Zach Braff: Living Large

By: Sean Axmaker

Tuesday January 18, 2005

New Jersey boy Zach Braff made his name in "Scrubs," the sitcom now in its fourth year. This year he even scored a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Comedy. But acting was never Braff's primary goal. To quote a cliche, what he really wanted to do is direct.
Garden State, Braff's directorial debut, hasn't done too bad, picking up a pair Independent Spirit Award nominations (for Best First Film and Best Screenplay, which Braff wrote) and the National Board of Review's award for Best Directorial Debut.

Dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, his hair disheveled and his eyes tinged with red, he showed the fatigue of his busy tour only in his appearance. From his entrance, he was friendly, jovial, and energized: ever the pro.



Sean Axmaker: You got a film degree from Northwestern. Was it always your ambition to be filmmaker?

Zach Braff: It was. As a kid I loved acting, I acted a little bit as a kid unprofessionally, but my favorite thing was making movies. I made videos with my friends and my brother had a super 8 camera. It was my hobby. I wasn't into sports at all. What I liked doing was acting and making movies. So I got in to Northwestern and they make you choose whether you want to be an acting major or a theater or film major. I made the choice then that I really wanted to study film. That's all I really did there, was make movies. I did one play but really just worked on as many films as I could. I worked on dozens and dozens of other people's movies, doing any possible crew position I could do, and then over the course of my time there I directed four shorts myself. I did a lot of jobs after school and thank God it led me, eventually, to "Scrubs," which changed everything.

Was it leverage from "Scrubs" that enabled you to direct "Garden State"?

Yes and no. Indirectly. I would have thought that being on "Scrubs" would have helped more to get the movie made, but I had myself and Natalie Portman attached and Danny DeVito producing and still everyone was passing on financing it. Indirectly it helped because when I got "Scrubs" I got a big fancy agent and the big fancy agent was extremely important.

I read that you had been working on the script, at least in idea form, for years.

I didn't know what it would be, I just collected stories. I didn't know what my first film would be, I just knew that I wanted to write something personal and I had lots of anecdotes and experiences from growing up in suburban Jersey. So things I experienced, things I watched my friends go through, I put to paper. I just would write, I didn't really have a clear intention, I would just write a scene and say, "Well, maybe that will be in the movie, maybe it won't." I wrote to figure out who the characters were and to weave these anecdotes together, and the characters began to form. That's really how I set out to starting write it.

Where did Large [Andrew Largeman, the character Braff plays] come from? He's a character who has, essentially, been medicated since the age of ten.

Without the medication part, there is a lot of Large in myself. I've experienced depression and even more than that I spent much of my twenties very introspective and oftentimes lonely and feeling alienated from everyone I knew, just because I was out in LA, not knowing many people, trying to become an actor without even knowing if that was what I wanted to do, going home and feeling that I didn't belong there. When Large talks about, in the movie, being homesick for a place that doesn't even exist, I really felt that. So, there is a lot of myself in Large. My mother and my stepfather are psychologists, therapy was always a big part of my life, so I think there is a lot of myself in there.

They say that a therapist should never treat his own family. That point is made very clear in this movie.

I think it's hard for them not to. Obviously the father stepped way over the line in prescribing medicine to his son, but I've had psychiatrists tell me that they are constantly hit up by their family members because they think they know what drugs they want and they don't want to go to a psychiatrist, so will you write your prescription for such-and-such? And they really are constantly battling their ethics on that. So I just took it to the next level. But I mean psychologist parents are always somehow treating their kids a little bit. My mom was a psychologist before she was a nurse and she always used to say that the more education a doctor has, stereotypically, the less patient skills they have. In her experience. Here was a guy who was a psychologist, who had been at school a whole lot, and he just lost sight of how to talk to people.

Of course we don't see the past, we only see the effects, but ever since the death of Large's mother, you get the sense that the father is diagnosing Large with his own symptoms.

Of course, of course. I think that he was maybe prescribing medication for himself as well. I never go into that, but I imagine he is. I imagine him as the great Oz behind the curtain. He's the puppet master for the whole family. At the end of the day he's a little sad man who's probably crying at home.

I hadn't thought of that. It seemed to me that he had achieved what his son is without medication. He's completely removed and disconnected from everything. He doesn't have an emotional response to anything.

