The era of affirmation and self-love is over, you useless piece of garbage. Self-loathing, in a spate of recent movies, is the hot spark that leads to creative combustion. Eminem beats his rapper rivals by dissing himself more than they would dare in 8 Mile; Jerry Seinfeld, in the documentary Comedian, shows the emotional self-flagellation that compels the standup comic; in Punch-Drunk Love, Adam Sandler's character hurts himself on mirrors and concrete walls because, he says, "I don't like myself very much." They're mad as hell and it's their own stupid fault.

Perhaps the extreme of this cycle of movies -- at its most tormented and creative -- is the new movie Adaptation. The movie is written by -- and is also about -- Charlie Kaufman, a former television sitcom writer, who, along with director Spike Jonze, created the mind-bending Oscar-nominated Being John Malkovich. That deliriously inventive movie, in case you missed it, was about a group of people who find a portal into the brain of actor John Malkovich.

There hasn't been such a strange film since, until the same team came up with Adaptation. Adaptation picks up on the set of Being John Malkovich, where a depressive writer named Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) is struggling to measure up to his own previous success.

This is a movie with a lot of background. Kaufman was asked by Jonathan Demme to adapt The Orchid Thief, a 1998 best-selling nonfiction book by New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean. The contemplative, digressive book is about flowers, swamp ecology and the yearning for passion. (The versatile Orlean also wrote a story that is the basis of another movie this year, Blue Crush.) The intermittent hero of Adaptation is an eccentric, toothless orchid collector named John Laroche, played by Chris Cooper.

In Adaptation, the screenwriting assignment brings the lonely bachelor Kaufman to despair, agonizing about being"fat," "bald," "old" and "repulsive," obsessing about his muffins, masturbation, lack of sexual attractiveness and sweating. Adding to the fictional Kaufman's problems (and here we move well into fiction), he has an idiotically happy identical twin brother, Donald (also played by Cage), who decides to move in with him and become a screenwriter as well.

The movie, which is also about mutation and evolution, becomes a twisting double helix: One story line is about chasing orchids and passion in the Florida swamps; the other, dynamiting a massive heap of writer's block in a Los Angeles apartment.

In real life, back in 1999 when he was writing the Adaptation screenplay, Kaufman had just sold a second screenplay (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, about a man trying to surgically remove the woman he loves from his brain, which will star Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet). The double deadline pressure drove him into paralyzing depression.

Trying to write himself out of his block, he followed the dictate of writing what he knew: Thus was born a comedy about depression and orchids. When he eventually handed in the screenplay seven months past deadline, he honestly believed his career was finished. Everyone from the script reader to the producer was shocked to find themselves, with their real names, in Kaufman's movie.

So was journalist Susan Orlean (played by Meryl Streep), a woman whom Kaufman never met or talked to, and who's character is credited with an adulterous affair and violent criminal behaviour. Orlean has a good sense of humour, but she originally wanted her name removed from the project. She was persuaded to let it stand for the sake of the film's consistency: Kaufman's world is precisely the opposite of journalism -- the names are true, only the facts are changed.
Now here we are in a hotel room, with the three principal creators of Adaptation seated in a half circle. Cage -- big, handsome and friendly in an expensive-looking suit jacket and open-neck collar -- contrasts with the filmmakers, in their student garb of knit tops and tousled hair.

The 33-year-old Jonze -- soft-spoken, shaggy-haired and bearded -- has a slightly reedy quality to his voice. In real life, Kaufman has a Brillo Pad of curls like his fictional alter ego, but is thin, 44 and married with children. He looks worried, and speaks softly, with thoughtful pauses. Streep, in a recent Entertainment Weekly, noted accurately: "The work is hilariously funny and dead, dead serious. It's very rooted in pain and all of that is apparent in speaking with him."

Though he rarely jokes himself, he laughs at others' humour, and indicates in interviews that he's aware (perhaps even painfully so) that his self-deprecation risks looking like a shtick. We start the panel with the obvious issue: The power of negative thinking. Do you have to beat yourself silly to achieve anything worthwhile?

