A love story in spite of itself

Zach BRAFF wanted to be a filmmaker long before he garnered fame and acclaim for his role on the popular sitcom “Scrubs.” His debut as writer and director, “Garden State,” in which he also stars alongside Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard and Ian Holm, takes place during a few days in which a young man returns home for his mother’s funeral. Braff, 29, confesses that he was unabashedly trying to make a film that would speak to his generational contemporaries, along the lines of “Reality Bites” and “The Graduate.”

“I aspired to,” he says, convincingly humble in the face of his own ambitions. “And I’m not saying I’ve done anything major. It’s just those are some of my favorite movies. I was aspiring to do something like that for people like me who like movies like that.”

Which is not to say things turned out exactly as he planned. “To be perfectly honest,” he explains, “when I wrote the movie I thought I was writing a movie about a guy who comes home and, in falling in love with someone, finds new freedoms and opens up to his dad and finally has the conversations he never could have before.

“When I got in the editing room I realized I’d made a love story. That was a surprise to me. I didn’t know I was doing that.”