I think he's a sad guy. I really see him as lonely and depressed. So yeah, he's a really interesting character and Ian Holm did so much with such a small part. I had more scenes with Ian that will be on the DVD, that are just extraordinary.

When Large goes back home to his New Jersey town, nothing has changed since he left. Everyone's gotten older, but they are in exactly the same place. Is that something you experienced when you returned home after your time in LA?

Yeah, in a lot of ways. My friends from Jersey are amazing guys. I run into a lot of people that aren't completely themselves. No one is more themselves and real and unabashedly honest than my friends from Jersey. They have jobs but a lot of them don't have an interest in leaving so they still live with their parents. But in a weird way there is a contentment there. They're not complaining, they're okay without. That's what I put into Mark [played by Peter Sarsgaard]: "Don't rush me, I live my life. I'm not saying I'm unhappy so don't tell me I should be unhappy." And then universally there is a false idea of what it means to be an actor in Hollywood, that everyone is rich and everyone is a coke addict and parties every night, and there are just amazing girls on every corner. They all have script ideas that they'd like to tell you about. I've definitely run into all that.

Sam's family is the exact opposite of Large's family, this kooky, warm, absolutely unconventional lifestyle, but at the same time when someone walks into the house they become part of the family.

I experienced that too. As I try to portray it in the movie, the town I grew up in was on a hill. The very wealthy people lived at the top and the poor people lived at the bottom, and that fed into Newark. At the top you'd have these very cold McMansion places with white walls. It always just felt very cold to me, which I tried to recreate in the Largeman house. And then I'd go sleep over in a friend's blue collar home and they may have a big rip in the couch or a towel over one of the windows, but it was the most cozy, warm feeling. Some of the best nights of sleep I ever had were on that couch just because there was so much love in that house. It didn't matter that you had three cats sleeping on you. I always felt very safe and comfortable in their homes and I really wanted to paint that contrast between the two. They didn't have money but it didn't matter, they had so much love for each other.

That fabulous chasm at the very end, where everyone stands on the edge and peers down into the mysterious unknoen, is that a story from your past?

The abyss we created digitally but the quarry that we put the abyss into is real. It's three blocks from my dad's house and we used to go there as kids and run around. It was private so nobody was supposed to be in there, but is the last big, huge undeveloped land, that no one else was allowed i nto, so it was the ultimate playground for teenagers. You'd go up there and drink canned beer on a crane at night. They were in a constant battle over whether they could put in condos there. People were fighting over the last undeveloped land, the deer in there, it was really beautiful. Since we filmed there, they lost, and if you went there today you'd find it filled with aluminum sided condos. So that I put debate over the land in there. And I really just liked the idea of that one couple that really experienced contentment, the one couple that we find in the movie who are happy and in love and really experiencing this idea of home that Large is talking about. What they have is really special, but it's occurring in this ark that is teetering on the side of this abyss. I think of the movie as analogous to Noah's Ark. I want Large to find parts of himself that he loves and rescue them before this big storm comes, so at the end of the movie, when they're by the ark and the big storm is raging, it's going to be the final chapter. A new chapter is going to start after he receives this talisman, the necklace. So for me, it was him emptying all the parts of himself into that abyss that he didn't want anymore.

Mark seems to be stuck in time and hasn't moved, but he understands Large the way no one else does. When he's there, at that abyss with Large, he shares that sense of wonder and that sense of potential.

I agree with you. A lot of people are looking at me and Natalie in that scene, but I've seen it 9,000 times so I watch Peter sometimes, especially in the ark, and you can see how much that couple affects him and you get a sense for the first time that he wants that too, that he's lonely too, and that he'd love to fall in love and have a child. For me, his character doesn't change that much -- I didn't want him to change that much -- but he does have a small arc in that he performans this great act of love for Large in retrieving that necklace. And he says, "Look, I'd be lying if said that this was my plan all along." He sold the necklace off [the corpse of] the guy's mother, but then he has an epiphany so he does this act of love. For Mark it's a pretty huge gesture, to spend the day trying to track it down. And it is that necklace that really is the thing that sends Large over enough to be able to emote and mourn his mother's death.

Interesting choice of music for that scene, the Simon and Garfunkle song "The Only Living Boy in New York." Everything else in the movie is contemporary.

