the wachowskis : the new...

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ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS

BEYOND THE MATRIXThe Wachowskis travel to even more mind-bending realms.by Aleksandar Hemon

SEPTEMBER 10, 2012

The new film from the siblings Lana and Andy Wachowski, co-directed with Tom Tykwer, is an adaptation of thenovel “Cloud Atlas.” Their model was “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a movie they first saw as children. Photograph byDan Winters.

n the monitor screen, Tom Hanks’s eyes, inextreme closeup, flickered through a complicated sequence of emotions: hatred, fear,

anger, doubt. “Cut!” Lana Wachowski shouted. The crew on Stage 9 at Babelsberg Studio, nearBerlin, erupted in a din of professional efficacy, preparing for the next shot, while Hanksreturned to his chair to sip coffee from an NPR cup. Lana and her brother, Andy, who are bestknown for writing and directing the “Matrix” trilogy, were shooting “Cloud Atlas,” anadaptation of David Mitchell’s 2004 best-selling novel of the same name.

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The novel has six story lines, and the Wachowskis and their close friend the Germandirector Tom Tykwer, with whom they’d written the script, had divided them up. They wereshooting at Babelsberg, using the same actors, who shuttled between soundstages, but Tykwerhad an unplanned day off. Halle Berry had broken her foot while on location in Mallorca and heneeded to wait for her full recovery to shoot a chase scene. And now there was anotherproblem: the actor Ralph Riach, who played a small but crucial role in one of the story lines thatTykwer was working on, had fallen ill and been hospitalized, and his state was progressivelyworsening. Tykwer had been on the phone with Riach, and the prognosis was, at best,unpredictable. Tykwer, with a bad cold and a large scarf around his neck which resembled aRenaissance millstone collar, had stopped by the Wachowskis’ set to discuss the situation.

The filmmakers huddled near the monitor and in low, concerned voices debated whether towait for Riach to recover or to hastily find a replacement and reshoot the scenes he’d alreadyappeared in. The decision: they would wait, even if it meant prolonging the shooting schedule.“The rocket ship is falling apart,” Lana said afterward, shaking her head. “We’re sitting in thiscapsule, can’t get out, only one engine working—and we have to make it to the end.”

In the Wachowskis’ work, the forces of evil are often overwhelmingly powerful, inflictingmisery on humans, who maintain their faith until they’re saved by an unexpected miracle. Thestory of the making of “Cloud Atlas” fits this narrative trajectory pretty well.

n the spring of 2005, Lana and Andy Wachowski were at Babelsberg running the second unitfor the director James McTeigue’s “V for Vendetta,” which they also wrote and co-produced.

Between scenes, Lana (who is transgender and, until 2002, was called Larry) noticed thatNatalie Portman, the star, was engrossed in a copy of “Cloud Atlas.” Portman raved about thebook, so Lana began reading it, too. She and Andy, who is two and a half years younger, haveretained a childhood habit of sharing books, and soon both of them were obsessively parsing thenovel and calling friends to insist that they read it.

Mitchell’s book is not a simple read, with its interlocking stories and a multitude ofcharacters, distributed across centuries and continents. Each story line has a different centralcharacter: Adam Ewing, a young American who sails home after a visit to an island in the SouthPacific, in the mid-nineteenth century; Robert Frobisher, a feckless but talented Englishman,who becomes the amanuensis to a genius composer in Flanders, in the nineteen-thirties; LuisaRey, a gossip-rag journalist who rakes the muck of the energy industry in nineteen-seventiesCalifornia; Timothy Cavendish, a vanity-press publisher who finds himself held captive in anursing home in present-day England; Sonmi~451, a genetically modified clone who gains herhumanity in a futuristic Korea, ravaged by consumerism; and Zachry, a Pacific Islander who


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struggles to survive in the even more distant future, after “the Fall,” which seems to haveendangered the planet and eradicated much of humankind. These characters are connected by anintricate network of leitmotifs—a comet–shaped birthmark crops up frequently, forinstance—and by their ability to somehow escape the fate that has been prepared for them. Thebook’s dizzying plot twists are infused with lush linguistic imagination. For the Zachry sections,Mitchell constructed post-apocalyptic mutations of the English language, which effectivelyforce readers to translate as they go.

