Zach Braff makes movies that he wants to see. The director loves reveals, humor, heartbreak and his home state of New Jersey.

In his latest film, “A Good Person,” Braff took those cinematic themes and wrote, produced and directed a movie about Allison (Florence Pugh), a young woman living in South Orange, New Jersey who is grieving after a tragic car crash. She meets Daniel (Morgan Freeman), a grandfather who is on his separate, but very closely related, journey through grief. The two slowly become friends, despite the tragedy that links them together.

Make no mistake, “A Good Person,” has a heavy premise, but Braff did not set out to make a downer. He approached grief the same way he has in real life, with a touch of humor. After all, he likes a movie that pangs at your heart and makes you chuckle.

“I like to have my heart broken,” Braff told The DePaulia. “I want to be like ‘ow’…but I also want to release from that, I want you to make me laugh.”

Those moments of release are interspersed in “A Good Person,” from Freeman’s crotchety yet endearing delivery of grandfatherly sass, to Pugh’s dry and sarcastic quips and Alex Wolff cameo where he plays a South Orange burnout.

Humor helps balance the film, which Braff said was inspired by events in his personal life. Braff lost his sister, his father and his best friend in the span of only a few years. He wrote the script for “A Good Person” during COVID-19 in lockdown, but the catharsis of making the movie actually began after the film was complete.

“It didn’t actually come from making it, it comes from sharing,” Braff said.

Braff said that while he has been going to screenings of  “A Good Person” across the country, he watches the last half hour in the theater with the audience. He enjoys hearing the silence, the tears and laughter and watching people connect to the scene on the screen. Sharing the movie with audiences is the most gratifying part of the process for Braff.

As an audience member, the most gratifying part of the movie was the sheer authenticity. Scene by scene, “A Good Person” does not feel like a movie, but it feels like we are walking through someone’s life. And in a way, we are.

“A Good Person” is set in Braff’s hometown of South Orange, New Jersey. He went back and filmed scenes at his high school and the duck pond that he used to visit. It was clear that the setting was not only meaningful, but deliberate.

South Orange is a short train ride away from the energy of New York City. There is a real life tension there between going and staying that is mirrored in the film. Braff used the main character, Allison, to play on the theme of the two types of people in his hometown.

Within the first ten minutes, Allison has her life altered while driving to New York. She never makes it to the city. There is a sudden shift where she is stuck in South Orange at her mom’s house. Despite her own circumstance, she judges people that never leave South Orange.

“South Orange is a suburb like it’s depicted, but there’s a train that will bring you in the center of Manhattan in 25 minutes,” Braff said. “So I always thought growing up there was this really incredible energy there because, and not that one is better than the other, but some people would never leave the town and…some people would get on the train…go off and have a much broader life.”

Knowing the setting so well took the burden off one layer of the film, allowing more focus to be lent to the difficult subject matter.

“You know, if you’re gonna write something so authentic and so raw and really just put yourself out there in a really vulnerable way, there’s a certain comfort in like, I’m not gonna get the setting wrong,” Braff said. “I know what a Jersey dive bar looks like. I know what the train station looks like. I know what the random adult riding a BMX bike down the street for no reason is like. I just know it.”

“A Good Person” was shot in 26 days during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a movie about a woman in South Orange who experiences grief, humor, addiction, friendship, hope and recovery. It’s the movie Braff wanted to make and he hopes audiences enjoy it.

“There’s people saying like, they don’t make movies like this in the theaters anymore, and I want to say ‘people, I did’ and ‘please go you know,’” Braff said with a smile.

“Hopefully my dream is that you go out with your friends or your family or whoever you go to movies with, and you talk about it and you talk about your own experience and where it touched you and where it moved you.”

“A Good Person” is now in theaters.