Chicago director learned as he went along

The great thing about movie directors from Chicago? They don't use a lot of filters when they answer questions.

Take Zach Helm, who lived in Lincoln Park and Wrigleyville before he went west, wrote the screenplay for the Will Ferrell hit comedy "Stranger Than Fiction" and directed his own screenplay to "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium," which opened this weekend.

How would he describe directing his first movie with Dustin Hoffman and Natalie Portman in the cast?

"It was a phenomenal learning experience, a huge learning curve," Helm said during a publicity swing through his former home turf. "There are some things I am proud of and some things I wish I could go back and do over again. But I survived to fight another day, right?"

See? No ego here. Helm doesn't even try to sugarcoat his filmmaking inexperience to make himself look like the master of his universe.

"I'm a total neophyte," he admitted. "Making these movies has been on-the-job training for me. If I get stuck, I go back to the fundamentals, and those come from the time I spent at DePaul."

That's DePaul University, where Helm earned a bachelor's degree in acting.

"I would see up to 60 plays a year, so that gave me a depth of knowledge that I would have otherwise lacked, since I didn't go to film school," Helm said. "There are times in the movie ("Magorium") when I've simply staged it. It's not about the camera work or the cinematography. We recreated a sort of proscenium with the camera and let the actors do their jobs."

"Mr. Magorium" tells the story of a magical toy store in New York City where a 243-year-old owner (Hoffman) decides to let his protégé (Portman) take over. Helm conceived the story while working at a Chicago toy store called Saturday's Child on Halsted Street just south of Webster.

"It was a tiny little toy store tucked away in a store front with little, imaginative, great, non-battery-operated toys," Helm said. "I had actually written a substantial amount of the story while working there. There are parts of the movie that are directly taken from my journal I wrote while at the store."

Helm seems to have a grip on the enormous opportunities afforded him, and admitted he has some distance to travel in the movie world.

"This whole process of going through test screenings and looking at numbers and doing what you need to do to get a movie like this out was a little tough for me to understand," he said with refreshing candor. "I just wanted to make my silly little movie."

When "Stranger Than Fiction" became a quick hit, Helm said he didn't take time to enjoy his good fortune.

"I work as hard as I can," he said. "I'm never exactly happy with the work that I'm doing. But I'm tired of writing script for movies that never get made. I just put my head down and keep working and try to get better."