“As I was writing ‘Cloud Atlas,’ I thought, It’s a shame this is unfilmable,” Mitchell toldme. But the Wachowskis found themselves instantly, and profoundly, attracted to the idea ofadapting the book for the screen. They were drawn to the scale of its ideas, to its lack ofcynicism, and to the dramatic possibilities inherent in the book’s recurring moments of hope.They also wanted to work on something with Tykwer, whose 1998 movie, “Run Lola Run,”they’d loved (“our long-lost brother,” Lana called him), and “Cloud Atlas” seemed like the rightproject to unite their cinematic sensibilities.

In 2006, at the Wachowskis’ prompting, Tykwer took the German translation of “CloudAtlas” with him on a vacation to the South of France. “It was a mistake,” he told me, with alaugh. He sat on the beach reading for days, “stressed and inspired” by the book; when his wifefinally persuaded him to go on a day trip, he made her pull the car over so that he could finish achapter. The moment he was done with the novel, he called Lana in San Francisco, where it wasthe middle of the night, and breathlessly declared his commitment to the plan.

He and the Wachowskis, who were in the middle of other projects, had to wait a couple ofyears before turning to “Cloud Atlas.” But finally, in February, 2009, they met in Costa Rica,where they had rented a secluded house near the ocean. Before they began to work on a script,they acknowledged that it might prove impossible to make “Cloud Atlas” into a movie, and thatthey might not be able to work together. “Writing is the most intimate process in the artisticdevelopment,” Tykwer said, and there was no way to anticipate how things would go. Then theygot started: boogie-boarding in the morning, working the rest of the day, then preparing dinnertogether. Andy’s “world-famous” chicken roasted on a beer can was often the main dish on themenu. “It was like a childhood camp,” Lana said.

The main challenge was the novel’s convoluted structure: the chapters are orderedchronologically until the middle of the book, at which point the sequence reverses; the bookthus begins and ends in the nineteenth century. This couldn’t work in a film. “It would beimpossible to introduce a new story ninety minutes in,” Lana said. The filmmakers’ initial ideawas to establish a connective trajectory between Dr. Goose, a devious physician who may bepoisoning Ewing, in the earliest story line, and Zachry, the tribesman on whose moral choices


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the future of civilization hinges, after the Fall. They had no idea what to do with all the otherstory lines and characters. They broke the book down into hundreds of scenes, copied them ontocolored index cards, and spread the cards on the floor, with each color representing a differentcharacter or time period. The house looked like “a Zen garden of index cards,” Lana said. At theend of the day, they’d pick up the cards in an order that they hoped would work as the arc of thefilm. Reading from the cards, Lana would then narrate the rearranged story. The next day,they’d do it again.

It was on the day before they left Costa Rica that they had a breakthrough: they couldconvey the idea of eternal recurrence, which was so central to the novel, by having the sameactors appear in multiple story lines—“playing souls, not characters,” in Tykwer’s words. Thiswould allow the narrative currents of the book to merge and to be separate at the same time. Onthe flight home, Lana and Andy carried the stack of rubber-banded cards they would soonconvert into the first draft of the screenplay, which they then sent to Tykwer. The back-and-forthbetween the three filmmakers continued, the viability of their collaboration still not fullyconfirmed.

By August, the trio had a completed draft to send to Mitchell. The Wachowskis had had adifficult experience adapting “V for Vendetta,” from a comic book whose author, Alan Moore,hated the very idea of Hollywood adaptation and berated the project publicly. “We decided inCosta Rica that—as hard and as long as it might take to write this script—if David didn’t like it,we were just going to kill the project,” Lana said.

