Braff was in Chicago recently to discuss the film, and in person he’s alternately laid back and directly focused, as he eloquently reveals a passion for making films that goes back to his early days as a Northwestern University film student. He later strived to make it as an actor before creating this first and very personal film.

Lee Shoquist, ReelMovieCritic.com: What I think is so interesting about Garden State is the time period and state of mind that it addresses—which is between adolescence and adulthood. It really touches a nerve on a particular isolation that a lot of young people today experience.

Zach Braff: I wanted to write about what I felt like I was going through and what my friends were going through in their 20s. And for me, the way I described it is that there’s this time after- your whole adolescence feels like it gears up to college—those of us that go—and then you graduate and there is this time that sets in now, as we get married later in life, so now there are like ten years of time that weren’t always there. So for me it was a time of anxiety, and depression and feeling really lost. And so I wanted to make a movie about what that felt like, and there are a couple girls who wrote a book called "The Quarter Life Crisis." I always thought that was really good.

LS: For the first thirty minutes of the movie, I didn’t really know where your character, Andrew Largeman, was. In most movies, you know right away what a character wants and what they are driving toward. I enjoyed watching you enter the film and observe, evaluate, stand back and absorb things. Then Natalie Portman enters the film and everything changes. But I really got this sense of disconnection from him.

ZB: The first half hour of the movie is really setting up where "Large" is in his psyche. I had to do it pretty quickly; had to get out of LA really fast. That is one of the reasons I used the plane crash opening. I had to show in a very short amount of time how extreme the difference is between what is going on in his mind and the way he is in real life. And so I established that, and then saw one scene in LA just to see what his life was like there, and then he could go into Jersey. Yeah, the first half hour is really about establishing where he is in his mind.

LS: Did you worry about whether or not people watching might not get connected to the guy?

ZB: No. I wanted the whole movie to be told from his perspective, so there is not a scene in the movie that isn’t from his point of view. So when the audience experiences it, if they’re feeling like it’s a little slow, a little sterile and a little confusing, they should because that’s where he is. And they should feel a little drugged up, maybe. When he opens the medicine cabinet, are all the prescription bottles lined up in actuality? I don’t know. Maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re just the way he sees them. So the idea was that the whole audience feels that way.

LS: There is a very distinctive, alive musical vibe in the film, which functions almost like a score for the movie rather than a tiresome Hollywood soundtrack packaging effort.

ZB: It’s so important, and I am so glad to hear that people like it because for me, they don’t hear the music that’s on this on the radio. And for me, this is all my favorite music and essentially I wanted to score the movie with the songs that mean a lot to me right now. So online, to hear the reaction to people just hearing the first couple songs is so cool. It’s very rare I see a movie where I go, ‘Wow, that was an amazing movie, and that was made for me.’

So I feel like I’m part of something when I really love a movie that other people enjoy. So music is very important to me. A lot of it has been with me since I wrote the script. A lot of it is in the script, so I made this mix CD I was giving out to producers when I was trying to get the movie green lit, and almost all of that stuff made it into the movie.

LS: You reportedly started writing Garden State a few years ago with one scene. What was the first scene you wrote and built the film around?

ZB: The scene with Natalie Portman’s character in her bedroom. I wrote the movie in lots of pieces, sometimes even before I knew who the characters were. I sat down with these vague ideas of who the characters were and I wrote that scene. And I would say I never changed it, because I loved the way that came out.

And then the concept of a woman in a wheelchair who drowned was actually something that happened in northern Jersey. A woman drowned in her bathtub, who was in a wheelchair, and her husband was home, and there was all this confusion as to whether there was foul play. And that story always intrigued me.

LS: The scene with Natalie and yourself in the bedroom addresses the need in life to do something that’s original, which certainly relates to Garden State’s fresh take on identity, family and dislocation—topics foreign to nearly all mainstream films about young adults. Did you feel any pressure as a screenwriter to be commercial or to cater to your demographic?

ZB: No, I really didn’t think that. I knew it was going to be "R" so I knew that it would have to be over 18, at least on paper, because it wasn’t honest for me to tell a story without the drugs and the cursing, because the guys I know in Jersey curse every other sentence. So I knew that the core audience would be probably twentysomethings, because I was writing it about my experience being in the twenties.

I didn’t imagine that it would expand so much beyond the generation. I have been going to film festivals for weeks now, and I have old ladies come up to me with tears in their eyes after the movie. It’s so cool because I don’t imagine that they’re the core demographic but to know when someone gets them into the theater that they’re responding to it like that, makes me really pleased.

