By Wil Moss
December 27, 2002
Nicolas Cage was looking for a hit after a string of flops like CAPTAIN CORELLI’S MANDOLIN and WINDTALKERS. Maverick director Spike Jonze was looking for a project that would be as quirky and successful as his debut film, BEING JOHN MALKOVICH.
In walks screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s neurosis and his script for the new
movie ADAPTATION.
During the filming of 1999’s MALKOVICH, which Kaufman also wrote, he was hired to adapt Susan Orlean’s book THE ORCHID THIEF, which profiled a man obsessed with finding rare orchids. Kaufman, who initially had been attracted by this challenge, was soon overcome by his anxieties and frustrations of taking a book that is basically about flowers and adapting it into an engaging screenplay.
“He was telling me about this assignment when we were working on BEING JOHN MALKOVICH,” said Jonze. “And then at a certain point, more and more conversations were about how stressed and anxious and depressed and freaked out he was about having taken this assignment and [how he] didn’t know what to do.”
After about four months of false starts, Kaufman came up with the idea to put his struggle of writing the script into the actual script. Now he was the main character of a movie about a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman who was trying to adapt a book about flowers into a screenplay. The studio that hired him, however, was still expecting a straight-up adaptation of THE ORCHID THIEF.
“It opened up a lot of ideas for me when I started [writing myself into the script]. But I was still nervous about it,” said Kaufman. “I didn’t tell the studio that I was doing this. They didn’t know until I turned it in.”
Luckily for him, the studio execs, one of which is even portrayed in the movie (including appearing in one of many of Kaufman’s sexual fantasies), liked it. Soon Jonze stepped in to direct, and Nicolas Cage was cast as Charlie Kaufman—and also as Kaufman’s fictional twin brother Donald.
“I loved their first movie together [MALKOVICH] and I think they’re free thinkers and original talents,” said Cage. “I thought I’d get lucky and maybe have a chance at walking around in that world, y’know. Whichever world that is, I knew it would be unusual.”
And an unusual world it is. ADAPTATION is one of the most unique movies to come along since, well, 1999’s BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, a movie about a portal into actor John Malkovich’s head. In this movie, after being hired to adapt the book, Kaufman tries to deal with his own insecurities about writing the script and getting a girl, which isn’t helped when Charlie’s more confident but less intelligent twin brother Donald sells his first script and snags the makeup girl from the MALKOVICH set.
Kaufman eventually ends up following around Orlean (played by Meryl Streep) because he can’t work up the nerve to talk with her. This takes the movie into its dizzying third act down in the Florida swamps, with Charlie and Donald being chased by both guns and gators.
It isn’t an easy thing for a person to play two different characters and make you forget that it’s the same actor, but that’s exactly what Nicolas Cage does in the roles of Charlie and Donald. To do this, he studied how the real Charlie Kaufman lived his life. Or tried to, at least.
“I wanted to move in with Charlie Kaufman and sleep on his floor in a sleeping bag, and that didn’t work. And then I invited him to go to Mexico with me on a fishing trip, but that didn’t work,” said Cage of the reclusive and shy Kaufman. “But I did have four or five interviews with him that were very helpful.”
“It was very odd having [Kaufman] watch me play some surrealistic version of him,” said Cage. “We would get in our own little conundrums—I would think ‘OK, he’s messing with me,’ doing a weird move in a lunch interview, and thinking I was going to put that in the movie. I’ve learned since he wasn’t doing anything of the sort.”
“I was just nervous probably,” said Kaufman.
“So it proved to me that I was getting into the paranoia that was necessary for Charlie Kaufman—surrealistic Charlie Kaufman,” Cage clarified.
As for how Cage went about playing both Charlie, an insecure writer prone to outbursts, and Donald, an idiot savant with a rather sunny outlook on life, it all depended on how Cage felt in the morning.
“If I’d get out of Charlie’s side of the bed, and I get up in the morning feeling more like Charlie, I’d go in to work and Spike would say, ‘How’re you feeling? Who do you want to start with?’ and I’m like, ‘I’m a little cranky, a little paranoid, I’m not very happy. Let’s go with Charlie first.’ And then if I got out of Donald’s side of the bed, I was a little more uplifted, a little happier with myself in the world, and I said, ‘Let’s go with Donald.’”
“But it doesn’t matter who I started with, I still had to pay the piper so to speak, and go back to the other guy,” said Cage. “You still have to pay the bill, and the bill would come five to six times a day. And I think once I literally did scream. I shouted, because I was like, ‘Oh god! I can’t take it anymore!’”
“After that, I didn’t know if I did something wrong,” said Jonze. “But then he was like, ‘OK, OK, tell me – start from scratch. What are we doing in this scene?’ And then we just sat on the bed in the hotel room and took like five minutes to start from scratch again about where Charlie was in the story and what was happening in that scene and how he’d be reacting to his brother.”
Because of the sometimes-frustrating job of keeping track of the frame of mind he was supposed to be in, Cage was thankful that he was working with a director like Jonze.
“With Spike it was clear to me he had a unique vision and that I wanted to fit [into that],” said Cage. “So I would often say, ‘Look, I’m going to go in auto-pilot today and I want to give you the controls here and let’s see what happens.’ Whereas a lot of times I’ve been in circumstances where I’ll direct myself. I was really looking forward to a new perspective.”
This new perspective is meeting with differing opinions from people who have seen the film so far. But it is said that all art is good art if it provokes a reaction, good or bad. And ADAPTATION will certainly be provoking reactions.
“We did [a screening] the other day and it turned into a real discussion of people talking about their reactions, which is what we wanted,” said Jonze. “And some people will have negative reactions, which is what we’re asking for, we’re asking for people to react to the film. I still feel a little surprised when that guy in the back had his hand up…We were asking for reactions and there was an opinion that wasn’t so favorable.”
“At first I thought he was going to be very enthusiastic ‘cause he had a certain energy,” said Kaufman. “I thought he was going to say something really great. He was halfway through his paragraph when I realized, ‘Boy, he hates this movie.’”
“And he had a very articulate, thoughtful reason he hated it,” said Jonze. “[But] that’s what we’re asking for and that’s what we’ve got to be ready for.”
And ready they are. Because in the end, Cage gets a role where he delivers not one, but two of his best performances in years, Jonze directs another incredible film that stretched the limits of modern cinema. And what does Kaufman get? Well, at the least, hopefully this will get Kaufman laid.
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