As Helm began to imagine the various characters and elements of Harold Crick’s world, it became clear that they would all be deeply intertwined. “From Kay to Professor Hilbert to Penny to Ana to the wristwatch, each one of the characters ends up doing little things to help them save one another,” observes Helm. “There’s an underlying theme that the people and things we take most for granted are often the ones that make life worth living and actually keep us alive.”
Producer Doran was immediately intrigued by what she and Helm then referred to as “The Narrator Project.” Drawn to fantastical stories – her producing credits include the acclaimed DEAD AGAIN and NANNY MCPHEE, and as a studio executive she supervised GHOST, PET SEMATARY and other tales of love and death – Doran helped Helm develop his concept into a tightly structured comedic narrative.
Comments Doran: “I think that in any fantasy you have to make a promise to the audience that if they’ll just believe in this one impossible thing, everything else will be very real and true. And I thought we had to make the story feel as much as possible like a thriller. In the end, this is a story about a man trying to prevent his own murder, and Zach and I both wanted it to have that kind of suspense.”
Through a series of spirited conversations between Helm and Doran, the details of Harold Crick’s fantastical story began to unfold. “The process was a lot of fun because it let Zach’s extraordinary imagination run wild,” recalls Doran. “I would ask him questions such as ‘What would happen if …’ or ‘Would it be more real if…’ and then Zach would write a beautiful scene or a hilarious line to address the question.”
Says Helm: “Having Lindsay as my muse was just great. She’s very specific and very smart and she likes things to be as funny and as human as possible — so everything worked towards those two directions.”
A devotee of riddles and puzzles, Helm especially enjoyed lining the script with subtle clues and twists. Even the street names, business names, and the characters’ last names are significant – Crick, Pascal, Eiffel, Escher, Banneker, Kronecker, Cayly, etc. are all mathematicians who focused on the innate order of things. There is even a playful salute to mathematician David Hilbert and the 23 questions he put forth at the International Congress of Mathematicians of 1900.
Helm views details such as these to be a vital part of his writing process, a process that he believes is consistent with a larger Post-Modern movement. "From Pirandello, to Brecht, to Wilder, to Stoppard, to Woody Allen to Wes Anderson, we can see the progression of a contemporary, self-aware, reality-bending and audience-involving wave in dramatic literature,” says Helm. “I love to see Homer Simpson reacting to his creator, Matt Groenig, or the cast of ‘Urinetown’ complaining from the stage about their own title. Stranger Than Fiction is simply my abstraction of it — to take a story-telling device and to make it, in fact, the story. It’s great that we can invite the audience to emotionally participate, not only in the story being written, but in how the story is being written. And, aside from all of the highfalutin' theory, it always leads to some great jokes."
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