Zach Braff, star of hit sitcom Scrubs and writer-director-actor of cult hit GARDEN STATE, is back on the movie-making scene, this time around focusing on the trials and tribulations of trying and (occasionally) failing to raise a family whilst holding onto your lifelong dreams and aspirations. As a huge fan of Braff and his past work I snapped up the chance to attend a special preview screening of WISH I WAS HERE at London’s Empire Leicester Square, with both himself and co-star Kate Hudson popping along post-credits to answer as many audience questions as possible. Here’s a snippet of what the pair had to say.
Question: How did the writing process pan out?
Zach Braff: Aidan’s kind of a combination of my brother [Adam J. Braff] and I. He’s ten years old than I, he has two young kids, he is a lot like Aidan at the end of the movie – a really good dad who deals with his kids in a sort of different, out-of-the-box way – and he is the primary care-giver for them, his wife has a normal job as he pursues writing. And so we got together and we kind of banged out the first draft, the outline, and then we would write separately. So he’d say “I’m going to go take a stab at this scene”, and I’d say “OK, I’ll take a first stab at this scene”, and then we’d swap over e-mail and give each other notes. It took a long time but little by little the whole script started to form a whole thing.
Kate Hudson: You know what I never asked you – did you guys ever fight?
ZB: All the time! […] We did fight, and I actually had a set-up early on, and it’s going to sound funny, but it was always going to be 51% to 49% in my favour, because otherwise you’ll just get – like anything, like our American congress – you’ll just be deadlocked and nothing will ever happen. So because I was directing I said “Look, I want to fight, I want to have these debates, I do want to get passionate and argue, but if we reach a dead end…I will win!” As the director would though! If there were two writers and a separate director he would say “OK, let me hear both points of view…OK, I’m going to go with this one”.
Question: It’s a beautiful movie, and obviously so emotional as well, which is just heightened by the music. Do you have the songs in mind in your head as you’re writing it?
ZB: No, I don’t really. We kind of amassed this giant playlist…and then we just try stuff. We’d try 1000 songs before we find the perfect one. With this film, you know, GARDEN STATE came out ten years ago and there were record stores, there was no iTunes, people bought albums and not just tracks. So with this we really tried to keep up with the times and come up with some original stuff to make it special. Chris Martin saw the film and loved it, so Coldplay wrote an original song that Cat Power sings…Bon Iver, The Shins, they all watched the film then wrote original songs for the film, because I tried to find new ways to make a soundtrack unique in 2014, when nowadays nobody really buys albums.
Question: The visuals and the songs go really well together – how on earth did you get Paul Simon and Comic Con in your mind to work?
ZB: I’ve never really seen anyone marching at Comic Con, in formation! I just had that vision in my head, I had the idea of Noah (Josh Gad) showing that he had such pride in his work, and for the first time he felt so accomplished. And so marching with pride came to my mind, and so I organised the fact that he and some of his cosplayers would be marching in formation. I love that song [The Obvious Child by Paul Simon] so much, it’s one of my favourites, and I always wanted to cut something to it. Since film school I’ve been looking for something to cut that song to. The marching and that African drum beat just felt, like, perfect […] It’s funny, you can try your favourite song in 100 places and it just doesn’t work, and you’re like “Oh, I wonder why?”, and you want it to work so bad. Then you try a song that someone sent you and you never liked it, but my editor auditioned it, and then you’ve got goosebumps all over your whole body. It’s just a visceral thing and it’s just completely trial and error.
Question: The dialogue between the two of you is so natural. How much is improvised? Did you change it at all?
KH: We were pretty on-script.
ZB: Kate improv-ed one of the most beautiful moments in the whole movie, when she swipes that tear away and says “At least I’m trying”[…] People always ask me what it’s like to act and direct yourself – I do feel in the intimate scenes there’s no third party coming in to interrupt and give notes, whispering in her ear and then whispering in my ear. So I think, for example, the scene in the lifeguard tower, we were able to get an intimacy…first of all, we know each other and care for each other in real life, so that helps. But also, I have a unique ability to get rid of the crew, there’s no third party coming in, and ultimately at the end of the day it’s just Kate and I sitting on that lifeguard tower talking for hours.
KH: It was really nice. I’ve never had that experience before. Being granted, then again, it’s us talking, which we’ve done for years now. Zach pushed the cameras away, and they’d punch in with tighter cameras with longer lenses, and it’s just Zach and I sitting.
Question: I was just wondering if your relationship to religion, in GARDEN STATE and in this, was similar to how it was portrayed?
ZB: Yeah, completely. This is me and my brother, and we go out of our way to say a thousand times we have absolutely no answers. He’s ten years older than I – I’m 39, he’s 49 – and everyone in our circles had a religion forced upon them, but didn’t have a relationship to that apart from the holidays and the humour, and now that he’s got two young kids and they’re looking up at him with these big eyes asking questions. That’s what we wanted to write about – what does a secular man teach his children about his own spirituality?
Question: Did the idea of the swear jar symbolize something to you during the writing process?
ZB: I think, just on the surface, it symbolized all his mistakes, and that he was going to then turn to it as the source to buy it all back. He didn’t have any money and that swear jar money…he was going to use that as this giant piggy bank to turn around, and so all his past digressions – if you will – were the source, were the energy, to fuel making himself better.
Question: Do you think studios will ever be lenient in funding films with the creativity that you want?
ZB: Not a film like this, a film about a sad Jew in LA…people just don’t go to the theatres for this stuff anymore. You have to find non-traditional, smaller ways of making them and out-of-the-box ways as we did with crowdfunding. The good news is, on the positive side before it becomes a negative spin, television and cable and Netflix, there are new outlets for smaller tales. It’s just sad that it’s less and less possible it being a theatrical experience because people just don’t go. They factor in the cost, and the baby-sitter, and the parking, and the popcorn. They go “I’ll wait four months and watch it on iTunes”, and sadly that’s kind of the way it’s going.
KH: We should have done this in 3D!
Question: It seems the film is based on dark comedy and the beauty of death – is that just your creativity? Your sense of humour?
ZB: I think it just propels me, I literally have him running from death in this movie. Amongst the things the two films have in common is this idea of the struggle to be present, to be here now. The film’s called WISH I WAS HERE – I wish I was here, I wish I was here in the moment, instead of struggling with my regrets from the past and my anxiety about the future. In GARDEN STATE he literally says “I want to appreciate now, this is my life, this is it”. If there’s any call to action from them it’s the celebration of the now, of the moment, and that life is finite.
WISH I WAS HERE is in cinemas now. You can read our review here.