Except for Nick Drake. I grew to Simon and Garfunkle. My parents listened to them. It scored my childhood. But I wanted to keep the obvious songs away. We've already had people comparing it to "The Graduate," which is weird for me because, other than a movie about a guy who's lost and comes home and falls in love, they really don't have any other overlaps. So I didn't want to put too much Simon and Garfunkle in the movie, but I heard that song late in life. I'd never heard it growing up, it wasn't one of their more popular songs, but I heard a couple years ago and I just fell in love with it. It strikes me as a song about loneliness so I thought it was appropriate to the movie. I know we wanted to put it in the movie but I didn't know where and my editor cut it into that scene and as soon as we saw it we were like, "There's no way we can put it anywhere else, it has to go there." I don't know if this is true, but I've heard that it is one of Paul Simon's fa vorites, so he doesn't often license it, but we showed them the scene and they agreed to let us use it.

The film has been described as a comedy and it is very funny, but I don't think of it as a comedy.

I don't either.

I think one of the reasons they do that is that you have a real light touch with sight gags and deadpan punchlines. Who are your comic influences?

First and foremost Woody Allen. I grew up, at a very young age, with Annie Hall and Manhattan. My father is an enormous film buff and if we wanted to go rent Sixteen Candles one more time, he'd get us some classic and have us watch that instead. I was introduced to Woody Allen when I was very young, he was sort of the hero of my family, so I grew up on his comedies. And then I would say Hal Ashby. Harold and Maude is one of my favorite movies of all time. So I don't think that my film is necessarily a comedy. Tone-wise, when I was trying to describe what I wanted to do, I would reference American Beauty. I would say, American Beauty is a movie about very dark subject matter, but you've got a smile on your face the whole time, and that's what I want to do. I want to make a movie that's going to be about some really heavy things, but for most of the movie you're going to have a smile on your face."

There have been a lot of movies about the twentysomething generation trying to find themselves. You said that this is somewhat autobiographical, but do you see this searching in other people?

Oh yes. These girls [Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner] recently wrote a book called "Quarterlife Crisis." I was experiencing this malaise in myself in my post-college years, and I saw it in my peers. It's just a lostness. Now I'm not saying this is a new thing for your twenties, but I think it's a slightly different time now in that people get married later and later, and those who get married are waiting until their early thirties now, at least in my circle. So there are more years to be on your own and more years to get a little lost. For me, that led to some sadness and confusion, and that's what I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about what I was feeling as a twentysomething in 2000. I think there are a lot of movies about twentysomethings, but I haven't seen one lately that really spoke to what it felt like to be a twentysomething today.

Having been an actor and having been directed for the past 10 years or so, what is it that you've learned from all that direction that you were able to bring to your own approach to directing actors? What were you really aware when you directed other actors?

Lots of different things. "Scrubs," more than anything, has been a tremendous education in that regard because we get a different director every week, so it was great. I could take the things I liked and leave the things I didn't behind. Mostly I learned early on that there were directors that were wonderful technically that couldn't direct actors very well, and there were directors that were wonderful with actors but didn't know anything about the technical side of filmmaking, so I realized early on that I wanted to be someone who could do both. I knew a little bit about acting when I went to college, that's why really wanted to study film, so I'd be savvy in both. So that's the biggest thing that I've learned. Also to be a collaborator. I've worked with directors who didn't want to collaborate, who were more interested in being dictators, and for me, if you're going to hire all these amazing people, why would you not want their creativity to be involved as well? So that made me be a really collaborative director.

Natalie Portman is amazing in the film. You had an opportunity to remind people that she can really act. In the "Star Wars" movies she's been stuck in nothingness.

She got stuck in nothingness in those and it's so not her fault, but she got tangled in it and I think that the world will now see how brilliant she is. I think she is a really special actress and it's rare that someone who is that pretty is that good of an actress. I really think she's one of a kind.

She really brings a warmth and a spontaneity to that character.

That's her. She's such a wonderfully alive, excited, funny person, so it was really just a matter of getting herself to be uninhibited and just play, and she really came to play. She had done enough of other things and she had just graduated college and she was ready to be uninhibited and free, and she really brought that.

What are you hoping that people take with them from the film?

I hope they think about it. I hope that they had a good laugh and they experienced some romance, because I love a good romantic story, but it's also a movie about an awakening. It's a movie about seizing the day and about how short life is and this is life and stop waiting for something else to start, because this is it, this is all you get. That's what Large realizes, so if the audience feels that, I think the movie has been a success.