The 2002 film Adaptation is a film about making a film adaptation of The Orchid Thief, which is a journalistic profile of a man trying to clone the rare and endangered Ghost Orchid (Polyrrhiza lindenii).
The comedy-drama metafilm directed by Spike Jonze stars Nicholas Cage as the self-loathing screenwriter and Meryl Streep as the author, Susan Orlean, and Chris Cooper as the "orchid thief," John Laroche.
Cage's character finds writing the screenplay so challenging that he weaves his writer's block, feelings of inadequacy and creative process into the story, adapting his own experiences into Adaptation.
"The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility."
~ Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief
