In 1999, just as screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's Being John Malkovich was being brought to the screen by director Spike Jonze, he had been commissioned, by Academy Award®-winning director/producer Jonathan Demme and his producing partner Ed Saxon, to adapt New Yorker writer Susan Orlean's best-selling non-fiction book The Orchid Thief.

Susan Orlean as been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. She has established a reputation for her own mesmerizing take on literary journalism in a wide ranging series of profiles and portraits. Her articles have also appeared in Outside, Rolling Stone, Vogue and Esquire. In 1990, she published her first book, the critically acclaimed Saturday Night, which was named a New York Times Notable Book.  She most recently published a collection of her writings, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People. Orlean's The Orchid Thief, brought her to the bestseller lists. Ostensibly the tale of a Florida orchid poacher, Orlean's adventurous and erudite journey through the swamps became a riveting look at the nature of obsession and the lengths people will go to in the name of passion.

The book is a widely praised tale of a journalist who discovers the roots of her own passion while chronicling the adventures of John Laroche, a man who is obsessed with his love for rare orchids.  Discursive and introspective, the book lacked a conventional narrative structure, which initially frustrated Kaufman. Yet, at the same time, he was intrigued by the unique nature of the source material. "I remember being cocky and thinking, yeah, I like this. I can turn this into a movie."

However, when he was unable to conceive of a suitable way to shape the material into a narrative screenplay, his self-confidence soon turned into depression.  "If it had been a spec script of my own, I might have abandoned it at a certain point," Kaufman admits. "In this case, though, I had been hired by others. They had expectations of me. So I had to adapt to being an adaptor."

Throughout the torturous process, Kaufman remained steadfast in his commitment of finding a way to address the theme of passion. "Passion was something I wanted to write about, because it's what Susan Orlean was writing about," he says. "It was always in my head to try and capture the emptiness people feel when they don't have passion, and the directionless longing it can cause."

Since, by its very nature, passion requires "stepping over the edge, moving away from what feels safe and taking some kind of risk," Kaufman reasoned, the idea of incorporating the emotional process of writing a screenplay into the script evolved. "It became a kind of metaphor for ideas feeding upon themselves and how they eventually tie together in the end," he says.

Kaufman shared his radical approach to adapting The Orchid Thief with Jonze. "As I grew more and more interested in his ideas," Jonze recalls, "Charlie grew more and more nervous that he wasn't doing what the producers had hired him to do. I just tried to support him, but then again, unlike Charlie, I didn't have anything to lose.  It just sounded like fun to me." 

Meanwhile, producer Ed Saxon was patiently awaiting Kaufman's first draft. It would be six months before he received the script, entitled Adaptation. "I was immediately suspicious," Saxon says. "That wasn't the title of the book we had optioned. And then it said 'written by Charlie and Donald Kaufman.' And I thought,  'who is Donald Kaufman?  I didn't know he was going to be writing with a partner.' But, once I started reading the script, it clicked. I was stunned and amazed by how intricately woven it was."

While the script worked purely as entertainment, it also delivered on other levels, according to Saxon. "Adaptation is about art being challenging and motion pictures being challenging. It's about how alienated people are from each other in our contemporary culture, about how hard it is to have love in your life and how hard it is to connect with people, to be honest and open.  It's a movie about being demanding of yourself and admitting to the basic human frailties and yet, being able to adapt to all the curve balls that life throws your way." 

When Susan Orlean first heard from her agent that Hollywood was interested in The Orchid Thief, she was a bit surprised, not to mention curious.  Her book, though hailed by critics and embraced by readers, was, she admits, "layered like an onion." It seemed to defy adaptation into a movie. "The book is a kind of soulful meditation on passion and love sickness and subcultures and belonging. Those aren't very typical Hollywood themes," she says.

The screenwriter who had been hired to bring her book to the screen was Charlie Kaufman, whose breakthrough movie, Being John Malkovich, was then in production. When Orlean heard the title and the plot line of Malkovich (it's the tale of a struggling puppeteer who discovers a secret portal into actor John Malkovich's inner mind) her immediate reaction was, "What kind of weirdo is this guy?" she admits. When she saw the finished film, she was even more perplexed. She could not imagine how he would approach something as comparatively straightforward as The Orchid Thief.

