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AN INTERVIEW WITH:
ZACH BRAFF
by Peter Sobczynski

August 6, 2004

It should be easy to hate actor (and now writer-director) Zach Braff. He has the lead role on "Scrubs", one of the better television shows currently on the air. He managed to parlay that into a gig writing and directing and starring in his first major movie, a dramatic comedy named "Garden State" in which he not only gets the front-and-center role (as Andrew Largeman, an overly medicated, emotionally crippled actor who returns home to New Jersey for his mother’s funeral) but also gets to snuggle on-screen (and off, if the rumors are true) with the extraordinarily fetching Natalie Portman (playing the local girl who helps him finally break out of his shell). Then he got to see his film turn into a sensation at this year’s Sundance Film Festival-so hot that two rival studios (Miramax and Fox Searchlight) decided to team up to purchase the rights to distribute it.

And yet, despite all of that, it is impossible to not like the guy. He is just as genial and self-effacing off-screen as on and the film, rather than being just another example of a TV actor overstepping his bounds, is actually a pretty good debut. It wears its artistic influences on its sleeve (primarily Hal Ashby and Wes Anderson) and it shows that Braff as a director has a good touch with working with actors (besides Portman, the film also features Ian Holm and Peter Sarsgaard). Even though "Scrubs" looks as if it won’t be leaving the airwaves anytime soon, "Garden State" suggests that he may well have an interesting career to fall back on when it finally does go off the air.

THE INTERVIEW

What was it that got you interested in acting in the first place?

My father used to do community theater-he was a lawyer and when I was 8 years old, I would see him do everything from "Hello Dolly" to "The Prisoner of Second Avenue" and I was fascinated by all of it. When I was a kid, he sent me to a theater camp called Stage Door Manor in upstate New York, which was where kids who want to study that stuff go. It isn’t a vacation camp-it is a place to work hard. "Camp" was shot there, but that was very different from my experience-for lack of a better word, that was very campy. Needless to say, that was how I first got into acting.

With "Garden State", you also branch out into writing and directing. Was this something that you had hoped to do all along or did it just suddenly come up?

I actually set out to be a filmmaker. I acted when I was a kid but in high school, I really got into filmmaking. I went to Northwestern University and decided to study film and while I was there, I directed about four short films and worked on countless others. I took some acting classes but I really set out to be a filmmaker. When I got out of school, I started to get work as an actor and I ended up going down that path and that led to the television show. As soon as I could, I hoped to get back to making movies again and this was the first chance I had.

Were there any particular films or filmmakers that inspired you in any way?

Woody Allen has always been a huge inspiration to me. Hal Ashby, Alexander Payne-these are people that I look up to and want to be like.

What was the initial inspiration for what would eventually become "Garden State"?

I had a lot of anecdotes and stories from growing up in suburbia-things I experienced, things that happened to friends of mine and things I read about in the paper-and I took a lot of notes and kept journals of them. I also wanted to do something really personal that had large chunks of things that really happened to me or that overlapped with my life. I just started weaving them all together. Sometimes I would have a scene that I had written and work backwards and as I wove things together, the characters would begin to form.

Seeing as how you not only wrote and directed "Garden State" but that you play a character who, like yourself, is a television actor, are you concerned that people will see the film and assume that every single thing in it actually happened to you in exactly the way you depict it on-screen?

I think there will be people like that and I can tell them that it didn’t. They will see large overlaps, Certain anecdotes are true but a lot of it has nothing to do with me.

How would you describe Andrew Largeman?

I think he is lonely and lost and he is operating in a very low gear. He is looking for something more and it takes his mother’s death to really open his eyes and aspire to experience life on a higher level.

What was it about such a character that made you want to both write him and portray him?

I wanted to do something that was completely different from the character on "Scrubs". I think that part of being an actor is controlling different parts of your personality. On "Scrubs", I turn up all of the goofy and silly parts of myself. On this, I wanted to use the more introverted and pensive parts of myself.

One of the things that is most impressive about the film is that even though you are a first-time filmmaker, you managed to recruit a pretty impressive cast-people like Natalie Portman, Ian Holm and Peter Sarsgaard. With Portman, she clearly seems to be relieved to have dialogue to deliver that is somewhat easier to speak and portray than the stuff she has been given to do in the "Star Wars" films.

I think she got a little left up shit creek in those movies because they didn’t give her anything to do and they are so different from who she really is. Natalie is a person who is very close to Sam-she is silly and she’s happy and full of energy and she hasn’t had a chance to play a character like that since she was a kid. She had just gotten out of college and was looking to do something uninhibited where she could experiment and play and I think she dug that about this film. That is why she stands out more than in the "Star Wars" movies. Some of those lines that she had to say...

Ian, Peter and Natalie were my first choices and I never thought I was going to get them. One by one, they read the script and they each said that they wanted to do it.

Was it intimidating at all for you as a director to have them as the actors in your first film?

It did a little bit, but in the back of my head, I knew I couldn’t be intimidated by that. I knew I would be doing a disservice to them and to the movie if I allowed myself to be intimidated. I thank them because it was generous of them to trust me since I was unproven. They’d seen some short films of mine but other than that, they were really just trusting me.

For that matter, what was it like to be directing yourself at the same time-having to gauge your performance, the performances of the other actors and the other mechanics of shooting a scene while simultaneously trying to focus as an actor?

It is very tricky. There are times when you are watching the other actors with your left eye and the crane with your right eye. It is very challenging but I felt prepared for it. For my entire life, I’ve wanted to do this so I felt ready. It was a lot to take on for my first time out but it was like swimming with weights-when I do something where I am just directing, it will be a lot easier.

"Garden State" premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it proved to be an audience favorite and inspired a bidding war between Fox Searchlight and Miramax that ended with the two competitors joining forces to release the film. For you, what was the Sundance experience like both as a filmmaker unveiling his work to the public and from the business standpoint-especially since it was the first major deal that Harvey Weinstein worked on after the publication of "Down and Dirty Pictures" and therefore had a lot of people looking at how he was behaving in response to the horror stories recounted in the book?

It was amazing-probably the best ten days of my life. I mean, going to Sundance, skiing, hanging out in a beautiful chateau, showing my film and having it get this amazing response-it was beyond anything I could have daydreamed about. As far as the sale, it was an adrenaline-filled couple of days because there were a lot of people bidding on it and as soon as the bidding hits a certain level, a lot of those companies drop out. It was down to three and it was scary because I didn’t know how the whole thing works. I met Harvey and...I try to go only by my impressions of people and not to let their reputations precede them. He was so passionate about the movie and so excited about it, as was Peter Rice from Fox Searchlight. Eventually, they decided together to purchase it together, which was unprecedented and shocked all of us. We weren’t sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing because it seemed pretty odd to us. When the dust settled, it felt like a wonderful thing because they were like a dream team.

-- PETER SOBCZYNSKI

Copyright © 2004 Peter Sobczynski
All rights reserved.
Used with permission
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