'Garden State' better than the Garden State
Nilay Shah
Issue date: 8/6/04 Section: Entertainment
- Page 1 of 3 next >
A few weeks ago I got the opportunity to interview Zach Braff (Star of the show SCRUBS on NBC) for his new movie Garden State (starring Braff, Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgard, & Ian Holm), which opens August 6 in select cities. Braff wrote, directed, and acted in this independent movie about the coming of age of man who returns back home for his mother's funeral after being estranged from his family for a decade.
ME: Many of the scenes in Garden State are very visually rich in detail, did you storyboard at all?
ZB: Yeah, I storyboarded every frame in the movie. Some of the on set responsibilities of the director were sort of off my plate this way. One of the things that made me feel more confident was getting together with the cinematographer (Lawrence Sher) and storyboarding every frame in the movie. When we got to set we were simply enacting our plan, it wasn't like what should we do now? It was just too much for me to have to think about it all.
ME: How long did the storyboarding process take?
ZB: A long time. We developed a sort of language, I had a style for the way I wanted to shoot and I wanted it to be very still. I wanted the whole movie to feel as it was from Large's (Braff's character) perspective. So I wanted to have the movie very static. I feel nowadays the camera moves so much that it sort of dissipates its impact. So I thought if I kept the movie very still and at these moments of release or epiphanous moments for Large that I would have these huge crane moves that would stand out even more. They stand out on their own because they're big crane moves, but since the movie is very static they would really stand out. So we developed this style and shot the film in Super 35 widescreen. My cinematographer and I were on the same page, we just walked through the script and drew stick figures for all the different things we had in mind. Then we had an artist come in and translate them into something real.
ME: Was most of the movie shot on location?
ME: Many of the scenes in Garden State are very visually rich in detail, did you storyboard at all?
ZB: Yeah, I storyboarded every frame in the movie. Some of the on set responsibilities of the director were sort of off my plate this way. One of the things that made me feel more confident was getting together with the cinematographer (Lawrence Sher) and storyboarding every frame in the movie. When we got to set we were simply enacting our plan, it wasn't like what should we do now? It was just too much for me to have to think about it all.
ME: How long did the storyboarding process take?
ZB: A long time. We developed a sort of language, I had a style for the way I wanted to shoot and I wanted it to be very still. I wanted the whole movie to feel as it was from Large's (Braff's character) perspective. So I wanted to have the movie very static. I feel nowadays the camera moves so much that it sort of dissipates its impact. So I thought if I kept the movie very still and at these moments of release or epiphanous moments for Large that I would have these huge crane moves that would stand out even more. They stand out on their own because they're big crane moves, but since the movie is very static they would really stand out. So we developed this style and shot the film in Super 35 widescreen. My cinematographer and I were on the same page, we just walked through the script and drew stick figures for all the different things we had in mind. Then we had an artist come in and translate them into something real.
ME: Was most of the movie shot on location?
is a member of the 
Be the first to comment on this story