Rocket Science by Ioana Madalina Tantareanu

One reason the director of "Rocket Science", Jeffrey Blitz has jumped from documentaries to feature films to television and back again is that he does not want his work stuffed into a neat little Hollywood box. Blitz was nominated for an Oscar for his first film, the documentary "Spellbound". His new film, "Rocket Science", which is due to debute on Friday, doesn`t build on his non-fictional succes,but instead turns to a fictional comedy approach.The movie is about a teenage stutter on a high school debate team and left January's Sundance Film Festival with huge fan buzz, good reviews and a best director award for Blitz. Although the movie succes put the director on Hollywood`s map,he didn`t direct movies, only episodes of TV comedy "The Office", currently working on a documentary about lottery winners and writing a fictional screenplay.Blitz said in a recent interview that "Among earlier generations, people would think the egomaniac would be the film director; the quiet noble type would be making the non-fiction thing; and the sad sack guy who couldn't be the film director is making TV.For my generation, none of that stuff applies anymore. There are such great opportunities to tell different kinds of stories in different ways that people who hang on to the old ideas about it are really missing out," he added.Blitz loves to "pingpong back and forth," between media, and said it was nice to mix long, intense projects like movies with shorter ones. Blitz said that "Films are like long-term relationships ... you engage in a really deep emotional way.Commercials and TV are like great one-night stands. There is no expectation that they will go on beyond the brief amount of time you are there." "Films are like long-term relationships ... you engage in a really deep emotional way," he said."Rocket Science" tells the unlikely story of stutterer Hal Hefner, who is coerced into joining his high school debate team by an ambitious girl with whom he becomes infatuated. The idea of the film is Blitz`s adolescence, but he said he was not interested in making an autobiographical film. "Hal is a very shy kid and he recedes into the background and seems like he'd be more comfortable if everyone left him alone. I was never that kid," Blitz said.

by Ioana Madalina Tantareanu for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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