67 replies to this topic

[Tyler]

I finished reading Cloud Atlas recently, and one of the refreshing things about it was that there was no way I could see it ever being adapted into a movie; a lot of novels these days seem to be written with a movie already in mind. But Cloud Atlas has so many genres, locations, stories, characters, ideas, and perspectives floating through it, and so much of the book's structure depends on reading, that I thought a movie version simply couldn't work. Well...

Apparently the Wachowskis (and Tom Tykwer, and maybe Natalie Portman) have other ideas. (Turns out that story is a year and a half old.) Here's the latest:

Quote

Tom Hanks, Natalie Portman, James McAvoy, Halle Berry and Ian McKellen are now attached to Tom Tykwer’e potential adaptation of David Mitchell’s dense novel “Cloud Atlas,” a source tells The Playlist. All of the above talent had been rumored to be circling the project, though now it seems to be “official.”

Wikipedia has a decent summary of the book's structure and stories.

[opus]

Halle Berry joins Natalie Portman in The Wachowskis' latest epic

[Persona]

I guess I thought the brothers would produce and Tykwer would direct or something like that.

This just seems strange to me:

Entertainment Weekly (I will never figure out what concert tickets I bought to get a free subscription to this magazine, but it's great bathroom material) from 1.7.11 quotes Natalie Portman as saying, in regard to Cloud Atlas, "I don't know what's going on with financing. I read it while I was doing V For Vendetta, and I gave it to the Wachowskis and to Tom Tykwer. Now they're directing it together, the three of them. I will have some acting role in it if it happens, but probably nothing major."

THREE?! Hope they don't trip over each other in the process.

Edited by Persona, 04 January 2011 - 09:18 AM.

[Tyler]

The book is segmented, so maybe each director would tackle a different section. There are six distinct stories, so maybe they'll take two or three each.

[Cunningham]

And in the book each of the segmenets is written in a strikingly different voice. I wonder if they will try to duplicate that visually in the film…

[Ryan H.]

Sounds nutty. But interesting nutty. I won't be surprised if this is a colossal failure, but however it turns out, it will probably be very, very interesting.

[Tyler]

Tom Hanks to star.

[Overstreet]

Yeah, I read part of this recently, and it really is unfilmable. Whatever movie comes out of this project will be interesting, but it sure won't be a big-screen version of the book.

[Ryan H.]

CLOUD ATLAS has funding, with shooting set to begin in September.

[Ryan H.]

Some concept art and our first still from the film, which I found on AintItCool:

[Tyler]

First Showing.net has a photo gallery and a 5-minute trailer that makes me believe this movie might actually work.

Edited by Tyler, 26 July 2012 - 08:29 AM.

[Anders]

Wow. I watched that trailer and I'm in. I'm so in.

[Ryan H.]

That trailer didn't work for me at all.

[Anders]

Ryan H., on 26 July 2012 - 08:04 PM, said:

That trailer didn't work for me at all.

It's definitely too long to be a really effective "trailer" in the conventional sense, but I felt like it gave a taste of the overstuffed, sprawling narrative that this film is going to be.

[Ryan H.]

Anders, on 26 July 2012 - 09:50 PM, said:

Ryan H., on 26 July 2012 - 08:04 PM, said:

That trailer didn't work for me at all.

It's definitely too long to be a really effective "trailer" in the conventional sense, but I felt like it gave a taste of the overstuffed, sprawling narrative that this film is going to be.

I wasn't put off by the length, so much. I just didn't find a lot to like. The performances seemed all kinds of wrong, the dialogue was very lacking, the visuals seemed grand but kind of lifeless, and the sentimental music gave everything a sappy edge.

But I haven't read CLOUD ATLAS, so maybe this is all just-right as an adaptation and I'm not tuned into the wavelength of the material.

Edited by Ryan H., 26 July 2012 - 11:13 PM.

[Tyler]

The part that works really well, as an adaptation of the novel, is the sequence near the beginning where it transitions from one person reading a document, to the writer of that document appearing in the frame and then reading a different document, and another author appearing, and so on. That's how the book itself is structured, and it's illustrated well here. It looks like there will be more back-and-forth between sections in the movie, but that's not automatically a bad thing. I liked how the LOTR movies went back and forth from one storyline to another, instead of having all of Frodo's story in one half of the book.

[old wave]

I don't know how it's going to end up turning out, but I'm rooting for it to succeed after seeing that trailer.

[Peter T Chattaway]

[Tyler]

Or, directors' commentary, if you care about those kinds of things.

[winter shaker]

Wow, um, Larry...