Director Spike Jonze seamlessly blends fictional characters and situations with the lives of real people: obsessive orchid hunter John Laroche (Chris Cooper, in an Academy Award-winning performance, 2002, Best Supporting Actor), New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), Hollywood screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage), and his twin brother, Donald (also Cage). As Charlie struggles to adapt Orlean’s best-selling book The Orchid Thief, he writes himself into his own movie. The various stories crash into one another, exploding into a wildly imaginative film.