Jeffrey Blitz, Director of 'Rocket Science', was interviewed by Jan Anderson of BSA Scotland at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, August 2007. A condensed version appeared in a Speaking Out article 'Rocket scientist'.

JA: Can you tell me about your personal experience of stammering?

JB: Sure... I'll use the word stutter, coming from the States. My earliest speaking experiences were stuttered. My father was a stutterer and he had an uncle who stuttered - so it ran through that side of the family. My parents tell me that when I was two years old and just learning to put sentences together I would get stuck. My mother said she was hopeful that I would outgrow this, but my dad guessed that the way I was stuttering was similar to the way he himself stutters. Even when I was very young I would describe my experience saying "I know the words I want to say - but I just can't make myself say it". And they realised that what I was describing was a very acute description of stuttering. My dad is a research psychologist and my mum is a paediatrician, so, immediately I started going to see different speech therapists and my dad did all sorts of research into the latest work on stuttering.

My dad's approach to stuttering had always been to accept himself as a stutterer. He learned techniques to help himself through blocks, to stutter softer, but not to eliminate blocks entirely. Also, when he was in college he joined the public speaking club and just got increasingly comfortable with himself there.

When I was growing up, I was much more frustrated by my stuttering. I went to see speech therapists who would talk about how important it is not to avoid stuttering - but I was obsessed with avoiding it. As a result, I developed a tremendous vocabulary at a young age. My father said it would require a lot less energy to accept that I stuttered, and that it's not such a big deal. Eventually other people would accept it and be able to deal with it - but I was not interested in any of that. My dad just has a different personality than I do. He doesn't care what anyone thinks about him. From a very young age, he marched to his own beat and was very comfortable doing that. I wanted to be a really social kid, to have more friends. At that age, you don't want to be different. You just want to blend in.

JA: At what age?

JB: Probably, age 12 - 14. I tried the things that worked for my dad, but they didn't work for me. For example, I wanted to run for student government when I was 13 years old and you had to give a speech. I was very nervous about it and my dad said "why don't you say at the beginning of your speech that you are a stutterer, then everyone will know and you won't be worried about whether you end up stuttering or not". I gave the speech and announced that I was a stutterer and it was so weird... I asked myself "Why am I telling people that I have this?" To me, as a kid, it felt like a very unusual thing to do. It just was not suited to me at all.

In any event, I became very good at avoiding stuttering. I contorted sentences in all sorts of crazy ways and drew upon all sorts of words that kind of meant what I wanted them to mean.

When I was 15 years old, I decided I wasn't content to think of myself as a stutterer who would have to be shy about whether or not I would speak in public. Also, I am an argumentative person by nature. I would have these great arguments that would bloom in my head and I wanted to share them. So, I joined my debating team. I thought, if I could just make my mouth say what I wanted to say, I would be really good at it. In the first year I was tragically bad and my stuttering had never been worse. It was a high-pressure situation for me.

JA: Were you trying to avoid a lot?

JB: Yes, but in public speaking you develop a theatrical voice that is not your own. I think this voice serves the same purpose as speaking in an accent. The more comfortable I became with this new voice, the less stuttering I did. By the time I was in my last year of high school, I was amazingly good at debate. I was almost completely fluent and it carried over into my life outside as well. It had just sort of become my voice. I didn't have anxiety about stuttering anymore. I won the state championships. I was the president of the team. It was my obsession in high school. I didn't care about my grades. All my sense of self was invested in debate and I did brilliantly at it!

By this time, I had already been through many different sorts of speech therapy. When I was much younger I went to this weird, experimental positive reinforcement therapy where, whenever I would say a sentence fluently, I would be given a baseball card. It was completely absurd and did not help me one bit, but I had a terrific baseball card collection at the end of it! I don't think anyone practises that kind of positive reinforcement anymore. Then I went to a stuttering programme that was run by Catherine Otto Montgomery in New York. That was probably the most helpful programme for me at the time. However, speech therapies were very difficult for me because it was only on the phone, or in high-pressure situations, or getting called upon in a classroom, that I would stutter. In casual conversation, I would almost never stutter. Generally, when you are modifying your speech and behaviour, you have to modify it 100% of the time in order for it to really work. I was a really fluent kid 60% of the time. I didn't want to have to adopt an artificial way of speaking for this 60% of the time so that the other 40% of the time I would be OK. So, it was only when I found debate and my brain figured out a more organic solution that I could apply across the board that things really started to work for me.

In conclusion, most of the speech therapies in my childhood and adult life have been of very limited help. They were enormously helpful in the moment and carried over for a few weeks - but then I ceased to apply the techniques to my everyday casual speech because I didn't need or want to use them.

If I stuttered most of the time, behaviour modifications would have been brilliant. But I don't, so the techniques feel very artificial. Also, I naturally talk fast. A lot of stutterers think of themselves as fast talkers, whether they can get the words out or not, and these fluency modifications generally require you to slow your speech down so much that your brain is generating 10-20 thoughts but "I am speaking to you like this" (impersonates very slow speaker). It is incredibly frustrating, not to be able to speak at the speed of your thoughts.