Cage: "I don't think there's a movie I star in where I'm not completely mystified as to what to do. I have enormous doubts as to whether or not I can even act and I think that's part of the charging up that's needed to get into that world. I don't really relax until I hear 'Action.' Up to that point, it's just a torturous process." Can't he learn to be creative without torture?

"I guess in a way I impose it on myself to rise to the occasion. If you increase the pressure, then the steam's going to come out. I'm sure there's other ways to do it, but it seems to be the path I've taken."

Kaufman: "I think I do it a lot and I've been thinking about it lately as too personal. I just wonder where it comes from, when self-abuse became a way of existence. I'm thinking of it lately in relationship to children and not seeing it in them but I see it in most adults in some form or another, either anger or self-loathing and I wonder when and why that happens. It has definitely happened to me in the way I live and work."

Cage: "I think it happens to everyone with the advent of puberty."

Jonze: "In any creative process, self-doubt's a major part of it. For me, it comes in waves, as it does to Charlie in the movie. You get excited about an idea, you think it's going to work and then -- in editing, or when you have an early screening -- you realize it doesn't work. Then you go to the extreme the other way. You punish yourself and believe it doesn't work at all. A certain part of that is useful. Some of that intense self-punishment helps you focus and ideas come out of that. I'd really like to do this and do it without getting as depressed as I do, and use my energy to solve the problems."

Cage: "I know I don't want to get too comfortable and get lazy, but on the other side -- I think it was Winston Churchill who said you can measure the greatness of a man by how he handles grace under pressure. I'd like to handle the pressure with a bit more grace. Sorry for my quotes, but I remember Jim Morrison said somewhere -- he was probably ripped at the time -- that he wanted to write a song that expressed pure happiness. In some way, I'd like to do a performance that came from happiness for a change, rather than stress."

So when does the arghh! of despair turn to an aha! of discovery?

Kaufman: "There was a very guarded aha! when I decided to put myself into the screenplay and then a lot of ideas came to me. At the same time, it was very risky and I didn't tell anyone I was going to do it, so it wasn't so much an 'aha! This is great.' It was more of an 'aha! I can write again now -- but this is still going to be the end of my career.' "

Knowing that intense self-doubt is a reasonable side effect of creating something original, he says, doesn't make it easier.

"If I understand this self-punishment process at all, I could only understand it intellectually. For example, if it were happen to someone else, I could see why it was happening. If it's happening to me, I'm still too mad at myself to really digest it and appreciate how destructive it is."

Was there a point, when the movie was finished, when he allowed himself to feel vindicated?

"To a certain extent, when I heard people liked the script. But I was still nervous. I didn't know what it would mean to have someone portraying me, what it would mean during production and what it will mean to my life. So it's still nerve-wracking."

Cage: "Charlie was kind enough to let me interview him and spend some time with him. Sometimes we went to lunch and I'd start tripping out, thinking he was playing a chess game with me by doing these quirks and then seeing if I copied him, flapping his menu at lunch and things. Charlie says he doesn't remember doing that. I started getting paranoid.

"Then later, he started getting paranoid watching me on set and wondering if I was playing some caricature of him. But by the end of the second week, it was fairly relaxed.

"We had a really long, terrific rehearsal process with Spike. In a way, that's the best part of what I do, when you're discovering things and assembling your arsenal before you go into battle."

Jonze: "The enjoyable thing about rehearsal is that you really feel you can measure the progress of your work.

"We spent a lot of time rehearsing improv scenes with the two brothers [both played by Cage] so the final product was a real relationship between two characters, not a trick of an actor playing two parts. . . . We spent a lot of time breaking the scenes down to what shot best served to illustrate their relationship, and worried about how to make it happen technically later on."

Kaufman agrees, tentatively. The beginning is painful; the result uncertain. But there's a point in the middle, during the rehearsal, which making something new almost feels good.

"For any screenwriter or playwright, there's a moment that's really satisfying and educational when things go from lines on paper to watching two people interacting in a room. That's when your ideas really comes to life. Or not."