After Orlean read the script, she was almost speechless. Kaufman had taken her journey and combined it with his own, crossing the border from fact into fiction. "I thought the script was completely strange and yet, wonderful.  When I read the sections about the Susan Orlean character, I was absolutely convinced that Charlie Kaufman had indeed come to New York and secretly followed me around, studying me," she says. "By and large the character is quite different from me. But the initial portrait of me as a writer contained certain details that were startlingly accurate. I never could figure out how he did that. But the important thing is that, in the end, this was the perfect thing to have happened to this book. It has become more of a character in the movie than the actual basis for the movie."

The concept of a screenwriter being a character in his own screenplay - or at least the screenwriter's darkest fears about himself - presented Oscar® winner Nicolas Cage with a unique creative opportunity. The fact that he was being asked to portray both Charlie Kaufman and his identical twin brother Donald, only doubled his pleasure. "Though they're twins, Donald and Charlie are total opposites," Cage explains. "Charlie hates himself. He's morose, hypercritical and joyless. Donald feels pretty good about himself. He's amusing, easygoing and optimistic. But the interesting thing is that Charlie is the true artist, whereas Donald aspires to be an artist but, seems more like a commercialist."

Cage experimented with different techniques before deciding on how to tackle the two roles. "I approached it from the British school of acting, creating the characters externally and then working inward, rather than the Method school, in which you work from the inside out," he explains. The result is a seamless interplay between the two characters. "Nic moved effortlessly back and forth between the stultifying anxiety and neurosis of Charlie and the relaxed joyfulness of Donald," says director Spike Jonze.  "It was almost like a schizophrenic form of alchemy."

As he prepared to tackle his fictional doppelganger on screen, Cage decided to spend some time with the real Charlie Kaufman. "It was kind of a surreal experience.  I would scrutinize him and, at the same time, he was scrutinizing me to figure out how I was going to play him," Cage observes. " Sometimes I'd catch him trying to fake me out. We'd go to lunch and he'd start flapping the menu around just to see if I'd pick up that mannerism and use it in the movie. Later, when he visited the set, it was mind blowing. He'd be sitting off camera watching me play him in a scene he wrote about himself - only it wasn't him really, but a projection of himself.  Like I said, cubist."

As he delved deeper into Kaufman's psyche, Cage realized that, behind the facade of his dark self-image, there was an almost childlike need for absolute purity. "I discovered that Charlie was someone who is very devoted to being honest and totally naked in his art. He wants to rip the masks off himself, off everybody."

For the casting of Susan Orlean, Jonze imagined Meryl Streep, reasoning that it would take an actress of her talent and caliber to capture the subtleties in the script, which not only looked at the creative process of researching and writing The Orchid Thief, but also at how Orlean's exploration of John Laroche's passion for orchids unleashed her own hidden passions. The more Jonze thought about Streep, the more he realized, "it was a pipe dream," he confesses.

But Streep responded enthusiastically to the script. "It was simply one of the best screenplays I'd ever read," she says. "There was no other script like it. So, I had to say yes." Having seen Kaufman and Jonze's previous collaboration, she was prepared for their unorthodox approach to filmmaking. "The sensibility of Being John Malkovich definitely resides in Adaptation," she adds.  "It's obvious that they both sprang from the same brain." As for Jonze, she continues, "he was inventive, sure, unfailingly sensitive and very well prepared. I truly enjoyed making this movie - except for the parts where I was waist deep in a swamp." 

In preparing for the role, Streep chose to rely on Kaufman's character, a composite of the actual New Yorker writer and his own fictional musings. "The first time I met Susan Orlean was at the screening of the finished film," says Streep. "I asked for her forgiveness and understanding for the liberties we took with her name and reputation. And she said, 'Oh! That's okay. I wish I were Susan Orlean!' I'm a great admirer of her work and I do think parts of it reside in this film, but I'm not sure I can say the same about the character bearing her name."

