"Cloud Atlas" production notes [PDF] - VisualHollywood
"Cloud Atlas" production notes [PDF] - VisualHollywood
"Cloud Atlas" production notes [PDF] - VisualHollywood
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
CLOUD ATLAS (2012) PRODUCTION NOTES<br />
About the Production<br />
"Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others.<br />
Past and present. And by each crime, and every kindness,<br />
we birth our future." – Sonmi-451, 2144<br />
An ambitious and dazzling epic spanning five centuries, "<strong>Cloud</strong> Atlas" explores questions about life<br />
and purpose that humanity has contemplated since the beginning of conscious thought. With a kaleidoscopic<br />
array of action, emotion and urgent human connections that lights points along an infinite<br />
timeline, it suggests that individual lives continue their personal trajectories through the ages.<br />
Souls, reborn, renew their bonds with one another, time and again. Mistakes can be rectified...or<br />
repeated. Freedom can be gained or lost, but is forever sought.<br />
And always, love survives.<br />
"The scale of its ideas is what we were instantly attracted to, its compassion for human beings, its<br />
boldness and audacity and the way it felt simultaneously classic and yet completely new," says Lana<br />
Wachowski one of the film's three writer/directors who adapted the award-wining David Mitchell<br />
novel on which it is based. "Thematically, it transcends boundaries of race and gender, location<br />
and time, and tells a story that implies the nature of humanity is beyond all those boundaries. That's<br />
what intrigued us when we read the novel and then when we started working on the script."<br />
Filmmakers and longtime friends Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer had often thought<br />
about working together, but it was their passion for Mitchell's <strong>Cloud</strong> Atlas that finally galvanized<br />
the three into action. Befitting its unconventional storyline, they formed a truly unique creative alliance<br />
to share writing and directing efforts in bringing this book that has been hailed as a modern<br />
masterpiece to the big screen.<br />
"It strikes so many powerful <strong>notes</strong>," says Tykwer. "There's truth to be found in simple, individual<br />
observations that anyone can relate to, but, by setting those moments into a broader dramatic context<br />
and with the sweep of time, you see the human condition in a fascinating way."<br />
Encompassing a range of genres and set simultaneously in the past, present and future, "<strong>Cloud</strong> Atlas"<br />
illustrates how events and decisions made by the people in one period can reverberate in unforeseeable<br />
ways across the timeline to touch the lives of others.<br />
A San Francisco attorney harbors a fleeing slave on a fateful voyage home from the Pacific Islands<br />
in 1849...a poor, gifted composer in pre-World War II Britain struggles to complete his magnum<br />
opus before the cost of a reckless act catches up with him...a journalist in 1973 works to avert an<br />
industrial disaster...a present-day publisher, on the eve of his greatest success, faces unjust imprisonment...a<br />
genetically engineered worker in the year 2144 feels the forbidden awakening of human<br />
consciousness...and in the ravaged far-off future of the 2300s, a goat herder battles his conscience<br />
over what he has done to stay alive. Each scenario is introduced, then unfolds alongside the others,<br />
while fluid transitions from one to another reveal the ways in which they are all linked.<br />
It soon becomes clear that these are not separate stories, but moments captured from a single flow.<br />
"The key is to abandon the idea that it's six stories. It's one," Andy says. "Each of the pieces and<br />
time periods reflects upon the others throughout the movie. As all these souls evolve, you see the<br />
connections between them, and follow their chronologic progress."<br />
© 2012 Warner Bros. Pictures 4