Dustin Hoffman and Natalie Portman in Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium Courtesy of Fox Walden

The climax of the film, which looks like it occurs in one moment, was scheduled to shoot over four days. "My first AD and I were going, 'This is four days if we're lucky, but if we can't do it in five we're sunk,'" Helm says. Because it was timed to music that had already been written, "it was like shooting a musical. The score was playing, there was a conductor there, all of us were counting eight-counts in unison. It was all on Natalie's shoulders: She had to maintain her character while hitting all her marks. She was unbelievable. With all the crazy stuff going on, the emotion of what she was doing still comes through. When our sound guy, who's 5'10", 200 lbs, came up to ask me if we were doing another take, he had tears in his eyes. I thought, 'Apparently we don't need another take, apparently that's the keeper.'"

Though he wrote Magorium's and lived with it for years, Helm is discovering in post what all directors know: that while shooting, a film undergoes its own kind of alchemy. Some of his favorite scenes were the last he shot, of Magorium and Mahoney's final day out on the town — Hoffman and Portman jumping on beds at a mattress store, dancing on bubble wrap in a park.

"Dustin and Natalie had become friends, so these scenes became about their friendship," Helm says. "The scenes of Magorium trying to pass on his legacy to Mahoney — a character who is not fulfilling her potential, who when I'm feeling highfalutin' I compare to Harold in Harold and Maude, or [Jack] Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, or Edward Scissorhands, where we know there's so much inside them, and for some reason it's not getting out — very much became about Dustin talking to a younger actor about what she needs to do in order to be fulfilled. They were constantly working together off-camera. They started to use each other's real names — Dustin's done this before — and talk to one another. It's a movie predicated on magic, but the most magical moments are the ones where two characters share something.

"It has become a movie above all else about the connection of people, and what we choose to believe in," Helm continues. "When we can't believe in ourselves, our ability to believe in others."

Not to mention, believing that a zebra can play fetch.