarily a fiction filmmaker or non-fiction filmmaker?

No, I just think of myself as a visual storyteller. That's the most important unifying element for me.



Speaking of that, a lot of the reviews from Sundance, including mine, pointed to Wes Anderson as a big influence on your visual style. Do you find that flattering, or irritating, or. . .

It's neither flattering nor irritating. It's confusing, to be honest. I like Wes Anderson's movies, but I don't see Rocket Science as being in that vein at all. Or only in the most superficial way. It's about bright high school students, so people think of Rushmore. But Wes Anderson creates these worlds that are completely closed off — almost like snowglobe worlds. He's a master of figuring out what hat a person would wear in the snowglobe world, and then what angle the hat needs to be turned at. But there's very little narrative shape to his movies, and also very little human emotion, I find. Oftentimes the soundtrack becomes a substititute for emotion felt by the characters. Rocket Science, to me — assuming I'm the kind of filmmaker I think I am — is much more along the lines of somebody like Hal Ashby. It's a blend of absurdist comedy and real humanity. Harold and Maude is a much more direct forerunner to Rocket Science than Rushmore is. I just don't get the connection.

You don't see any similarity in the visual sensibility? You're both incredibly precise.

I think there's a sense of style in both, but they feel different to me. Wes Anderson is all about the wide-angle frame where everything is symmetrical. In Rocket Science, people are frequently cut off by the frame. Nobody ever gets cut off in a Wes Anderson film. Everything is centered.


I get the impression you did read the reviews from Sundance.

Oh, I read all of it. There are critics out there whose work I'm really interested in, and I'm dying to see what they have to say about my stuff.
And even someone who doesn't like your work, if they're coming at it from a smart place, you can really learn a lot.


Was there anybody who didn't like Spellbound?

Yeah. There was this one review in Slant Magazine —


Oh, those guys are vicious.

He wrote this ungodly piece that basically said Jeff Blitz ought to be brought before a firing squad and killed. Claimed it was one of the most awful movies made in the past ten years. It's vile, it's disgusting. Just one horrible thing after another. Eventually the writer had a nervous breakdown and took a leave of absence, which I feel like I'm directly responsible for. [laughs] But my friends and I used to laugh about that review, 'cause that's not a review you're gonna learn anything from, except that the guy's ready to go postal and you just happened to wander into his sights at that moment.


Do you want to hear my one big complaint about Rocket Science?

Absolutely. Bring it.


I thought it was really funny, but I was annoyed that you went for the life lesson at the end.

Here's the interesting thing about that: I hate lessons in movies. I hate the whole idea that the story doesn't have value in and of itself.
And I don't think there's a life lesson at the end of my movie. There's the illusion of a life lesson. There's a little bit of personal accomplishment for the kid, but it's really a pyrrhic victory. It's a nihilistic ending that pretends to a sappiness that doesn't actually exist. 'Cause he asks his dad the question — I don't want to give anything away here for the readers who haven't seen it — but he asks his dad this heartfelt question and the answer he gets is just...not acceptable. [laughs] So it acts like it arrives at a resolution that it never really arrives at. Or at least that's what I was going for.