After months of speculation and rumor, some definitive word has landed about the adaptation of David Mitchell‘s “Cloud Atlas,” and it’s now officially moving ahead.
Deadline reports that filming will begin in September on the film which will head to Cannes next month, repped by Focus Features International, to sell overseas rights and with Tom Hanks still attached — he linked up to the film last year — and with the directors of “The Matrix” and “Run Lola Run” on board, it should have no problem landing buyers. As Natalie Portman first dropped a few months ago, the film will find the Wachowskis co-directing and writing the feature with Tom Tykwer (earlier word had vacillated between the two directing). No word yet on who Hanks will play, but we can’t wait to see how they adapt David Mitchell‘s 500-plus page book that spans centuries and follows six major characters described thusly by Amazon: “There is a naïve clerk on a nineteenth-century Polynesian voyage; an aspiring composer who insinuates himself into the home of a syphilitic genius; a journalist investigating a nuclear plant; a publisher with a dangerous best-seller on his hands; and a cloned human being created for slave labor. These five stories are bisected and arranged around a sixth, the oral history of a post-apocalyptic island, which forms the heart of the novel.”
While a number of actors have been rumored for parts — James McAvoy, Natalie Portman (who admits her potential part is “nothing major“), Halle Berry (who said she was on board last fall, though that may have changed) and more recently Hugo Weaving — nothing is confirmed just yet.
The film now has an official “Pay It Forward” meets “V For Vendetta“-esque logline too: “An epic story of humankind in which the actions and consequences of our lives impact one another throughout the past, present and future as one soul is shaped from a murderer into a savior and a single act of kindness ripples out for centuries to inspire a revolution.”
No word yet on a release date, but if we had to guess, probably 2013.