Because I think that even though this is specifically about being in your twenties or your early thirties now, I think everyone can relate to going through these emotions at some point in their life. It’s really about looking for contentment, and every human being can relate to that.

LS: The film is very personal and I’m wondering what connection Andrew’s process might have to do with Zach’s.

ZB: I get along very well with my parents. There are pieces of my relationship with my father in there, but it’s by no means my father. But my mother and stepfather are both psychologists, so I’ve had it in my life. I haven’t been medicated, but I’ve experienced some real down times in my life and been to plenty of psychologists and psychiatrists.

There are lots of aspects of the movie that are word for word conversations and then things where I just made it up or anecdotes from friends of mine. I always say about seventy-five percent of the movie is true, it just didn’t all happen to me.

Q: We see so many actors who want to direct. But what’s interesting about you is that you were director, who became an actor, who became a director once more. What was the experience of going to film school in the Chicago area at Northwestern University?

ZB: I had a great time. I have to admit I spent a lot of it in Evanston, because I was so shocked by how cold it was here! The idea of taking the El (Chicago’s elevated train) to the city wasn’t appealing too many times, but I did come down a bunch. At Evanston, I had a great experience. It had a really good film program, and for me the best way to learn about making movies was to make movies and work on every student film I could. And there is such a great film community there, and people who wanted to make films every time they could get their hands on a camera.

So I could work on dozens and dozens and dozens of movies while I was there and learn most from actually doing that. I was committed to learning all the technical aspects to filmmaking. So I probably worked on a hundred student films, and I would do the sound on one and cinematography on another and just anything I could get my hands on. And I felt if I learned that, then I’d be equipped to direct these people, once I knew what they did. So I then worked my way up to directing, and they give out one grant a year, which I was awarded my senior year to make a pretty big—by student film standards—film that I still used to get the cast interested. I showed it to them.

LS: How did you get from directing at Northwestern to acting in the LA comedy The Broken Heart’s Club?

ZB: I had worked a little as a kid. I was in a Woody Allen movie for like one scene, I played his son, and I’d done some After School Specials and small stuff. When I got out of college, I started as a PA, working on music videos and commercials, and doing the sort of post film school jobs. And then I thought, since I had some connections, why don’t I audition again? And my first part I got, which was a production of Macbeth, directed by George Wolf at the (Joseph Papp) Public Theater, was a really big gig to get. Alec Baldwin was Macbeth, and Angela Bassett was in it, Liev Schreiber, and that really opened the door for me to get more parts in New York. I did independent film and I did some more Shakespeare.

To make a long story short, that eventually led to me getting The Broken Hearts Club, which brought me out to LA, and I stayed and worked as a waiter while the movie was actually out in theaters. I was waiting tables on the corner at the restaurant that the first scene- that’s based on me. People would come to the restaurant after the movie, and they’d be like, ‘We just saw your movie!’ And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s good. Uh, thank you. Let me tell you about our specials.’ Only in Hollywood can you go to a movie and then have one of the leads of the movie wait on you for dessert.

LS: Garden State is loaded with so many good actors in small roles. It must have been your dream cast.

ZB: As my producers remind me every day, it doesn’t normally happen like this. When you sit down to cast a movie, you say, ‘Who are the types? We’re looking to get a Tom Cruise kind of guy.’ So for me it was like a sort of like Natalie Portman sort of girl, someone like a Peter Sarsgaard and someone like Ian Holm. We never imagined they were all going to say yes.

Especially Natalie, she’s so busy doing things, but we submitted it to her, she read it, I had sent her a personal letter and she loved it, and we sat down over lunch and just clicked. And he called her agent on the way home and said she wanted to do it, which I thought would make the movie be green lit right away, but I learned it wasn’t. Everyone in Hollywood passed on the movie because I was untested and had only this short film I had directed under my belt, and I was going to try to star in it and direct it.

LS: I was so happy to see the great, unsung character actress Jackie Hoffman in the film.

LS: Did you see her in "Hairspray" on Broadway?

ZB: I hadn’t seen her in "Hairspray" but heard she was wonderful. She came in and read and floored us; had us laughing so hard.

LS: Speaking of your writing, acting and directing the film, was it always a "package deal" the way you pitched it? You weren’t just trying to sell a screenplay here—you really wanted to do it all.

