by MATTHEW HAYS

I take my place on the couch in a swank Toronto hotel. Sitting across from me are the three principals behind Adaptation, one of the gaggle of films that will flood cinemas this holiday season. There’s Spike Jonze, the director, Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter, sitting in the middle, and Oscar-winner Nicolas Cage, on the other end.

It’s time to be honest. “I feel like I’m in a very, very weird job interview right now.”

Cage pipes up. “How do you think I feel?” he asks.

It’s a weird scene, for sure, and at this point I’m still digesting the film itself. Adaptation, a followup for Kaufman and Jonze, is the surreal story of Charlie Kaufman (played by Cage) and fictional twin brother Donald (also played by Cage) who are in an epic struggle to write screenplays. Charlie is tortured by the success of Being John Malkovich; he’s now trying desperately to adapt New Yorker magazine writer Susan Orlean’s book The Orchid Thief. This is a story about a man obsessed with orchids; how can Charlie turn this into a screenplay, given the demands of that medium? Bro Donald, meanwhile, is writing a crass cop-crime thriller, a composite ripoff of every bad idea ever presented in a derivative movie, much to the disdain of Charlie. As the two live together, Charlie has trouble avoiding Donald. But he tries.

Charlie continues to grapple with an evil bout of writer’s block, and soon finds himself following Orlean herself (played in the film by Meryl Streep) to find out what makes her tick and why she’s so obsessed with the orchid man.

Strange days indeed

If it all sounds strange, then I’m describing it perfectly. But that’s just the beginning. Adaptation gives new meaning to the term genre buster; Kaufman (the screenwriter, not the character) has deep fried the screenwriting rule book, taking his initial premise and rolling it into a snowball of delightful weirdness. There are car chases, odd sexual scenes (Streep on Cage!) and even someone getting gobbled up by a crocodile. Adaptation is at once a quasi-sequel of sorts, a mystery, a romance and a sibling melodrama. And forget those dreary debates about that dropped subplot from the latest Merchant-Ivory page-to-screen rendering; Adaptation is the strangest, and best, off-kilter literary adaptation since Clueless.

As might be expected, the responses to Adaptation have been broad. Kaufman laughs when I read him back a write-up in the L.A. Times, which stated “screenwriting is only used as a metaphor for the suffering Americans feel when they come face to face with their fruitless pursuit of happiness.” The quote points up the difficult-to-pinpoint aura hovering over both Kaufman-Jonze collaborations. They’re laugh-out-loud comedies, but also touch on the metaphysical. Call it pop profundity.

“We wanted to start a conversation rather than offer up all the answers,” says Kaufman, cautiously. “I don’t think anyone’s grabbing at straws in terms of the way they see it. The setting for the movie is screenwriting, but I hope others can connect with it through their own struggles.”

“Really,” says Jonze, “we’re sort of more curious as to what other people take away from it. And that’s what’s exciting about it: people are coming out with very strong reactions, entirely different from the ones of the person sitting next to them.”

Screening struggles

Kaufman acknowledges the film is part autobiography. After the success (and an Oscar nomination) for Malkovich, Kaufman got a gig adapting Orlean’s book, after Jonathan Demme commissioned him to transform the award-winner into a screenplay. “The struggles you see on screen are pretty much what I was going through,” says Kaufman. Those struggles include the brutal inner monologue of someone coping with a self-esteem spiral encountered during writer’s block, one so deftly drawn any scribe will recognize it immediately.

“As Charlie was writing it,” says Jonze, “he would tell me about it. As he told me more and more about it, he was including more of his own problems in it. I got really excited about it. When I finally got to read it, I loved it. I asked Jonathan [Demme] if I could direct it. Eventually, I got it.”

Part of Kaufman’s mission was to go where no screenwriter had gone before. Gazing at the film, it’s hard not to think of Adaptation as the bookend to its polar-opposite bookend Far From Heaven, Todd Haynes’ artful revamping of Douglas Sirk. “I try not to look at models,” confirms Kaufman. “I actively make the un-model. I feel like it’s my obligation to break new ground, at least what’s new ground for me. But the movie adaptations I probably admire the most myself are Rosemary’s Baby and The Shining. There, the director’s vision and author’s vision complemented each other perfectly.” For the record, Kaufman says Orlean is extremely pleased with the far-out riff on her book, saying it’s much better than a strict interpretation of it would have been. Kaufman, understandably, is pleased to get the stamp of approval.

Drum roll, please

Even with Kaufman’s artful insanity and the Spike Touch, Adaptation simply wouldn’t fly if it weren’t for the crucial and wildly dynamic performance of Cage as the twins, a dual depiction which stands right up there with Jeremy Irons’ superb turn in Dead Ringers. “Yes, this was definitely one of the more challenging experiences for me,” Cage confirms, under a head of dyed jet-black hair. “Technically, I’d start the day depending on which character I felt more like. I’d record my dialogue for that character. Then I’d go off the set and change into, say, Donald’s clothes. In that time period I’d try to get myself psyched up, in terms of how Donald saw the world. Charlie would then be replaced by a stand with a tennis ball on it. I had an earpiece that would play back the dialogue I’d recorded as Charlie. So I had to try to think and feel like Donald while remembering what Charlie had done. So I liken it to what I would imagine drum playing would be like: you’re playing the bass drum, you’re playing cymbals, then you’re switching back.”

Cage looks at me, a bit perplexed. “Frankly, I didn’t really know what I was going to do at times. I was pretty overwhelmed. I got my rhythm in the end. But I must say, when it was all over, I was happy to be out of the process. It was tricky. Sometimes I would feel like screaming, or just scream. Spike would talk me through it.”

True to the Method, Cage did examine his real-life counterpart. Another challenge, as it seems: Cage was handed the delicate task of playing the screenwriter himself. “I studied Charlie closely. I wanted to go on a fishing trip or move in with him, but that didn’t happen. But what did happen was a series of very successful interviews that I recorded. I have been very respectful of his privacy, though. I burned the tapes after I was done. Because I’m dramatic. Really, it was a release to light them on fire and watch them melt. Whenever I finish a movie I feel like I have to shed the skin. It’s my ritual.”

But Kaufman in reality feels quite apart from Cage’s Kaufman. “I don’t think Charlie on film is like Charlie in life,” confirms Cage. “It’s a surreal version of Charlie. Spike and I worked out that we weren’t going to do just an impression.”

Though Kaufman has a bit of a detectable nervous edge to him, Jonze seems extremely relaxed as we talk about the project. But it’s got to faze him: though this is his follow-up to Being John Malkovich, there has been another feature in between. Last year, Spike co-produced and Kaufman wrote Human Nature, a very funny and similarly quirky film that tanked at the box office. Does Jonze worry about how Adaptation will go down with the ticket-buying public? “There’s no way to predict how films will be received,” says Jonze. “But the lesson I’ve learned is that that’s not my business. You do your work, you move on. You don’t actually have any control over it. It’s wonderful if people embrace something but there’s no way to assure it.

“We finished the movie about two months ago. We struggled and tormented ourselves while making it. We felt we’d made the movie we wanted to make. Whether it’s perfect or not, we felt we’d made a solid film. But then I really have to detach myself a bit from what happens now, so I can retain the feeling of making this thing, of having made this with people I like.

“I think, ultimately, the experience of making the film has to be more important than what comes after.” :

Adaptation opens Friday, Dec. 20