Word: portman
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Eventually Braff got Danny DeVito's Jersey Films to co-produce it, partly by trading on the fact that the company had never made a film about its eponymous state. Then he got Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Ian Holm, Jean Smart and Method Man to be in it. At Sundance he sold it to Miramax and Fox Searchlight for a $5 million distribution deal. "He's a very confident guy. To be a director, that's what you have to do," says Portman, 23. "He demands confidence in others. You just have to talk back...
...preparation, Braff had Portman watch one of his favorite films, Harold and Maude. Like that movie, Garden State quickly establishes an off-kilter tone, using odd pacing and such surrealistic touches as the giant pet cemetery in Portman's character's backyard to create a marijuana-like haze between the main character and his surroundings. "I love stuff that's totally realistic, then dips across the line," he says. "Sometimes I crossed the line...
...only time a tiny fissure appears in the immensely likable Braff's confidence is when he reveals, as he has in each interview about the film, that he had always pictured Portman for the role but never dreamed he could land her. After the phrase "someone like Natalie Portman" was mentioned for the hundredth time, a producer sent her agent the script as a long shot...
...films. And, while Braff the actor manages to justify and even enrich his numb character the more he weaves his way through a maze of “how old are we” house parties, fluorescent-lighting and tentative moments with a new girl, Sam (Natalie Portman ’03), there’s something awkward that still shouldn’t be. The sense that he is playing this exactly right—Braff, as his biography suggests (he was a waiter and, until now, a minor actor), is largely playing himself—can?...
...students in America" and their parents with a homily that, in his inimitably maladroit manner, touched on everything from sex, drugs and pornography to famous Harvard grads like "Lyndon Baines Johnson, or, as he is known, J.F.K." and "that really fit hottie from Star Wars" (a.k.a. actress Natalie Portman, who graduated last year). At the end, he cheered the audience with "Big up yaself, Princeton...