It wasn’t an easy production. One of the leads was fired and re-cast; Carrey suffered a traumatic incident while shooting that caused the studio to re-evaluate its safety standards. When producer Scott Rudin showed Lansing an early cut of the film, he joked that he should have an ambulance waiting outside the screening room—in case she had a heart attack after realizing an $80 million budget had been burned on what was, in its first cut, an art film. (“It’s not unusual to have a bad first cut [of a film]. It was unusual to have that bad [of] a first cut, I have to say,” said Lansing.) But 20 years after it premiered, the movie remains one of the modern age’s most hauntingly prophetic films.

“I have a very hazy crystal ball,” joked Niccol. “I certainly didn’t foresee the onslaught of so-called reality television. I doubt the film had much to do with it. If it did, I apologize.”

When Carrey read the script for The Truman Show in the mid-90s, he was living a surreal experience that in some ways mirrored that of the movie’s main character. The Canadian-born actor had recently shot onto the A-list, thanks to the 1994 movie-star-making trifecta of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Dumb and Dumber, and The Mask. By the time he boarded Truman less than two years later, he was commanding $20 million a movie—and haunted by paparazzi cameras that could be hidden anywhere, including Carrey’s own backyard. Photographers even followed him to a private resort in Antigua, where Carrey was honeymooning with his then-wife Lauren Holly.

“Those were the kind of things that happened periodically that made me realize, ‘O.K., my life will never be the same,’” said Carrey. “It’s almost as if celebrities lose their civil rights when they become famous. There’s great advantages, too. I’ve certainly been shown incredible amounts of love, but there are certain times where there’s just no sympathy for someone who has done well whatsoever . . . no one is going to cry a river for me.”

Truman, too, was surrounded by people who were not who they said they were, and dogged by a mass audience taking voyeuristic pleasure in his personal life. After starring in seven studio films in three years, Carrey also related to Truman in another way: he wasn’t sure whether he should continue on his trajectory, or begin leading a life that felt more authentic. The Truman Show would be Carrey’s first dramatic role, marking the beginning of what he seems to consider a more fulfilling stage of his career.

As Carrey was dodging photographers and contemplating his strange new life, Niccol, a New Zealand-born screenwriter working in London, was grappling with a concept that had been nagging at him since childhood: that everything around him was nothing more than a charade. The concept of “round-the-clock recording and the counterfeit world” came first, before Niccol figured out that a TV show could serve as a framework to rationalize those elements. “At the time of writing, there was no reality television,” Niccol pointed out. “The Real World started just after I finished the script.”

“Andrew is the king of paranoia,” said Lynn Pleshette, Niccol’s former literary agent, who took the screenwriter around town to pitch the project. “We once had a meeting at MGM. The valet took our car, and Andrew said, ‘Well, he’s wearing the valet uniform. But we don’t know if he’ll bring the car back, do we?’”

Niccol’s initial script was darker in tone and set in a parallel dimension in New York City, rather than an idyllic seaside town. Per the screenwriter, “Truman had a drinking problem. He was cheating on his wife with a prostitute—of course, he didn’t know that it was the worst-kept secret in the world, since the affair was being televised. In one scene, he fails to intervene in an assault on the subway.”