Mitchell, who lives in the southwest of Ireland, agreed to meet the filmmakers in Cork. In “aseaside hotel right out of ‘Fawlty Towers,’ ” as Lana described it, they recounted for the authorthe painstaking process of disassembling the novel and reassembling it into the script he’d read.“It’s become a bit of a joke that they know my book much more intimately than I do,” Mitchellwrote to me. They explained their plan to unify the narratives by having actors playtransmigrating souls. “This could be one of those movies that are better than the book!”Mitchell exclaimed at the end of the pitch. The pact was sealed with pints of Murphy’s stout at alocal pub.

n June, 2011, the Wachowskis and Tykwer were in Berlin, working on preproduction for“Cloud Atlas.” In the living room of Lana’s apartment on Unter den Linden, where a copy of

the Marquis de Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom” was being used as a doorstop, the three directorstalked about their passion for the movie. Andy, who was forty-three, was wearing a washed-outT-shirt and a pair of Crocs with a South Korean flag on them, which went nicely with themiddle-aged grunginess of his shaved scalp. Lana, who was about to turn forty-six, had a full


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head of pink dreadlocks. Tykwer, at forty-six, was wiry and energetic, with striking green eyes.The three resembled a former alternative-rock band—the Cinemaniacs—overdue for a reuniontour.

“ ‘Cloud Atlas’ is a twenty-first-century novel,” Lana said. “It represents a midpointbetween the future idea that everything is fragmented and the past idea that there is a beginning,a middle, and an end.” As she spoke, she was screwing and unscrewing two halves of someimaginary thing—its future and its past—in her hands. If the movie worked, she continued, itwould allow the filmmakers to “reconnect to that feeling we had when we were younger, whenwe saw films that were complex and mysterious and ambiguous. You didn’t know everythinginstantly.”

Andy agreed. “ ‘Cloud Atlas’ is our getting back to the spectacle of the sixties andseventies, the touchstone movies,” he said, rubbing his bald dome like a magic lantern.

The model for their vision, they explained, was Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A SpaceOdyssey,” which the Wachowskis had first seen when Lana, then Larry, was ten and Andyseven.

The siblings grew up in a close-knit family in Beverly, a middle-class neighborhood onChicago’s South Side. Their parents—Ron, a businessman, and Lynne, a nurse—were filmenthusiasts. They dragged Larry and Andy and their two sisters to any movie they foundinteresting, ignoring the parental-advisory labels. “We would have ‘movie orgies’—doublefeatures, triple features, drive-ins,” Andy recalled. “I was so young that I didn’t know what theword ‘orgy’ meant, but I knew that, whatever it was, I liked it.”

Lana initially hated “2001,” and was perplexed by the mysterious presence of the blackmonolith. “That’s a symbol,” Ron explained. Lana told me, “That simple sentence went into mybrain and rearranged things in such an unbelievable way that I don’t think I’ve been the samesince. Something clicked inside. ‘2001’ is one of the reasons I’m a filmmaker.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, Lana’s gender consciousness started to emerge at around thesame time. In third grade, Larry transferred to a Catholic school, where boys and girls woredifferent uniforms and stood in separate lines before class. “I have a formative memory ofwalking through the girls’ line and hesitating, knowing that my clothes didn’t match,” Lana toldme. “But as I continued on I felt I did not belong in the other line, so I just stopped in betweenthem. I stood for a long moment with everyone staring at me, including the nun. She told me toget in line. I was stuck—I couldn’t move. I think some unconscious part of me figured I wasexactly where I belonged: betwixt.” Larry was often bullied for his betwixtness. “As a result, Ihid and found tremendous solace in books, vastly preferring imagined worlds to this world,”Lana said.


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It was around the time that Larry and Andy saw “2001” that they first directed together: oncassette tape, they read a play inspired by the “Shadow” comic books and radio programs.Soon, they were writing and drawing their own comics. Their creative process, Lana said,“hasn’t essentially changed since.” The brothers were inseparable. “Larry would come up with acrazy idea,” Ron Wachowski recalled, “to hang ropes from a tree and make a swing or trapeze,and Andy would be the person to grab hold of the rope, climb, and crash down.” The boys spentsleepless weekends playing Dungeons & Dragons in the attic, coming downstairs only to raidthe fridge. “In D. & D., you have nothing but your imagination,” Lana said. “It asks all of theplayers to try to imagine the same space, the same image. This is very much the process ofmaking a film.” The Wachowski brothers and some friends even wrote a three-hundred-pagegame of their own, called High Adventure. “We were often frustrated by genre differentiation,whether it was in games or in fiction,” Lana said. “In our naïve and foolish innocence, we daredto imagine a utopian world where all genres could intermix.”

