Zach Braff's leap to the big screen

Zach Braff has made a movie. Which isn't so surprising. American sitcom stars - he's J.D. from Scrubs - often do. But Braff hasn't just turned up in a film. He's written it, fought to get it financed and attracted big-screen names Natalie Portman and Sir Ian Holm to it - they play romantic interest Sam and her widowed psychiatrist father, respectively. He then directed it. Oh, and he's the lead character in it too.

The resulting Garden State - basically the semi-autobiographical story of how Braff's Andrew Largeman goes home to New Jersey and wakes up from the emotional coma of his life as a twentysomething struggling actor in Los Angeles - is some piece of work. Not only is it a bleakly funny portrait of Braff's over-medicated generation, it's the best romantic comedy starring a sitcom guy, ever.

Braff was on a whirlwind publicity tour to Australia this week. Somewhere between being told his film was "very British and that's a compliment" by Aussie morning television hosts, and getting the Rove treatment, he sat down with TimeOut.

Did the writer or the director gang up on the leading guy?

They sometimes didn't get along. It's hard to act and direct. You have to sometimes tell yourself when you suck and if you're not a person who can't tell yourself when you suck then you shouldn't do it. Better than I am an actor, I'm a good gauge of when someone is good and when they're not. So there were some times I would go watch the video playback and just be able to tell myself, "That was an awful take and that's completely the wrong direction" and I have to go do it again.

How about the writer being on set?

I was pretty attached to the script so I didn't really make many changes and we didn't improv much because we didn't have much time. So we pretty much stuck to the script.

Was it a case of first novel - write about what you know?

Yes, but I think I'll do that for the second and third film too. Obviously I take a lot of leeway and make a lot of stuff up but I am not a person interested in writing about spying or sci-fi or robots. I think I write best when I write things I am passionate about or that worry me or things that I obsess about. Those are the films I want to see.

How autobiographical is it?

Large chunks are completely verbatim and then there are things I totally made up. I have a great relationship with both my parents, for example. My mother is a psychologist and my stepfather is a psychologist and my stepmother is a therapist.

I would say my character [is autobiographical] more than anything. I was an actor with very little success working as a waiter in Los Angeles. That scene in the restaurant is verbatim. And then coming home and feeling estranged and feeling like all my friends, and having these warped visions of what Hollywood was like, and what my life was like, and just being depressed for no apparent reason, and feeling lost and just feeling like this twentysomething malaise. That was me.

So what's behind all this generational existential angst?

By no stretch of the imagination is being lost and confused in your 20s a new thing, but I do think there is more time these days to sit in it because you are not rushing out of college to get married and start a family. There is this decade all of a sudden where you are just sort of brewing in it. Your teen years are your body's puberty but your 20s are really your mind's puberty. No one prepares you for that in health class. Like, "My life is pretty good, I have a great family, people who love me but why am I so depressed right now?" And as I started to ask around and talk to my friends, a lot of people were stuck in this rut, intimidated by all the possibilities.

That your character starts out heavily medicated, how autobiographical is that?

It's more friends. I don't know how you could make a movie about being a twentysomething in America without having medication be a character. Because it is. I haven't seen a film discuss it openly and I didn't even go into it as deeply as I would like to. And by no means is it me condemning it. I am pro-medicine. I have seen it save people's lives. I wanted to tell a story about a character who had been misdiagnosed and who had been numb to life, because for all the good medicine does for the people who need it, a side-effect is undoubtedly this numbing to life. And as so many of us are already numb to life I wanted to create this superhero of numb to life, which is a guy dosed with lithium since he was 11 years old.

With those references one might wonder why there aren't any Nirvana songs on the soundtrack.

Yes, there should be. But the Nirvana songs will be in the film about my teenage years as opposed to the songs that have been scoring my 20s.

As a kid you appeared in a Woody Allen film. Did anything rub off?

I think when I go back and look at that, we shot for about four days and I ended up in one scene. I was so young and so young wide-eyed and so in awe of my situation I didn't get to savour much. I was like a deer in the headlights. I was so intimidated by the whole thing. I needed some years on me to go, "Now I want that chance again." Now I would savour it.

Is Sam [Natalie Portman's character] your Annie Hall?

I definitely said to Natalie, "She's Annie Hall", and I think I told her I wanted her to be a 21-year-old version of Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude. But Annie Hall is the greatest romantic comedy ever made so I can't help but tip my hat to it occasionally.

Natalie Portman had some Lolita-ish parts when she started out. In this movie you've finally made it okay for guys to have certain feelings for her. Like, thanks.

Ha. Yeah, now she's legal. There is a unique thing about Natalie, and as you say a lot of guys were thinking, "I feel dirty because I am falling in love with this 14-year-old girl." Natalie is just an astonishing person. She has this old-world glamorous movie star thing about her.

There is this energy, this charisma, that I think we all saw in this young girl and thought, "Holy shit, that is going to be one of our great movie stars."

This is the first movie she's done where she dives back and is as uninhibited as she was as a child.

You got her after Star Wars and Ian Holm after Lord of the Rings. Are you running some sort of epic fantasy recovery programme for actors?

Yes, come back to real life.

Sir Ian Holm, a fine hobbit, but a Jewish psychiatrist from New Jersey?

Of course, when you think of Jewish psychiatrists from the Jersey suburbs you probably aren't thinking of Ian Holm first. But I saw The Sweet Hereafter and I could completely buy he is from North America.

And he's one of the greatest actors in the world so I am sure he can handle Jewish suburbia. I liked that Ian doesn't play into any of the stereotypes.

Did your Scrubs profile help or hinder getting the film made?

I thought it would help more, to be honest. It did help a little bit. It got people to read it faster but it didn't get me the financing. The studios didn't want to be so crass as to say, "Make it more like a studio movie." But they would give me all the notes and when you added it all up, if I was making a movie that was spoofing the Hollywood system, I would have a scene where I would sit down and someone would give me this note. I didn't agree with the notes and something inside me felt really confident that I would get it made.

Garden State is screening now.