Zach Helm

The thing about having a zebra in your film is that if you need one, you're going to need two because zebras are herd animals. And for the second zebra, you'll need a pony so he'll have someone to hang with while the first one is shooting.

ZACH HELM says the epiphany that led to "Stranger Than Fiction" came to him while riding in his car: A guy hears a voice that, he realizes, is narrating his life. So he called producer Lindsay Doran to share his brainstorm. "She said, 'That is really funny,' " he recalls. "It's not necessarily a movie, though." It took him two more weeks to come up with the needed complication: The unseen narrator would tell the man he's going to die.