ZB: Oh, yeah. (It was) ‘I’m going to direct it, I’m going to play the lead, I wrote it, this is the music I want to put in it, and this is who I want to cast in it.’ So it was very hard to find someone to trust me enough to just go for it.

Q: You’ve said the film explores the idea of longing for home and family as feeling nostalgic for something that might not exist anymore once you become an adult, and that produces a very lonely feeling.

ZB: For me, it was like my first quarter at Northwestern. I was miserable. I was so homesick. I was really unhappy and homesick. But I had already left home and I didn’t really feel like my home was my home anymore, so it was the first time I had this feeling like, ‘Wow, I’ m really homesick for a place that doesn’t exist anymore.’ And that was such a lonely-ass feeling, that I was longing for a place and an idea that was no longer.

And I really thought that summed up this feeling that I’m talking about—this malaise, this sort of lostness—that feeling is now gone until you establish anew for yourself. That transition is best summed up by going, ‘I now need to create that for myself. I’m going to start from scratch and create a new idea of home and family for myself. And when I eventually get married and have kids, that will be their concept of home.’

LS: The movie is acutely aware of certain "vaguely amoral," as you put it, antics that Mark, played by Peter Sarsgaard, participates in whether its stealing valuables from corpses or pulling scams at the local hardware store.

ZB: Every time I’ve been to a funeral there were always these people mourning the loss of someone that was so important to them. And then I’d look just beyond, and see the gravediggers on the tractor checking their watch like, ‘Can you please hurry up?’ And we are all sobbing. I’ve been to ten funerals in my life, and every single time I’ve seen that. Someone needs to put those guys behind a tree. And as I would stare at them, thinking about how they wanted to get their day on so they could get out of there. And I wondered, people put all their most precious jewelry- I wonder if they’re shady enough to do that. That was the brainstorm.

But the scam about returning stuff, I knew guys who did that in my hometown. They didn’t have any money and there’s a certain huge hardware store chain that if you returned under forty dollars you didn’t have to have a receipt. And these guys would augment their income by doing that. I think the chain has since caught on.

LS: Mark’s character is intriguing because we don’t know how to read him, though in the end he makes a genuine, selfless gesture.

ZB: Yeah. Every character has a small arc. And I think if anything happens in Mark’s, he gains a little bit of a conscience for what he’s doing. Is he going to stop? No. I didn’t want to make a movie where he learns a lesson and stops. But he does do this act of love for his friend, which is something that he wouldn’t normally do.

LS: I don’t want to give away the ending of the film, but I’m very curious as to why you made the decision to go one direction and not the other. Does that make sense?

ZB: How do we talk about it without giving it away? Maybe you could put like, "SPOILERS." I’m a sucker for a happy ending. Romance so often doesn’t work out in real life that in the movies I like it when it does.

LS: What does it feel like to be inside of a scene acting, and then have to take yourself out of the moment to direct it, or how does that work?

ZB: It’s hard. Most of the scenes are one, two or three people. I had storyboarded the entire film before we went into it, so I knew exactly how we were going to shoot it. We were all on the same page. So taking that out of the equation, it was just a matter of approving the lighting and the framing. It was all planned out. And then when I was acting with one other person, it was cool in a sense because I could steer the scene. It was almost like I was undercover—"director undercover"—because I could shape the way I wanted the scene to go by what I was giving them, and they would then return it back to me.

So I took the middleman out of the equation and just sort of directed from the inside. It got tricky when the scenes were big, like the pool scene was very hard for me. That was when I was pulling my hair out of my f***ing head. Because there’s a fifty-foot techno crane and it’s raining and the pool is cold and we’re shooting all night long and there’s fifty extras and it was very cold and everyone was a little pissy and that was very challenging. When there were bigger scenes it was a lot harder for me.

LS: Garden State is an intimate character movie that’s beautifully shot in widescreen. Like so many other small pictures with small budgets these days, was there every any temptation to shoot the film on HD since it can often lend itself to intimate moments and is vastly less expensive than film?

ZB: No. I probably could have made the movie a couple times before on video. I’m an amateur photographer. Photography is my- I am a big fan. I love it. I collect it. So for me, to make my first movie and not shoot film would have been really sad for me. And I love Super 35, I love widescreen anamorphic and I had such a clear vision of how I wanted the movie to look. One day in all our lifetimes we’ll probably all have to go to video when the studios stop paying for it, but as long as I can shoot film, I will. Without sounding too pretentious, the idea of twenty-four photographs being taken in a full second to make up a full film is beautiful. I don’t want to give it up.