When Zach Braff, star of NBC’s doctor sitcom Scrubs came into town to talk about his new movie Garden State, the Varsity sat down with him to talk about the film, which was a bit hit at this year’s Sundance Festival and is due in theatre July 28.
Garden State chronicles the homecoming of a listless Hollywood actor returning to his native New Jersey for his mother’s funeral, and is an impressive directorial debut for the actor, who also wrote the script. Funny, engaging, and visually poignant, the movie follows in the tradition of dialogue-driven plots and acting prowess found similar films that influenced Braff, such as You Can Count on Me and Before Sunrise.
Colin Tait: It’s interesting, though you talk about dialogue a lot, it’s almost like the visual style of all those movies managed to seep into your own film. I think a lot of the really poignant scenes that you have are purely visual.
Zach Braff: I really wanted to let the actors move around within the different spaces and have the photography be very still so it wouldn’t upstage anything that was going on with the characters. So that’s something that was important to me.
CT: You said you were looking for a movie that, it sounds so cheesy, but would “talk to your generation”… but there’s not necessarily any real representation of young, listless people in our multiplexes now.
ZB: Yeah, there hasn’t been for a long time. That wasn’t my intention when I set out to do it. What I wanted to do was make the kind of movie I like to go see. We talked about Before Sunset, which I think is great, before that Lost in Translation, Eternal Sunshine or You Can Count On Me-those are the movies that I come out of and go, “Wow.” And those types of movies come along so infrequently.
I thought of the guy who rushes out to see the new blockbuster (not that there’s anything wrong with them) but I’m the guy who goes “Oooh, the new Kenny Lonergan movie!’, so it seemed like there hasn’t been a movie in a long time that (although I think Lost in Translation did it to some extent) really felt like it spoke in that same tone to the people that I grew up with and that I know.
So what I aspired to do was take that same tone that I love so much and write a movie like that about my experience in my twenties.
CT: In a lot of ways I’m in danger of relating to your movie-the whole issue of homecoming to the suburbs and the small details that are so true and yet so surrealistic at the same time. Those details (like the fingerprints on the TV or the skating video), if you didn’t experience them, or didn’t know about them, they would seem almost false to you.
ZB: Right. Well, we all have those moments in life where you go, ‘If I put this in a story, no one would believe it, it would be way too far.’ I went to a neurologist and looked at his walls, and thought to myself, ‘If this guy has one more diploma, it should be on the ceiling.’ There wasn’t one, but there could have been. There are moments that were in the script that I shot that just went too far toward that line, and I had to pull back a little bit.
But I love movies that walk that line of reality and surreality and then occasionally dip their toe over the line, and a lot of it is Large [the main character played by Braff]’s perspective. The drugs are draining his body. Are all the pill bottles in his cabinet all perfectly aligned, in actuality? Maybe not, maybe that’s just his perspective. But it’s a fun world to operate in because we all have those moments where something really surreal happens in our lives, so I like to pepper those in the movie, even though I tried to play it as ‘real’ as possible.