For Orlean, the fact that she was going to be portrayed on screen by Meryl Streep was "absolutely unimaginable," she admits. Yet, it was one of those moments in life that seems almost fated. Though they were never formally introduced, Streep and Orlean had actually appeared in the same movie almost 25 years ago. "I've only been a movie extra once in my life and that was in The Deer Hunter, starring Meryl Streep," Orlean relates. "So it somehow seemed like karma that she was going to play me. To have such a great actress wanting to play a character based on you is thrilling. It gave me confidence about the outcome. Watching where she takes the character of Susan is like taking the most amazing virtual reality ride." 

At the center of Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief is John Laroche, the true-life orchid hunter and his intense, almost pathological, obsession with rare species of the flower. Orlean describes the larger-than-life man as "a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale eyed, slouch shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth.

Actor Chris Cooper was immediately captivated. "I usually play very contained characters. This was a precious opportunity because, with Laroche, I could explode out there," says Cooper. "He is a very big character who considers himself one of the smartest, most incredible, people you've ever met. That was very interesting and challenging, because that kind of confidence is not something that comes easily to me."   

Cooper set off on his own investigative journey through the swamps of South Florida, immersing himself in Laroche's obsession. He also put himself through "orchid school," spending weekends attending flower shows and attempting to catch a bit of the fever. Like Cage, Cooper altered his physical appearance, working with a trainer to mimic Laroche's frenetically lean, wiry physique. "I haven't been this weight since high school," he laughs. 

In his research, Cooper began to tap into the wellspring of Laroche's fascination with orchids and how it dovetailed with the film's themes. "I became amazed at the orchid species' ability to adapt. It's truly amazing what, over the years, orchids have been able to do. They've been able to mutate in order to survive.  To imagine that a flower could take on the color and shape or stripes of a certain bee in order to attract that bee for the purposes of pollination, I mean, that's mind boggling."

As with his work in Being John Malkovich, production designer KK Barrett's settings for Adaptation were constructed to reflect "what is going on in the character's heads, their emotional state," he says. For example, the character of Charlie Kaufman lives in an oversized, sparsely decorated house. "The surroundings reflect Charlie's state of mind," Barrett explains. "He's in his literary head all the time, and he pays little attention to what furnishings or style surround him.  He's not a social animal."

By Spike Jonze's standards the shoot was lengthy, 53 days. "The story is so sprawling and nonlinear that we had to keep changing locations and shooting in little scenes," explains Jonze.  "We rarely spent more than a few days in any one spot." The most time consuming scenes were those between Charlie Kaufman and his brother Donald, both played by Nicolas Cage. They entailed extensive use of green screen and other camera tricks. Jonze collaborated closely with director of photography Lance Acord, to bring visual variety and emotional resonance to these crucial scenes. "We used, pretty much, every technique that exists for shooting doubles - split frames, motion control, green screen, etcetera. It required a lot of exhausting work from Nic and the crew," says Jonze.   

Producer Ed Saxon describes Jonze's shooting style as having all the hallmarks of a small, independent production, but with a big movie feel. "Spike combines the religious preparation of a studio film with the manic, exalted energy of an independent movie," Saxon explains. "He photo-storyboards many of the scenes and thinks through the whole script. At the same time, he is almost psychedelically freeform and spontaneous.  He brings that kind of energy to the set every day, which helps make the actors feel free and confident, and helps the cast and crew to do their best work and have a good time doing it." 

SPIKE JONZE  (Director) Prior to Being John Malkovich, Jonze was best known as an award-winning music-video, short film and commercial director. He got his start working as a photographer and co-directing (with Mark Gonzales), Blind Video Days (skate video). His direction of the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" music-video (1994), a spoof of 1970s television cop shows, received critical praise and numerous awards. Ever since, Jonze's music-videos have regularly been nominated for MTV Video Music Awards. He has worked with such talented artists as Bjork, The Pharcyde, Fat Boy Slim, Daft Punk, R.E.M., Sean Lennon and Weezer. He recently produced Human Nature, based on an original script by Charlie Kaufman.

The Art Of Adaptation - adapting novels, plays and short stories to the big screen