From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to the treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. I'm in New York, sitting across from a man you may have come to know as JD, but you should know him from Manhattan murder mystery even. We go the way back.

My guest is Zach Braff. Ten years ago this year, his first film as director and writer played

the Sundance Film Festival. The film was Garden State. His newest film is, Wish I Were Here,

Forgive my English. No, actually, you were about to say it the grammatically correct way, and I Was Here, Forgive My English.

No, actually, you were about to say it the grammatically correct way, and I've heard plenty of people tell me that it is grammatically incorrect.

I would never tell you that, but I would not disagree with that.

What does the title come from?

Well, it was a play.

My brother, I wrote the script with my brother Adam and it was a play off those postcards,

wish you were here. Yeah. And then, um, the idea in the film was someone struggling to find

their own spirituality and searching for a way to be in the present moment, ultimately realizing

that maybe his religion, if he had anything, was the desire and struggle to

live in the present moment, be here now, as the book says. That's where we got it from. It was like,

I wish I was here. I wish I was present in my life and present, not worried about the past,

not obsessed about the future, but here now.

But it leads me to a question. I assume it's a question you've been asked a lot when you saw,

how old you, when you saw the graduate, because in terms of characters with a kind of a spiritual void and looking, trying to figure out where they stand in the world and the way music is

used in that film as well, it seems the graduate must be an obvious influence. The graduate was a big influence, and I would also say Harold and Maude was a big influence.

Harold Maude was the first film I saw that was about loneliness and searching for oneself, but in a quirky, funny way.

Also somebody trying to be in the moment, and that moment is sort of eluding him.

Of course, and in a way it found a way to be so interesting and funny, but heartbreaking

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