JA: Can you give me a little more detail about the speech therapy techniques you learned?

JB: I have used gentle onsets and stretching out syllables. Catherine's programme had a psychological component as well, including methods for relaxing yourself and letting go of some of the tension that might be contributing to the stuttering. I also went through a speech therapy programme in New York when I was younger that was about breathing modification. I tried the Holland's programme in Virginia where you stretch out syllables and learn how to initiate vocal chord vibration when you are blocking. However, it's another one of those things that is super helpful for two weeks, then it all falls apart unless you really adopt the altered voice - and that voice is a very artificial one for me.

Actually, a funny thing is that, from the time I graduated high school and was doing debate until my film 'Spellbound' came out, I went through a period of incredible fluency during which I would tell people "I am a stutterer", and they would say "that's absurd, you are perfectly fluent".

I started to research a documentary about stuttering in Los Angeles that I never ended up making. I met Vivian Sheehan. The whole Sheehan approach at UCLA is very much about accepting yourself as a stutterer and not trying to coach ways out of it or do behaviour modification. For someone who was as ambitious as I was as a kid, I was not ready to accept this. I always felt there are some people who, like my dad, are OK with it. Then there are other people who are determined to push past it. I think these are constitutional differences.

JA: Sometimes the people who most want to push past stuttering are most at loggerheads with it. And in fact, Sheehan's theory is that the more you struggle with your stuttering, the more the struggle will be evident in your speech.

JB: I understand and appreciate that. But as a teenager, I was not ready to accept it at all.

JA: So when you met Vivian Sheehan?

JB: I was very fluent and doing research into the proposed documentary. I sat in on a group therapy session and said "I'm a stutterer too" and they said "Shut up, you're not a stutterer at all"! And I said, "No really, I still experience the mental exertion that goes into not stuttering. I still have to think through my sentences. I am good at it, but they don't just pop out."

But, what is happening in America right now, true to the American character, is that if you can find the 'magic bullet' solution, you go for it. So, people are using the SpeechEasy device now. I tried it but it gave me a headache and didn't work at all for me - but I know stutterers who swear by it and the difference when they have it in and when they don't is magnificent. What I think will become the big trend in the US, and probably ultimately around the world, is what Gerry McGuire has termed the 'psycho-pharmacological' treatment of stuttering.

JA: You are really well researched aren't you!

JB: I know Gerry because he's in Irvine and I'm in LA. When my speech was very fluent I started to direct in the advertising world and telephone conference calls became how I would get a job. Suddenly, I became very self-conscious on the phone. Whatever my brain had been doing that had enabled me to be fluent, I lost this ability to do. I could hardly say anything, not only on the commercial teleconference calls, but also on calls to my family or friends. I was utterly tongue-tied. It was incredibly frustrating. My stuttering became worse than it ever had been in my teenage years.

JA: How did you understand that?

JB: Essentially, I became very self-conscious on the phone and started stuttering a little bit, so I went to see a prominent speech therapist outside LA - and actually it was terrible. She made me incredibly self-conscious. She tried to teach me these behavioural modification techniques that had me focus on what I had been doing. This meant I became aware of something that I had mastered by not being aware of it. Suddenly, I was thinking of stuttering and I couldn't make my mouth do what she wanted it to do - and then suddenly, the whole thing just collapsed on me. It was very dramatic and it happened in a short period of time.

JA: So, directly focusing on your speech was very counter productive. I wonder if you can pause and reflect on what has made the biggest difference in terms of managing your stammering in recent years.

JB: I will tell you two things that helped a little and something that helped a lot. I started doing speech therapy with a guy named Mark Power down in Irvine, Southern California. The idea was largely about breaking a sentence down into chunks before you say it. Somehow the act of breaking things down and thinking things through really helped my fluency a lot. Initially it starts with slowed down speech, so you are putting everything into one or two syllable chunks, then you build up to a more normal rate. Also, from the Holland's programme, there are one or two things that, when I get really stuck, I'll try to draw on, although it is a more unnatural way of speaking. These are the things that helped me a little bit.

What helped a lot is... let me just jump off on a weird tangent... around the time I was getting out of graduate school I developed a terrible fear of flying. I used to be absolutely fine with flying. Then all of a sudden, over the span of six months, I started to obsess over stories of plane crashes. It got to the point where the thought that I would have to fly somewhere meant I would not sleep. I use to fantasise the night before about the work that I was going to getting cancelled so I could stay at home. It was really dramatic. Then a friend of mine suggested that I try taking Xanax before flying. So, I took Xanax whenever I flew for about two years. When I stopped taking it I found I had overcome my fear of flying entirely.

