Zach Braff plays a lovable everyman doctor on Scrubs, but you probably won’t like him in his new movie, The Last Kiss. He plays an average schlub with the perfect pregnant girlfriend who’s so commitment phobic he entertains the advances of a college girl. While doing interviews to promote his film, Braff makes no excuses for him.
“I think that we should relate to him as a human being,” he said. “One of the reasons I wanted to do this movie was it was so refreshing, it was real. It was like a human being that fucks up, that makes mistakes, that does a dumb thing and don’t we all. Don’t we all have things that we wake up the next day and go, ‘Oh, I’m such an idiot.’ You read so much crap and then I read this and first of all, I couldn’t believe a studio was going to make this movie. When I met the producers, I said, ‘Are you guys going to change this or are you really going to keep this as gritty and honest and real as it is?’ When they said they weren’t going to change it, I signed on. So there’ll be some people that’ll come out of the movie hating me and some people will come out the movie going, ‘God, I’ve been there, I can relate to what he went through.’ And I think there’ll be people that will be shocked at how human the characters in this movie are.”
Based on the Italian film L’Ultimo Bacio, the American film leaves the future of the relationship open ended. “Who knows what’s going to happen with them? And I love that we don’t know. I think that there’s hope and there’s possibility but he needed to do this thing. If he didn’t do it now, he would have done it later. And I think that he may have sacrificed the greatest love of his life but it was sort of a piece of the puzzle that he needed to experience and grow through to become a full adult. He needed to realize, ‘God, that was shallow and hollow and empty and nothing compared to the way I feel for this woman.’ And he needed to have that experience. We know for a fact he’ll never do it again. The only question is whether or not he lost the greatest love of his life over it.”
When he heard about the remake, Braff saw the Italian film, but once he was cast, he didn’t let it influence him. “I think we did a pretty darn different version of it. I think he was a little more of a playboy and a cad in their version. We didn’t want to do that. We wanted this to be something that he doesn’t normally do and wouldn’t normally do and won’t do again but it’s something that he does. We definitely first and foremost Americanized the movie without taking the balls out of it, for lack of a better term. There are slightly cultural things. In the Italian movie he doesn’t admit to his wife that he slept with her. An Italian audience was okay with that. An American audience would never go for that. Like I said, we kept a lot of the gutsier things in the movie but we thought there was no way that an American audience would ever go along with this if he didn’t cop to what he did. In the Italian movie he never admits it and they end up happily ever after.”
Having directed his own feature film, Garden State, Braff has had to resist becoming a difficult know-it-all actor himself. “That is tricky. Inherent in being a director is having strong opinions about things. That’s not to say they’re always right or even usually right, but you definitely have your strong opinion on things. So it was hard sometimes but I have to say Tony [Goldwyn] is just a dream because he’s so collaborative. He’s more collaborative than I am as a director. He really was genuinely interested in everyone’s opinions and then he would make his own and make the decision. But he was so wonderfully open to what I had to say and what my two cents was. I’m sure there were times when I annoyed the hell out of him. But it’s a good question and in terms of segueing into the first movie I did that wasn’t one I directed, he was a great person to do it with because I wasn’t dealing with someone who’s ego was getting in the way. When I had those moments like why don’t you do it like this? I could actually say, ‘My gut really thinks we should do it like this. What do you think on that?’ He would go either A, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea’ because he really had no ego about it, or ‘I hear what you’re saying but this is why I want to do it this way.’ He was a great person to work with.”
Garden State was also a slightly different scenario, because Braff was directing himself as the star. “I have to say, I was so blessed. It’s shocking. If you look at all the people I worked with in Garden State who have all done so many more movies than I did, they really all left everything in my hands. For me, when you’re acting in a movie, you really have to plan a lot more out than when you’re not, so I storyboarded every frame of Garden State. I blocked everything out before actors even arrived juts because I couldn’t leave all that up in the air. I needed some things to have control over. So if an actor had said, ‘I really hate this blocking…’ I mean, if someone had a real problem with it, I would have worked it out but so much had already been determined by where I put everybody in the shots.”
The Last Kiss opens Friday.
