Garden State

Programme Notes

'I've won the indie film lottery'
Zach Braff has graduated from star of Scrubs to writer and director of his own hit film. He tells Patrick Barkham how luck, persistence and a note to Natalie Portman made his celluloid dreams come true

Zach Braff meets good fortune and bad with the same disarming puppy-dog gaze. He has experienced both, but currently the 29-year-old's luck is most definitely in. He has graduated from waiting on tables to starring in Scrubs, the cult US sitcom. Now, he is the writer, director and star of a film that has seen him hailed as spokesman for a generation.
Garden State is released in Britain next month after its surprise success in the US. Surprising, not only because it had a tiny budget, but also because it was modest, realistic, funny and all kinds of other things that Hollywood routinely shuns. Endearingly wide-eyed about his current status, Braff claims he was just lucky. "I feel like I've won the independent film lottery," he says. Charm and persistence also helped.

Braff wrote the script for Garden State three years ago, drawing heavily on his own experience growing up in New Jersey - the "garden state" - and returning there as a jobbing actor. The film tells the story of Andrew Largeman, "Large", a jobbing actor who reluctantly heads home from Hollywood for the first time in nine years when his mother dies. Abandoning the heavy medication his parents have kept him on since he was a boy, Large drifts through the weekend meeting old friends and avoiding his cold father, a psychiatrist - until he meets Sam, a dishonest epileptic played by Natalie Portman.

Minus the medication and distant father - his own dad is very warm, Braff says - much of Garden State reflects his own experience as the youngest of four children growing up in an east coast Jewish household well versed in both comedy and therapy. Reared on a diet of Woody Allen, Mel Brooks and Neil Simon, Braff, aged 18, secured a small part as his idol's son in Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery. Stardom did not beckon, however, because Braff decided he wanted to become a director and took himself off to Chicago to study film-making for four years. When he graduated, he fell back into acting to supplement his income as a waiter. Musing on the alienation and loneliness of twentysomethings, he wrote Garden State and stubbornly bided his time - "until I found someone who would let me make that movie I wanted to make".

His easygoing charm did not help him as he hawked his script around Hollywood. "Everyone said no. Everyone with a date book and a phone in Los Angeles said no."

After gaining a small reputation as the accident-prone JD in the medical sitcom Scrubs, Braff fantasised about freeing Portman from the tribulations of Star Wars and having her as his co-star. "When you are writing a script, you can't help but stop and daydream about which actors are going to play the parts, and I kind of imagined Natalie Portman. Not just because she is beautiful, because obviously she is, but she is a wonderful actress who hasn't had a chance in a long time to show the world how talented she is."

As Braff puts it, they were both "east coast Jewish appreciators of musical theatre". They had also both performed Shakespeare in the park in New York at different times. "I remember her as a kid and thought, wow, that actress who as a kid was so free and uninhibited is in there somewhere. We've got to bring it back out."

He sent her a note stressing their shared backgrounds along with his script. "She read it and loved it and wanted to meet me. We had lunch. That's what you do in Hollywood, you have lunch. And we just clicked. She's a really cool girl and her personality is so fun. We got along instantly and I found out later that day that she said yes."

Finally, Braff persuaded a young banker who had never before financed a film to back him on the condition he could realise his dream for $2.5m (£1.4m). Shooting in 25 days, Braff managed just that. He then cut the film and assembled a quintessential twentysomething soundtrack - which with 14 of his favourite songs, including tracks by Coldplay, Nick Drake and the Shins, has also become a cult hit. Hollywood moguls who rejected his script still play in their cars the tape of "mood music" Braff sent with it.

Braff is happy to admit that Large is based closely on his own character "in terms of being someone who was in his mid-20s and feeling incredibly lost and homesick and depressed and alienated from my home town - alienated from any town". He recalls "not feeling like I belonged anywhere and feeling long overdue for the next chapter of my life to start but not knowing what that was". Braff experienced the same sense of dislocation as Large when he met old friends from home in the wake of securing some "little, crap" acting roles on the west coast.

