Zach of All Trades

It’s 112 degrees just north of Los Angeles, and the sun is beaming off both the rocky desert floor and the ancient, gutted Airstreams littering this RV graveyard, every ray soaking into the black button-down shirt that singer/songwriter Cary Brothers, the star of this video shoot, is wishing he hadn’t decided to wear. With only a pair of EPs to his name, Brothers is new to music videos, but he’s making the most of his $10,000 budget. In southern California, that modest sum will get you a crew of about 20, a low-cost location and—if you happen to be a close friend—Zach Braff to direct.

Wearing a straw Japanese fishing hat and sweating through his dark-blue T-shirt, Braff stays focused despite the heat. The footage he’s filming will be intercut with scenes from his upcoming film The Last Kiss, and he seems to know exactly what he wants. Unlike Garden State, which transformed him from “that goofy actor on Scrubs” to award-winning screenwriter, director and music supervisor, Braff didn’t write or direct this one. But when he accepted the role, he made sure he’d get to pick the songs for the movie.

In many ways, The Last Kiss is a natural extension of Garden State, and the new soundtrack is a sequel to the last one. The role of The Shins is played by Snow Patrol this time, and Cary Brothers, Coldplay, Remy Zero and Frou Frou’s Imogen Heap all make encore appearances. Braff and Brothers were friends at Northwestern University, and they reconnected when each moved out to L.A., Braff scrounging for acting gigs and Brothers playing open-mic nights around town.

“A big part of our friendship has always been music,” says Brothers. “It’s funny when I look at the Garden State soundtrack and I think in that year prior he called me up and said, ‘You gotta go see this band Remy Zero,’ which was a Viper Room show. And then I called, and I was like, ‘You gotta go and see Colin Hay play a show at Largo.’ There was a lot of that.”

Braff is a music fanatic—constantly talking up his favorite bands on his website and MySpace page—and revels in helping his aspiring musician friends like Brothers and another Northwestern alum, Joshua Radin, who’s also on the new soundtrack. Braff was recently a guest DJ on L.A.’s Indie 103.1, and is talking to the station about hosting a regular show highlighting emerging artists and having them play acoustic sets in the studio. It’s easy to imagine him as the kid in high school making piles of mix tapes, heading into the city from his South Orange, N.J., home to catch shows at CBGB’s and The Bitter End. But when we meet up two weeks after the shoot, I find that’s not the case at all.

“I wasn’t as into music in high school,” he says. “I mean, I had what I liked, I listened to a lot of Cat Stevens; Crosby, Stills & Nash, but I didn’t really find my musical taste until my early twenties. When I moved out here, I developed a good circle of friends who were all recommending good music to each other, and I started to really find out—I think late in life—what kind of music I like.”

We’re in the café of a hip but subdued hotel on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, and I’ve just done two very un-L.A. things to get here—walk from my own accommodations, a few blocks away, and show up early. I was reviewing my list of questions when Braff was suddenly staring down at me, clad in jeans and a T-shirt and attracting absolutely no attention. He’s affable, energetic and looks very, very normal—not the perfectly sculpted face of a typical Hollywood leading man, but the expressive, pliable features that make all of Dr. John “J.D.” Dorian’s quirky neuroses charming on Scrubs.

His passion for music may have come late in life, but Braff knew early on that he wanted to act and make films. His father was a lawyer, but was very involved in local theater and loved movies. Before the family had a VCR, he would host dinner parties and show 16mm prints of Woody Allen flicks on the living-room wall. Zach’s oldest brother Adam eventually got a Super 8 camera and began filming his own James Bond movies in the house.

“Adam and all the other kids would be in the movie,” Zach remembers. “I was three or four, so I would be the evil midget, my sister was Moneypenny and my brother was [almost] always James Bond. He took it very seriously. I remember we weren’t allowed on the set if we weren’t in the scene; it was all very cool. So those were two big influences in my life early on—I realized, wow I have more fun acting in my brother’s James Bond movie than doing anything else.”