"Cloud Atlas" production notes [PDF] - VisualHollywood

CLOUD ATLAS (2012) PRODUCTION NOTES
At the same time, Ewing's other shipmate, the malignant opportunist Dr. Goose, played by Tom
Hanks, is pursuing a very different course.
Filling out the ever-shifting ensemble, Jim Broadbent appears in this timeframe as the ultimately
pragmatic ship captain Molyneux; Susan Sarandon as Horrox's suppressed, but seething wife; Keith
David as the Maori slave Kupaka, who silently endures; Halle Berry as another Maori working the
plantation; Hugo Weaving as Ewing's entitled father-in-law, Haskell Moore; and Doona Bae, in
western guise, as Ewing's beloved wife, Tilda.
1936, Scotland
Ben Whishaw is the roguishly charming, brash, and immensely gifted young composer Robert Frobisher.
Disinherited by his father and finding all doors closed to him in England, Frobisher takes
leave of his lover, Rufus Sixsmith, played by James D'Arcy, and sets out to make a name for himself
on his own terms. Apprenticing himself to Vyvyan Ayrs, a renowned composer past his creative
prime—played by Jim Broadbent as a man in his 70s—Frobisher plans to write his masterpiece:
a symphony he will call The Cloud Atlas Sextet. All the while he keeps in touch with his beloved
Sixsmith through letters, imagining a triumphant return. But Frobisher underestimates Ayrs'
power until his situation takes a desperate turn.
"Because Frobisher is young and full of creative energy and ideas he thinks he's manipulating Ayrs,
but maybe Ayrs is manipulating him," Whishaw hints. "It becomes a struggle over the music—
Frobisher to gain recognition, and Ayrs to retain his reputation."
Supporting the main characters in Frobisher's saga are Halle Berry as Ayrs' trophy wife, the stoic
Jocasta, and Hugo Weaving as Ayrs' friend, Tadeusz Kesselring, who harbors an ugly secret. Hugh
Grant appears as a posh hotel staffer refusing to allow Frobisher and Sixsmith a peaceful parting,
and Tom Hanks is the greedy manager of another, far seedier inn.
1973, San Francisco
Halle Berry takes the lead in 1973 as journalist Luisa Rey, who uncovers corporate corruption at a
nuclear power plant that could affect thousands of lives and puts her at odds with duplicitous plant
president Lloyd Hooks, played by Hugh Grant. She is aided in her investigation by the same Rufus
Sixsmith of the Frobisher piece, now an elderly physicist, and by plant employee Isaac Sachs, Tom
Hanks again, who is inexplicably struck by how familiar Luisa looks and how strong his impulse is
to help her.
"Luisa is at a crossroads," says Berry. "As a journalist, she feels she hasn't quite lived up to her expectations
of what that means, and then this gift falls in her lap, a major opportunity to take a risk
and so something potentially significant. She really doesn't know how tough she is or whether or
not she can actually accomplish it, but once she makes that decision she will have to do things she
never thought possible."
Targeted by Hooks' hitman Bill Smoke, played by Hugo Weaving, Luisa's only chance to survive is
to put her faith into the hands of Keith David's character, Napier, a man officially in Hook's employ,
but who has clearly had enough of taking his orders.
David sees him, in period, as "a kind of Shaft character, so that was a frame of reference. What was
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