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 Garden State Production NotesA moderately successful TV actor living in Los Angeles, “Large” hasn't been home to the "Garden State" in nine years. But even with 3,000 miles between them, he's been unable to escape his domineering father Gideon (Sir Ian Holm) and the silencing effect he's had on his son from afar.
Stunned to find himself in his hometown after such a long absence, Large finds old acquaintances around every corner living quite unique lives as gravediggers (Peter Sarsgaard), fast food knights and the panderers of pyramid schemes. Meanwhile, at home, he does his best to avoid a long-simmering but inevitable confrontation with his father.
By a twist of fate, Large meets Sam (Natalie Portman), a girl who is everything he isn't. A blast of color, hope and quirks, Sam becomes a sidekick who refuses to ride in his sidecar. Her warmth give Large the courage to open his heart to the joy and pain of the infinite abyss that is life.
About Garden State
“I wanted to make a smart love story for young people, and I wanted to make a movie that got across the genuine feeling of what it's like to come home,” says Zach Braff, the writer, director and star of Garden State.
To do that, Braff felt he needed to abandon the traditional three-act Hollywood movie structure taught in screenwriting classes. “I got tired of watching movies with the same outline, where X needed to happen 30 minutes in, or else,” he says. "So many films follow that structure because it's so hard to get a movie made if it doesn't."
Instead, Braff created a film in which events unfold “as they would if you're this guy who comes home all of a sudden. You run into people you once knew, you hang out with them. Then maybe you never see them again. In the case of my character, he also buries his mother and falls in love. A lot happens in this one weekend.”
Garden State is a comedy, but as Braff's co-star Natalie Portman observes, “It also has a heart. A lot of funny stuff these days is so cynical, but there's nothing cynical about this movie. It's untraditional and unlike anything I'd ever seen before. That's what made it exciting.”
In a larger sense, the film is about the awkward period between adolescence and adulthood. "I remember when I went away to college, I was so ready to get out of New Jersey," says Braff. "But when I got to school I was completely homesick, even though I didn't feel like the house I grew up in was my home anymore. So I was missing a place that didn't really exist. When you become an adult, your job is to create the concept of home for yourself and your children."
Braff, who plays Dr. John "J.D." Dorian on the NBC sitcom “Scrubs,” originally came up with the idea for a film homage to his native New Jersey while still in college. Over the years he collected anecdotes and wrote scenes here and there, but it wasn't until 2000 that he finally sat down and banged out a draft of Garden State in three months.
"I originally called the film LARGE'S ARK," says Braff. "I always liked the biblical story of Noah's Ark, the idea of some great power starting the world again. For me, the idea was that Large himself is trying to begin anew. He's trying to rescue all the parts of himself that he likes and start a whole new chapter of his life, the way Noah put the animals and people on the ark and saved them from the apocalypse and started again. He's trying to find his ark."
Pamela Abdy, a former executive at Jersey Films, the production company owned by Danny DeVito, Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher, says of her first reading of the script: “I finished reading Garden State and I had the most desperate need to meet the person it came from. I knew it was special, and even though I had a meeting with Zach the next day I wanted to get in my car right then and find him.”
Richard Klubeck and Jersey Films subsequently signed on as producers of Garden State, followed by Gary Gilbert and Dan Halsted's Camelot Pictures, who also provided financing for the film. “We read the script and loved it," says Gilbert, "and after meeting Zach and hearing his vision for the film, and getting a sense of his passion for the project, we were in."
The Residents of Garden State
When it came to casting the film, Braff says he was “incredibly lucky.” "I remember thinking it would be amazing to get someone in the spirit of a Natalie Portman, someone like Ian Holm, someone like Peter Sarsgaard," the director recalls. "We never imagined in a thousand years we would actually get them. But one by one they all signed on. We were in shock."
Braff, like many moviegoers, first took note of Portman when she played Timothy Hutton's 13-year-old love interest in the 1996 Ted Demme film BEAUTIFUL GIRLS. "Natalie is such a movie star," he says. "It's not just being a great actress, which she is, and not just being beautiful, which she is. It's that she is also so charismatic, you can't take your eyes off of her."
During the production, Braff learned that Portman also has a lot in common with her onscreen persona. "She's silly, charged with optimism and passionate about life, and it all comes through in her character."
For Portman, who was coming off of her role as Senator Amidala in the STAR WARS prequel trilogy, Garden State offered a complete change of pace. "I was excited to do something that was more of a character story after doing something so big and crazy." Her character, Sam, is as far from the regal and burdened intergalactic stateswoman Amidala as she could be.
“Sam is a funny girl,” Portman says, but more importantly, “she's a whole character. Most female parts written by a guy, especially romantic parts, turn out to be his weird ideal of what a girl ought to be: she's hot, she takes off her clothes a lot, and she also really likes sports. But as written by Zach, Sam is a real person - she has problems, she's got a sense of humor, but what I really appreciated was that she's as interesting and complex as the male characters.”
