Meeting screenwriter Charlie Kaufman for the first time leaves one unmistakable impression: Nicolas Cage is a very, very good actor.

The big, brooding star of Con Air and Leaving Las Vegas would seem to have little in common with the slight, wiry man looking vaguely anxious as he faces a less-than-imposing panel of five student reporters on Tuesday. Cage was considered a few years back for the part of a big-screen Superman; calling Kaufman Clark Kent would be something of a stretch. For anyone who’s seen Kaufman’s 2002 meta masterpiece Adaptation, though, the resemblance can’t be denied. Here, in a sunlit conference room on the second floor of the Boston Ritz-Carlton, is living evidence that Cage was nearly perfect in his on-screen portrayal of that self-referential script’s author. Kaufman has the same quietly intense air as his film double, leans over in the same way to burst out with a self-deprecating jab or an enthusiastic riff.

Kaufman is sitting next to director Michel Gondry to promote their soon-to-be-released collaboration, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which Jim Carrey joins the growing list of actors who have played some version of Kaufman’s harried hero. The writer’s sense of humor, it becomes clear, is no more Carrey-esque in real life than it is on celluloid—at least, not in that mid-90s sense, when the world knew Sunshine’s star as the spastic man behind The Mask. Kaufman will at no point shout “smokin’!” or “somebody stop me!”—and neither, for that matter, will Carrey. Sunshine is another introverted film that makes tentative comedy of profound awkwardness, and if all Kaufman’s scripts have the feel of having been written by a man who knows his way around romantic rejection, his latest goes for the emotional jugular. A surreal, 108-minute look into a grimily futuristic process that medically excises the memory of a nasty breakup and the relationship it ended, Sunshine takes place for the most part within Carrey’s character’s psyche.

This makes for one of the most realistic dreams to hit screens since—well, since the respective last projects of Kaufman and Gondry, neither of whom has shied in the past from experimental ways to represent the subconscious. It also puts the two thin men with tousled hair in the unenviable position of having to lead a group of eager college journalists through their dense, dark cinematic fantasy in the early afternoon.

“It was a hard one to write,” Kaufman says by way of explanation—and, apparently, a hard one to make. The script spent years “floating around,” in Gondry’s words, before heading into production. Kaufman recalls that he and Gondry pitched the idea for Sunshine just a week after he received a contract to write a screenplay based on Susan Orlean’s non-fiction book The Orchid Thief—a writing project that, if we are to believe Adaptation, quickly became something of an existential nightmare. And shortly after getting the green light on the Sunshine project, the author and director say they threw themselves into 2001’s Human Nature, Gondry’s feature-directing debut and the duo’s first work together.

This down time was not necessarily a bad thing, they say. As executives moved on to other projects, what had begun as a simple dinnertime parlor game between Gondry and an artist friend took form as a complex, classically Kaufman script.

“We were very lucky,” Gondry says with his native French accent. “Charlie was left alone to write.”

Unsurprisingly, that writing process was an intensely personal one. Though his string of critical successes has no doubt brought a wide range of Hollywood stars within his reach, Kaufman says he paid no attention to casting possibilities as he wrote.

“I never have actors in mind when I’m writing, with the exception of John Malkovich,” he says, referring to 1999’s Spike Jonze-directed Being John Malkovich, in which a frustrated puppeteer discovers a hidden portal into the character actor’s mind.

Once Gondry had secured Sunshine’s cast—which also includes Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Tom Wilkinson, Elijah Wood and Mark Ruffalo—Kaufman says he made no effort to re-tailor his script to their dimensions. Speaking now of the fine points of shooting the film, he continues to use characters’ script names rather than those of the actors who play them.

In many ways, though, the most important character in Kaufman’s newest screenplay remains the same one who has emerged in one quirky script after another: himself. In one of Adaptation’s more transcendently bizarre moments, the fictional Charlie Kaufman (played by Cage) haunts the edges of the painstakingly-recreated studio set of Malkovich, his first produced film script, awkwardly interacting with that movie’s suddenly irritable cast and crew. Just the same, if Carrey’s Joel Barish is easily distinguishable from Cage’s Kaufman or the writer doodling now as the more talkative Gondry chats on, Sunshine’s author is never far from the new film’s margins.

But the scribbler who managed to make a meditation on rare flowers into a film with not one but two versions of himself in the starring roles is not, he says, always entirely thrilled with the business of putting his innermost thoughts on multiplex screens.

“The first time I saw Nicolas Cage masturbating in Adaptation with my name attached to his body, I was embarassed,” Kaufman says.

But he says he’s warmed “happily” to the role of self-analyzing amateur shrink, at once a more straight-forward and yet infinitely more obscure variation on Woody Allen’s narcissistic neurotic.

“I have no choice but to use my head for my work,” Kaufman says.