"Everyone has an idea that they think would be a great movie. Everyone has a cousin who they think you should work with. Everyone has a warped vision of Hollywood and what success in Hollywood is like. That you love cocaine and that you spend every night in orgies with models. If only it were true." He rolls his eyes.

Thousands of young Americans have identified with his themes of alienation and dislocation. Garden State clubs have sprung up, where twentysomethings meet online and in libraries to discuss the film. Unusually, Braff knows his audience better than most, having started a weblog while making the film, which he has continued since. He uses it to talk to his fans in a disconcertingly chatty way about walking his dog and why Alanis Morissette doesn't get irony. Spokesman for a generation then? Braff winces. "Don't print that. There is so much fucking bullshit that comes out of Hollywood and so much" - he searches for the word - "posturing".

"With this blog, I thought I'm just going to talk to my audience like I would with a friend. And it's been great for that. Here's what's going on in my life, here's what I'm doing, here's what really fucked me up when I was 25, here's what it's like when I wash my car.

"It's about trying to empathise with them and have them empathise with me about what it's like to be a twentysomething, instead of trying the other route, which is MTV Cribs: 'Look at all the stuff I own, look at my cars and how great my life is. Don't you wish you could have this? I do'. Which is so obnoxious and awful to me." "I make it clear on the blog I am not trying to be the spokesman or I'm not saying, 'This is how it is,' I am saying, 'This is my experience.' Readers are shocked by the blog. They say, 'I don't believe you're writing this, it's crazy you're writing this, you seem too real, this must be your assistant.'"

One blog musing caused a storm of protest when Braff mocked Ironic, the old song by Alanis Morissette. "As far as it's a fun, silly, stupid pop song, I really like that song, and then I thought: 'Oh, it's so sad she can't really sing the song any more because she made a mistake and there's not a single example of irony in the song.' And then all her fans were writing in on the blog going, 'No, don't you get it? That's what's ironic,' and I'm like, 'Oh please, gimme a break.'"

He laughs. Unusually for a resident of Hollywood, where he is staying while committed to another two years starring in Scrubs, Braff gets irony. He is an anglophile in his comedy tastes, loving Ali G and The Office. Right now, Sacha Baron Cohen and Ricky Gervais are his two favourite comedians. "Sacha Cohen is my hero and I want to have his love-children. Someone told me they saw him in the supermarket in LA the other day and I was almost ready to go back and try and find him."

The humour in Garden State, though, is more gentle, "a little more optimistic about human beings," says Braff. "But I love dark, dry humour. It's so upsetting and funny."

Far from being exhausted after doing everything in Garden State, Braff wants to carry on juggling acting, writing and directing. "I'd like to be a person who can bounce back and forth," he says. He has just directed an episode of Scrubs and is now doing the voice for Disney's Chicken Little, an animated cartoon due out next year. With one of his two brothers, Adam, Braff is also working on another children's film based on their adaptation of Andrew Henry's Meadow, a story about a child inventor who creates a utopia in the trees behind his house. Ever ingenious, the pair sold it to Fox on the basis of "if Terry Gillian had directed The Goonies".

Other than that, Braff is busy keeping a sharp eye on the sheer ridiculousness of "being a young human being in Hollywood". Is it hard not to succumb to the cliches of LA stardom? "Those of us who leave and come back stay grounded. It's such an odd, odd city, you need to leave to fully appreciate how odd it is."

Sinking back into the huge sofa in his London hotel, he ponders the celebrity divas who would probably add it to their fantastic rider of demands. "These are coming with me," he says with a bark. "It could get like J-Lo. 'I want this wallpaper!'" He points at the brash stripy walls. "'OK, Ms Lopez, we'll get the pattern copied.' 'No, no, I want this wallpaper!'" Zach Braff rolls his very large eyes.

Friday November 12, 2004
The Guardian

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