Andre the Giant

On HBO, Tuesday

at 10 p.m.

Jason Hehir, whose documentary “Andre the Giant’’ premieres on HBO Tuesday, was not a pro wrestling fan when he was growing up in Newton. He was too busy with more traditional sports. He began a three-year stint as a ballboy for the Boston College Eagles when he was a fourth-grader at Newton’s Horace Mann School; he pitched lefty on the varsity teams at Newton North High School and later at Williams College. One of his two dreams as a kid was to be a sportscaster, like his idol Bob Lobel. The other was to be a film director, which sprung from the days when he and his two older brothers would make movies with the family’s home video camera. Hehir never did get to the broadcast booth, but he has managed to find a career that ties together his love of sports and movies.

Hehir broke in as a production assistant at NBC Sports in 1998, got to know sportscaster Bob Costas there, went with Costas when he jumped to HBO, got the opportunity to produce short sports documentaries, and about a decade ago started his own company, JMH Films. He’s produced documentaries on all sorts of sports, from boxing and football to baseball and basketball. “Andre the Giant,’’ an insightful look at the professional career and personal life of the late André René Roussimoff — a.k.a. “the Eighth Wonder of the World’’ — is his first on wrestling. Hehir, 41, spoke by phone from Los Angeles.

Q. How did you get involved with this project?

A. Peter Nelson is a Newton South guy who I’d been friends with long before he became president of HBO Sports. When [producer] Bill Simmons, who’s from Brookline, signed a deal with HBO, he had an idea to do an Andre the Giant documentary. Peter called me and asked if I’d be interested in directing. I said I don’t think I’m the guy for it because I don’t have a passion for the wrestling world or for Andre. I knew who he was; I remembered him as a pop cultural icon from my youth. But Peter asked me to talk with Bill.

My initial reluctance was that I anticipated that Bill was going to make a documentary that was essentially a string of highlights from Andre’s career. But it became clear that we had the same sensibilities about what story we wanted to tell, which was the story of Andre Roussimoff, the human being, not of Andre the Giant, the wrestling character. We agreed that we had to give people the visceral enjoyment of watching some wrestling clips. But we also wanted to tell the inside story of a guy living in a world that was not made for him, and the definitive history of a guy about whom so much mythology and exaggeration has been spread.

Q. What was Andre’s actual medical condition?

A. He had acromegaly. You and I have an adolescence; we grow in our teenage years, then we stop growing and that’s our size for the rest of our life. Andre had several adolescences. He would have a growth spurt, and then a few years later, would have another one. He was constantly growing.

Q. Throughout his career, he was billed as being 7-foot-4 and weighing anywhere from 390 pounds to 525 pounds. Was that accurate?

A. No one ever knew his exact measurements. We went to great lengths to get any doctor records or hospital records. He was very averse to seeking medical attention, but one of the procedures he did have was at Beth Israel in Boston. He had surgery for a broken ankle. We interviewed the surgeon, then we called the hospital, but all of the records, anything that would have his official height and weight on it, had been destroyed. So all we got were estimates.

Q. The film has interviews with Andre’s relatives, with the folks who worked with him on “The Princess Bride,’’ and with some wrestling luminaries, including Vince McMahon, Hulk Hogan, and Ric Flair. Did you feel that everyone was telling you the truth about him, or were they perpetuating the myths?

A. My goal with everyone, especially the wrestling people, because the ethos of professional wrestling is so imbued with exaggeration and embellishment, was to get them to let their guard down, be honest with me, and to pull the curtain back of this business that is so historically shrouded in mystery.

Q. They all appear to have some kind of reverence for him.

A. That’s right, and I think he was revered for many reasons. One is that he was such a keeper of the professional flame of that world. He never broke character. Another is that he understood how captivating he was and he understood, before there was a WWE, what a big deal it was when he went into one of these small wrestling territories around the country. He could make stars out of guys in little towns, and he was very generous about that. If he felt like it he could just flick you across the ring like a gnat on his shoulder. But he would often act as if he was being beaten up by these guys, and then all of a sudden they were deified in their territories.

Q. Does anything that you learned about him really stand out?

A. Because there were so many stories about Andre, one of our rules was that we were only going to include first-person accounts in the film. So, it wasn’t, “I heard he drank 200 beers,’’ it was, “How many did you see him drink?’’ And Ric Flair says, “I saw him drink 106.’’ So that’s in the film. The culture is full of stories about Andre’s larger-than-life persona, so we were interested in seeing how true some of these stories were. Some of them weren’t, but more impressively, some of them were.

Andre the Giant

On HBO, Tuesday at 10 p.m.

Interview was edited and condensed. Ed Symkus can be reached at esymkus@rcn.com.