Then I started to really think. This was the first time I found a drug to be really effective. Around that time I was reading about Gerry McGuire and eventually I made contact with him. I asked if there was anything that I could try drug wise for stuttering that I didn't need to be on all the time. For example, to use if I had a big conference call or a Q&A at a screening. He told me about a drug that has tested quite well, but there were some side effects. So, I went on Zyprexa for a while. It made an enormous difference. There are side effects, which are unfortunate. You can put on weight, but luckily, I'm thin anyway. It could wreak havoc with your system. You also need to sleep solidly through the night (which is a good thing for someone who doesn't generally!). If you don't get 10 hours of sleep... its bad! I wasn't happy about the side effects but I took it long enough for the situations that were really difficult for me, like high-stress phone calls, to get easier. I went from being hardly fluent at all to being almost entirely fluent in just a couple of weeks. Now I just take it in anticipation of high-stress situations. I will try out Pagoclone when I go back to the States in September, because it supposedly has fewer side effects. It was a great thing. The anxiety eventually just went away.

So, now I still stutter on the phone but I don't dread it or stutter to the same extent. It's not for everybody and, as with any drug, you do not know the long-term consequences. However, if people are cautious with how they use it, I think it can make a tremendous difference. Eventually, I hope they will be able to refine it.

JA: Would you say at this point in your life stuttering continues to be a central issue or is it more peripheral now?

JB: It's very circumstantial. I'm just coming out of years when it has been very difficult so I can still feel the sting of that. I feel I'm about to enter a period of significantly greater fluency and whenever you enter a period like that, it's just such a relief to not have to think about stuttering in the same way. I imagine in my life I will have ups and downs - and when it gets bad it really gets foregrounded in your thinking.

JA: Avoidance is something you relied on a lot as a young person and obviously you have found lots of other ways of handling stuttering. Do you still swap words and use your vocabulary creatively, or is that a thing of the past now?

JB: The term 'avoidance' has a very negative connotation because it makes it seem like it's a cop out. I think 'word substitution' makes more sense because it sounds like it is more of a game - and that's what it felt like. I think it is a creative way of trying to solve a very difficult problem. It shapes the way I think in a very creative way. I make great leaps of thought - and that has emerged directly out of stuttering. I don't need it (word substitution) in the same way, but I enjoy it still. I like knowing that when I write I can scroll through words in my head and come up with synonyms for things, or rearrange sentences to make them sound a particular way.

JA: So, if you could live your life again with or without stuttering?

JB: I would absolutely stutter. I mean without hesitation!

JA: A lot of learning has come from stuttering.

JB: I would also add that it is a great character builder. I know that whenever anyone faces adversity and someone says "oh, it builds your character" you want to say "f*** off"... but, in retrospect, I think it was a great thing. It made me a tougher kid and it serves me well now.

JA: Have you been involved in The National Stuttering Association in America? Are you aware of how the film has been greeted by the stammering community in the US?

JB: They have asked me to be a keynote speaker at their convention next year. It is very flattering and if my schedule allows, I'll do that.

I read some online boards of stuttering groups that were very sceptical of the film before it came out, not knowing that I stuttered and feeling it was going to be played for laughs. There were concerns that, because it has elements of comedy, it wouldn't get at what it is really like to live with stuttering. As more stutterers start to see the movie they adopt it as their own and realise that one of their own has made it and been honest about the experience. Some people wrote, based on the film trailer, "he doesn't stutter in the way I stutter, so I am not going to go see this". People are very possessive about their own way of stuttering. It is like a fingerprint or signature. But I think stutterers realise that people stutter in their own unique way and that I created a movie about the way I stutter - and I hope other stutterers get to make projects about the way they stutter as well.

JA: The film goes a huge distance towards raising awareness of some of the subtleties around what it means to stutter. The people who stutter that I watched it with felt extremely positive about it. One of the main things that people who stutter suffer from is the lack of sympathetic portrayals of stuttering in the media. To have somebody who is endearing and bright... a character that a lot of people can identify with is a very positive thing. So I think you have done a great job.

JB: Thank you.

JA: The film is about a lot more than stuttering, so, if there is a core message to the public or to people who stutter, what might that be?

JB: Well, a critic wrote about the film and he really got it. Essentially, I feel like everybody stutters - it's just that some of us do it with words, while others do it in different ways. Everyone has their own thing that they believe ought to be simple, but they find it's not simple at all. And people feel a great deal of shame about that. I think that if everyone were aware of their own weaknesses, or their own areas where they couldn't achieve what they wanted, we'd find that includes everyone in the world. So, stuttering was really a metaphor for a lack of mastery over the world that everybody feels in one realm or another.

JA: We are not completely in control of ourselves and our lives...

JB: Yes. The human mechanism is just too complicated. It breaks down in all sorts of ways at different ages and stages in life. I think, if people can arrive at a point where they are more accepting of themselves, we're just happier in general.

JA: That's a really nice place to end up... thank you so much!

Note: Xanax is used in the treatment of anxiety and depression and Zyprexa is an antipsychotic drug - both can have severe side-effects. At present there is no medication available in the UK that can be prescribed specifically to help with stammering. For information on the pharmacological treatment for stammering, go to: www.stammering.org/ adther_drugs.html.

Speaking Out article: 'Rocket scientist'