Jan/Feb, 2003
IFC
(Scanned by easyconfessions, transcribed by Justin.)
Susan Orlean's nonfiction bestseller The Orchid Thief has everything a book needs to be a great story: a swampy Florida backdrop, toothless eccentrics obsessed with rare orchids, and endless run-ins with the law. It could be made into a great movie, and, in a way, it has.
Adaptation, the new film based on Susan Orlean's book, takes liberties with the original story that go well beyond your typical cut-and-paste job. Firstly, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, of Being John Malkovich fame, actually writes himself into the script as one of the main characters. Nicolas Cage portrays Kaufman as a self-loathing balding screenwriter struggling to adapt Orlean's book for the screen. Cage also plays Kaufman's fictional twin brother Donald, an overly confident writer devoted to the story-structure mantras of screenwriting guru Robert McKee. But the insanity doesn't stop there. Orlean, in reality a genteel writer for The New Yorker, is transformed in the film into a drug-addled muderer, played by Meryl Streep. In the hands of director Spike Jonze, this wild ride is both brilliant and hilarious.
The film jumps between the Florida swamps frequented by orchid hunter John Laroche (Chris Cooper), Orlean's Manhattan office and apartment, and Charlie and Donald Kaufman's L.A. house. These four characters eventually find themselves intertwined in a wild plot that veers away from Orlean's original book. While having her story and her life turned inside out would send most authors kicking and screaming, Orlean wasn't bothered. "I am not a drug addict, and I really have no wish to murder a screenwriter," she says. "Although I am sure there are plenty of writers who are going to look at that scene and say, 'Oh god, in my dreams! I would love to kill the guy who adapted my book!' But not me."
For a film that sounds like an excercise in paralyzing self-awareness, the collaborators sound surprisingly cheery. "The story of my writing the script is pretty close to what happens in the movie," Kaufman says, "I didn't set out to write it this way, and the studio didn't know i was writing it this way. I didn't expect that the movie would get made, and i just expected it to end my career."
Kaufman's anxious energies became infectious for everyone involved in the film. For Cage, the experience of trying to get into Charlie's head became a mindbender of its own. "I remember that we had been to lunch," Cage recounts. "Charlie had taken a menu and flapped the thing under his arms, and I remember thinking, 'Is he doing this because he thinks I'm going to put this into the movie and he's messing with me?' I didn't end up using that."
For the record, Charlie doesn't remember doing this at all. "I think I just have some fluttering menu problem." he says. "I was just probably nervous. The first time I had to meet Nicolas I knew the purpose was to be scrutinized and he was so respectful. I get nervous around people anyway, and I knew the idea was that someone was going to be watching me. It wasn't fun."
For Cage and Jonze, however, the uneasiness was just starting. Playing twin brothers, Cage spent much of the movie acting opposite himself. And for both director and actor, this was not the cheery Patty Duke Show experience one might have expected. Jonze explains that Cage would have to shoot a scene as one character, and then change clothes and shoot it as the other character. In the second take, he'd have an earpiece that played back the lines of the previous character. "We were trying to make it feel very natural, but the process was very technical." Jonze says.
"I think the most frustrating aspect was that we had to make the two brothers different enough so that if you saw Donald on screen you would know it was Donald and not Charlie," Cage says. The actor would decide which character he was 'feeling' more, and shoot that one first then switch to the other brother. "After switching three or four times a day I would start to feel scrambled," Cage says. "I think once i even screamed. Spike would have to talk me down. The first couple of days I wondered, 'Can i do this?' But then after a while you start to find your rhythm."
And if Kaufman was uncomfortable being studied by Cage, the tables were turned soon enough. Cage remembers, "Charlie would come to the set, and I always felt like he was scrutinizing me playing him, and I couldn't relax. And I was like, 'Spike, does Charlie have to be here?' " he says with a laugh.
Such harrowing off-screen tension wasn't revealed on-screen. But, Jonze warns, we shouldn't look too closely. "There are some things that are real in the movie and some things that are not. I think it is better not to define that line too well."