That complexity - and humor - is part of what attracts Large to her and eventually allows him to deal with his pent-up emotions head-on. "Throughout the movie Large is going from this really detached state to beginning to understand how to feel again," says Portman. "Meanwhile, she's someone who's so alive and so connected to everything that it starts to bring that out in him. Also, he comes from this really cold background and she's so grounded and has this really warm family, and she provides a kind of home for him."
Braff elaborates, "Sam is the polar opposite of Large. She's so full of hope and so energized and so excited to be alive. He's baffled by her energy and her charm and he falls for her because she's just so spectacular. I think it's a pretty universal male fantasy that a woman's going to come along and save you, to rescue you from yourself."
Peter Sarsgaard plays Mark, a vaguely amoral and deeply unmotivated gravedigger at the cemetery where Large's mother is buried. Mark still lives at home with his pothead mother (Jean Smart), who aspires to greatness but is dating a classmate of Mark's who is employed as a "knight" at the local medieval-themed restaurant. Mark's ambitions don't extend much beyond the incomplete collection of Desert Storm trading cards he hopes to parlay into early retirement.
Braff had seen Peter Sarsgaard's chilling portrayal of John Lotter in Boys Don't Cry. "He's terrifying in that, and I really believed he was that guy. One of my pet peeves is when uber-famous actors play regular guys because they want to stretch - and the whole time you're watching you're thinking 'I don't believe for a minute he's really that guy.' Peter is a great everyman and he's a chameleon, he just becomes the part.”
 Sarsgaard describes Mark as "the metaphorical sheriff of the town." A man who knows that anything can be had for the right price - even in suburban New Jersey. After receiving the script, Sarsgaard recalls, “I thought it was so funny and it would be a fun movie to make. In this movie, with my character, you feel like you can do anything."Indeed, one morning Sarsgaard showed up for an early call in a tuxedo - hardly in keeping with his character's slacker wardrobe. But the actor had been out so late the night before it hadn't made sense for him to go home to change. Although coming to the set in black-tie resulted in “something of a `walk of shame'” in front of the rest of the cast and crew, Sarsgaard says his mindset was perfect for the scene they were about to shoot - the morning after the film's big party scene.
By the end of Garden State, Mark's character goes through a metamorphosis, which, while subtler than Large's, is no less profound, "There's this epiphany that leaves everyone changed," says Sarsgaard. "Interestingly though, you don't spend a lot of time seeing how they've changed. You just know they're about to."
As Braff puts it, "The last third of the movie is about Mark redeeming himself. He's a guy who does what he has to do to get by. But he commits this one act of pure friendship."
For the role of Gideon Largeman, the main character's emotionally distant father, Braff sought out the Oscar-nominated actor Sir Ian Holm, best known for his work in Chariots of Fire, The Sweet Herafter and the Lords of the Rings saga.
The character, Braff explains, is “The Oz of the whole story. Large thinks of his father as the great puppet master, but it turns out he's a little old man in his tightie whities crying on the edge of his bed.”
"Gideon wants everyone to be happy," says Braff. "We all know people like this who want something so bad they just ruin everything. In trying to please everyone, he ends up making them all miserable. He had access to medicine and thought that as patriarch it was his responsibility to make them all happy. He's not malicious."
Still, in the final conversation between Large and his father, Large gives voice to something that is left unsaid between many adults and their parents. "Everyone has that thing they want to say to their parents," observes Braff, "and maybe you even say it, but you're not always sure they've really heard it. In that scene, we get the sense that Ian's character really hears it for the first time."
"I saw Ian in The Sweet Hereafter and he just blew me away," Braff adds. "“The day he called me to say yes, he said `Zach, it's Ian Holm.' I said `Oh my God.' He said `No, just Ian Holm. I want to play Gideon.'
"Then I met him and he's the sweetest most generous, humble guy. Here I am some kid from New Jersey giving this famous British actor direction. The guy's a knight for God's sake! But he came to play and he was just wonderfully collaborative and fun."
The feeling was mutual. "Zach is a brilliant young director," says Holm. "He's got it all at age 28. It was very good for an oldie like me to be associated with someone so young and full of energy."
Like Portman, Holm came to Garden State's indie production having recently starred in a mega-budgeted effects-driven franchise, in this case, Peter Jackson's The Lords of the Rings trilogy. Holm, whose recent films include summer tent pole films The Day After Tomorrow and The Aviator, is an almost ghostlike presence in Garden State, his pale face and white helmet of hair often appearing seemingly out of nowhere and catching Large off-guard. But while Gideon haunts the film, he also serves as a warning to his son of what Large could become if he doesn't make a major change in his life.
Holm describes Gideon as "a man of a certain age who has dark secrets. He's an authoritarian who took it out on his son, fed him lithium from early age, and caused him great pain. It's like 'King Lear.' It was never resolved between the two of them."
Rounding out the cast are Method Man (Soul Plane, How High) as Diego, the hotel bellman and peepshow proprietor; Ron Leibman (Auto Focus, Dummy) as Dr. Cohen the neurologist; and Jean Smart (Bringing Down the House, Sweet Home Alabama), as Mark's stoner mom.
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Natalie Portman and Zach Braff in Garden State.