Zach Braff discusses acting and directing

MakingOf: How did you initially get involved with filmmaking?

(Zach Braff): My earliest memories was my brother was given a super 8 camera by my father. He was obsessed with James Bond movies. So my hero, my older brother, was running around the house making and recreating James Bond movies with himself as James Bond with his super 8 camera. He was really good at it; great angles, rigging all sorts of effects. It was just so exciting to be basically a little toddler, you know, whenever your earliest memories are, and have your older brother running around and the cool thing he was doing, the cool thing your hero was doing was making a movie. So I think just from a ver very early age, I associated making movies with excitement and what the cool older brothers did. Also my father is a very big movie buff. And they used to have dinner parties where, you know, way before the era of home video, he had a friend that would get him prints of films. I think they were 16 mm prints. And he would project them on the wall of the living room, and they would have a dinner party with friends over, and they would watch “Annie Hall.” They were always Woody Allen movies, you know, “Take The Money and Run” or “Annie Hall” are the two I remember. And my father who is not very technically savvy, would fumble trying to get the projector working. And it was just again from a very young age, interesting and fun things in the house being centered around filmmaking.

MO: With “Garden State,” when you were working on that project, can you talk us through how it started and how you got it into production?

(ZB): I just kept shopping it around and kept getting nos, and nos, and nos. And eventually the script ended up at Jersey Films, and a woman named Pam Abdy, who was the president of production at Jersey Films, just got it. She and I clicked and became best friends instantly. She was a Jersey girl, she was kind of outside the system in that she worked in Hollywood but she was trying to get different kinds of movies made. And she just became my champion. And now I had a partner, now I had a producing partner who was just as passionate about it as I was. And she said, well, who would your ideal cast be? And I said, you know, archetype, someone like Natalie Portman, someone like Ian Holm, and someone like Peter Sarsgaard. And she said, well okay, well make a list of people like that, because usually you don’t get, you know, exactly who you want. This is your first movie. Make lists of people that are in the spirit of those people. You know, we are not going to get Natalie Portman, but lets get somebody like, you know, who do you think is like Natalie Portman. In fact, I’ve done, when we did Q and As, Natalie once turned to me and said, who’s like Natalie Portman? And I was like, no one. No one. Sorry. And then a funny thing happened. We kind of had all our eggs in the basket of this studio, mini studio, who shall remain nameless, and they wanted a co-financier. And my agent at the time at CAA, Jim Lefkowitz, ran into a guy named Gary Gilbert, who had made a lot of money in the mortgage business and was looking to invest in his first film and he was a fan of mine from my TV show and he was a fan of Natalie from all her work and he loved the script and it was kind of perfect. So we married up this independent financier with this mini major studio. I think that is what they called them at the time, they are all kind of gone, but smaller division of a studio. And it was all going well until Gary, who wasn’t a part of Hollywood, looked at the business model and he said this doesn’t make any sense for a business point of view. Why would a financier do this? The studio recoups their money first, but I take an equal amount of risk. It was funny, he was sort of analyzing the Hollywood business model from an outside businessman point of view and it just didn’t make any sense to him in terms of an investment. But he came to me aside and he said, is there any way we can make this movie for $3 million dollars, because if so, I’ll pay for the whole thing out of my pocket. And we were like, I don’t know, can we? So we had an amazing line producer named Ann Ruark, who somehow figured it out. And she came up with a budget for $2.75 million and we shot the movie in 25 days. Gary paid for the whole thing out of his pocket. He took the biggest risk out of everybody. He sold it at Sundance and he doubled his money instantly... and went on to make a lot more money but I mean, in the initial sale, he doubled his money which made me so happy because he was the only person in the whole world who was willing to take a gamble on me.

MO: And music played a huge role in the film. Did you have any idea at the time that it was going to have such an impact?

(ZB): I had my own taste, but I also had a lot of people suggesting things who were really good at finding gems. And then we put some songs in there as place holders never thinking we would get Coldplay, never thinking we would get Simon and Garfunkel. They were sort of place holders to find something like that. But when the movie came out better than I ever imagined and we started to get a little confident and going, maybe it can’t hurt to ask Mr. Chris Martin, it can’t hurt to ask Mr. Paul Simon. That began a whole other section of the process and, again, even after all this, and even after creating something that people are responding to, again, all these naysayers. I guess if there is a theme to this, it would be to ignore the naysayers because everyone was saying you are wasting your time. Its a two and a half million dollar movie. You can’t afford Coldplay. You can’t afford Paul Simon. But I just kept writing them letters and I did everything I could to track them down. I would get a lead that someone knew someone who knew the manager of Paul Simon and I would contact them, and I would buy them a drink. It was a lot of work and I just never relented. And little by little, with the exception of one artist, I got every single person I wanted.

MO: Were you nervous going into Sundance? Do you really go from that moment of having it wrapped to showing it to 1,500 people in a huge theatre?

(ZB): It’s amazing. It will always.. on my death bed I will remember it as one of the highlights of my life in that it was shown at the Eccles Theatre in front of 1,500 people and no one had seen it, other than obviously the producers and the financiers and such, but the cast hadn’t seen it. My whole family hadn’t seen it. There was everyone in that audience that was important to me in my life seeing it for the for the first time and it got the amazing response that it did. I just can’t imagine a greater high to put so much of yourself into something and have everyone say, no you can’t do that, and then to have it get that response at Sundance, you know, to have a half hour later Harvey Weinstein calling you on your cell phone. You know, that’s like every young filmmaker’s dream experience at Sundance. One of the coolest stories ever was someone told me the summer after Garden State came out that they went to go see Paul Simon play a giant venue. One of those epic summer venues. And he said to the crowd, I haven’t played this in a long time but I just saw it in a movie called Garden State and I remembered how much I love it. Hearing that story, I have that email that someone sent me on my bulletin board. So again, it was a thing that I never would have guessed that people would have responded to like they did, but the music took on its own whole new thing.

MO: What would you say would be your advise to anyone looking to pursue a career in filmmaking?

(ZB): My best advice would be to practice by making shorts on HD video and get good and when you finally have one that you feel really is good and you are proud of it and it shows the kind of filmmaker you are, try and get it into festivals.