Zach Helm
Zach Helm is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. The son of school teachers, Helm was raised in a town of less than 50 citizens in the Sierra Nevadas of California. He first became known for writing Stranger than Fiction, which garnered much acclaim for Helm, including awards from the National Board of Review and PEN International. He is best known internationally for his acclaimed stage play Good Canary, which has been translated and produced around the world, garnering multiple awards and accolades.
He is also known for the film Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium and his one-man performance pieces, most notably his revival of Spalding Gray's Interviewing the Audience.
Helm has also spent much time developing his own "open input" approach to drama, a collaborative process focused on helping artists mine narrative material from the real world. Using interviews, physical research, devised theater techniques and dramaturgy, the egalitarian approach has been used by Helm to help artists around the world, from primary school children to amateur filmmakers.
Early life and career
Helm is an only child, born and raised in California. His mother taught high school English and Journalism and his father taught multiple subjects and served as a school administrator. Helm lived in rural California, often attending the small schools where his parents worked. At 13, Helm began attending Nevada Union High School where he was made to take drama as an elective. After one year of the elective, Helm decided he wanted to pursue drama as a career. He attended The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago, a theater conservatory, where Helm was a merit scholar. While attending school, Helm began to work outside of the classroom, going at night to perform spoken word and monologues at bars and music events. He also began to write plays, performance pieces and monologues for others. During this time, Helm's work for himself and others began to garner attention from fellow writers, directors, producers, theater companies and film studios alike. It was also at this time that Helm experienced the events that would later inspire his play Good Canary.Writing and interviewing
In 1998, in an attempt to bring new writers to Hollywood, Helm was discovered and contracted by then head of Fox2000 Laura Ziskin to participate in a one-year studio screenwriting program, similar to the early writing deals of Hollywood. During this time, Helm wrote Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, his first screenplay, though it would stay at Fox despite Helm's contract expiring.From 2000 to 2004, Helm continued writing and collaborating in the theater, writing the plays Chapters and Last Chance for a Slow Dance. In 2004, Helm completed the first drafts of two projects, the film Stranger Than Fiction and the play Good Canary, both of which would help push Helm's career.
Stranger than Fiction, the meta-style comedy about an IRS agent seemingly trapped in a literary narrative that he can somehow hear, starred Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson. Helm was nominated for the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay and won both the National Board of Review Award for Best Original Screenplay and PEN Center USA Screenplay Award. He also received Saturn Award and Critics' Choice Movie Award nominations.
Good Canary, a contemporary piece about drug addiction, mental health, and love, was given to John Malkovich, who asked to direct the World Premiere of the play in French, despite the play being written in English. Helm agreed, and the play was translated. The play received six Molière nominations, the most of that year, and won the country's Crystal Globe for Best Play, beginning a decade of productions in multiple languages around the world, before being performed in its original language. In great part due to the writing of Good Canary, Helm was named an Ovid Fellow in 2006.
In 2006' Helm was approached to direct Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, and it was purchased in turnaround from Fox. The film was troubled early, and Helm has admitted views much of the film and its process negatively, citing he never has seen the final released version in 2007 . Frustrated with himself creatively, Helm began to re-build his technique by teaching and collaborating with other artists, and found new energy and passion via a Spalding Gray theater creation he had seen in college.
In 2008 Helm began Interviewing the Audience, a revival of one of Spalding Gray's more beloved performance pieces. Helm had seen Spalding Gray perform the piece while Helm was in college, and kindly asked to take on the show after Gray's death. As the title suggests, audience members are brought onto stage and interviewed, their personal stories and insights extracted in long-form conversations meant to create a sense of communal intimacy but challenge the convention of theater and story. Helm's approach differs from Gray's in that Helm's conversations are entirely extemporaneous, without any prepared questions, the audience members drawn from random, and Helm tends to find and illuminate the themes and connections within the interviews, thereby creating a through-line for each performance as it happens . Helm continues to perform the piece when he can, notably having a successful run Off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theater in 2011. Between Interviewing the Audience and research for his other projects, Helm has performed over 500 interviews and counting. The piece changed Helm's career as a writer, his focus shifting towards telling true stories, and using drama as an extension of journalism.
''Good Canary''
Good Canary completed a very successful run under the title Le Bon Canari in France in 2007, ending with the production, direction and translation being honored. Garnering the attention of theaters around the world, it was translated again into Spanish, and John Malkovich again directed it, with Diego Luna in one of the lead roles. The production was a tremendous success in Mexico, selling out in its entire Mexico City run and then touring the country for over a year to follow. Having succeeded in two languages on two continents, the play began to receive productions across the globe, and Helm declined any productions of it in English for years.The play, drawn from Helm's personal experiences is known for its dark humor, coarse language, views on sexism and misogyny as well as its use of Brechtian devices.
In 2016, the English-language premiere was announced by the Rose Theatre Kingston, to be directed again by John Malkovich in the fall of that year .
Other and upcoming projects
Starting in 2011, Helm has worked primarily in true stories, either drawing from or collaborating with journalists and often interacting with his piece's subjects and their stories directly, including convicted murderer Cameron Todd Willingham, vanguard cryonicist Bob Nelson, former U.S. Treasury employee Neel Kashkari, and others.In 2015, Helm was brought by Fox Searchlight and FilmRites to adapt and direct the true story of Paul Frampton, the North Carolina physics professor who, after claiming to be following the woman of his dreams, was convicted of trafficking cocaine through South America . The film, titled Culo Quasars Cocaine Chaos, marks Helm's return to film directing.
In 2016, Helm adapted the Epic Magazine article The Mercenary for Fox, collaborating with journalists Josh Davis and Josh Bearman. Again based on a real source, The Mercenary tells the true story of Roy Livingston, who became embroiled in one of the more bizarre gold heists in all of South America .