UR TV CAST

Last year, Kaufman was asked to adapt a non-fiction book called The Orchid Thief, written by the New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean; a book about flowers, and passion, and a Florida native called John Laroche (the thief in question), who’d somehow managed to entwine the two. Kaufman loved the book’s originality – but its lack of structure drove him crazy. He went crazy, and for five months couldn’t write a thing.Finally, having missed several deadlines, he decided to bring himself into the story, and invented a twin brother for himself, Donald, also engaged in trying to write a screenplay. Where he, Charlie, is all Woody Allen agony and self-doubt (he thinks he’s too fat, too bald, too sweaty, too everything), happy-go-lucky, socially successful Donald settles down with Robert McKee’s book of screenwriting rules and instantly coughs up a hit.Meanwhile, Charlie becomes obsessed with finding out more about Orlean, and Donald, trying to help, accompanies him to New York.

After interviewing Orlean – as Charlie – Donald decides her answers are way too pat. She’s about to go to Florida, and he suggests they follow her… Bear in mind, at this point, that Donald gets a (real-life) credit as co-author of Adaptation. Where does Charlie end, and his brother begin?Adaptation, then, is and isn’t about what Charlie Kaufman went through to write this script. The central characters (except Donald) are all based on real people; but much of their behaviour has been invented, and they’re played by stars.

Cage is achingly convincing as both Charlie and Donald, Meryl Streep makes a juicy Orlean, Chris Cooper is sublime as Laroche (Streep and Cooper have been nominated for their supporting turns). We believe these people are “ordinary”, which makes it all the more surreal when Orlean tells Laroche that her book is going to be made into a film She asks who he’d like to play him. “Who’s gonna play me? I think I should play me!”So here I am, introducing myself to the real-life Cage and Kaufman and Jonze. Cage, 39, is huge, covered in make-up and dressed in a sharp black suit that offsets his chunky gold bracelet and watch. Kaufman, 44, is sitting cross-legged on his chair, a tiny, hobbity creature with pointy ears and a head of curly hair that rears back, as if alarmed, from his scalp. And Jonze, 33 – famous, until Malkovich, for directing great pop videos, marrying Sofia Coppola and being the heir to the Spiegel mail-order catalogue fortune – he could be a preppy student, all neat white socks and plastered-down hair The three insist on being interviewed together. But they certainly don’t look like a “team”.I ask Cage and Kaufman if they feel guilty about poor Jonze, the only one overlooked by the academy.