10 Movies Inspired By Things NOBODY Expected

Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze's Oscar-winning metafictional comedy Adaptation feels like it's precisely the movie that screenwriter Kaufman had in his head from the very beginning.

But that couldn't be further from the truth. 

Kaufman was actually hired to write a straight adaptation of Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief, but after suffering from crippling writer's block, he decided to instead write a screenplay about his own struggles to adapt the novel.

Kaufman was well aware that such a zany concept would be immediately shot down if he mentioned it during development, and so he simply wrote the script without telling the higher-ups what he was doing.

The final script was especially surprising to Orlean herself, who initially refused to sign off on such a left-field adaptation of her bestselling book, and only later relented. However, Orlean was ultimately left very impressed by the film.

Few adaptations of hit novels have had quite such an unpredictable path to the screen, where the writer's own creative process unexpectedly becomes a driving force of the narrative.