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Garden State
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Starring: Zach Braff, Natalie Portman, Ian Holm, Peter Sarsgaard, Geoffrey Arend
Directed by: Zach Braff
Screenplay by: Zach Braff
Release Date: July 30th, 2004
Running Time: 102 minutes
MPAA Rating: R for language, drug use and a scene of sexuality.
Box Office: $26,781,723 (US total)
Studio: Fox Searchlight
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GARDEN STATE PRODUCTION NOTESWhen Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff) returns to his hometown for his mother’s funeral, he reconnects with old friends and - since he’s gone off his depression medication - himself. A chance meeting with Sam (Natalie Portman), who also suffering from various maladies, opens his world to the possibility of rekindling emotional attachments, confronting his psychologist father, and perhaps beginning a new life.
"Good luck exploring the infinite abyss!"- Andrew Largeman aka “Large”
Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff) shuffled through life in a lithium-induced coma until his mother's death inspired a vacation from the pills to see what might happen. A 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 and fearlessness give Large the courage to open his heart to the joy and pain of the infinite abyss that is life.
ABOUT GARDEN STATE
"Maybe that's all a family really is; a group of people who miss the same imaginary place."
“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."
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