In high school, Larry and Andy started a house-painting business to earn money for college.(Their only previous experience was a pantheon of superheroes that they had painted on theiraunt’s garage door.) Larry took out a loan and went to Bard, but dropped out after a couple ofyears. “I thought the teachers had to be way smarter than me to justify the loan,” Lana told me,“but some of them hadn’t read half the books I’d read.” He moved to Portland, Oregon, to write,working on, among other things, an adaptation of William Goldman’s “The Princess Bride.”(Having finished the script, he cold-called Goldman to ask for the rights; Goldman hung up onhim.) After Andy dropped out of Emerson College in his sophomore year, the brothers reunitedin Chicago, where they started a construction business, learning most of the skills on the job.They once built an elevator shaft without any plans or previous experience, having projectedunquestionable confidence to the people who’d hired them—not an unuseful talent in the filmbusiness.

All the while, the Wachowskis kept on writing: in the early nineties, Larry went to NewYork to knock on the doors of the comic-book publishers. He managed to get himself and Andyhired by Marvel Comics, to write for the series “Ectokid,” which was drawn by Steve Skroce.The brothers also worked on screenplays of their own. “Carnivore,” their first completedscript—in which a soup kitchen feeds the poor by chopping up rich people and cooking them inan addictive stew—was sent out to ten addresses, selected from an agent handbook. Two agentsoffered to sign the brothers. In the end, they went with Lawrence Mattis, who is now theirmanager. These days, the mention of “Carnivore”—which never became a movie—makes theWachowskis chuckle, but Mattis remembers “a surety to their writing that really popped.”

The blockbuster-film producer Dino De Laurentiis optioned the Wachowskis’ next


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screenplay, “Assassins,” while they were renovating their parents’ house. De Laurentiisentertained them with champagne and lascivious stories about beautiful actresses, and then soldthe script to Warner Bros. for five times what he’d paid. According to Lana, substantialrevisions by a hired writer removed “all the subtext, the visual metaphors . . . the idea thatwithin our world there are moral pocket universes that operate differently.” When the moviewas made, in 1995 (directed by Richard Donner, of “Lethal Weapon” fame, and starringSylvester Stallone, Antonio Banderas, and Julianne Moore), the Wachowskis tried to get theirnames taken off the credits but failed. Still, the script earned them a deal with Warner Bros.They finished the work on their parents’ house, quit construction, and became full-timefilmmakers.

y 1994, the Wachowskis had completed the first script for the “Matrix” trilogy. They’d hadthe idea while working on a comic-book proposal. They were thinking, Lana recalled,

“about ‘real worlds’ and ‘worlds within worlds’ and the problem of virtual reality in movies,and then it hit us: What if this world was the virtual world?” The trilogy is set in a dystopianfuture where machines exploit human energy by keeping people perpetually comatose in pods,while placating their minds with a continuous simulated reality called the Matrix. A small groupof liberated humans—Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity—fight back, through confrontations with thevirtual Agent Smith, and the stark darkness of the machine-controlled world is countered by thefeeble light of human solidarity. “When I first read ‘The Matrix,’ ” Mattis told me, “I calledthem all excited because they’d written a script about Descartes.”

According to Mattis, the Wachowskis were “the hot flavor of the month” when he sent the“Matrix” screenplay out, in 1994. “But then everyone read the script and passed. Nobody gotit,” he said. “To this day, I think Warner Bros. bought it half out of the relationship with themand half because they thought something was there.” The brothers had spent two years writingthe script, and they insisted on directing the movie. To prove themselves, they took on a smallerproject first: “Bound,” with Gina Gershon, Jennifer Tilly, and Joe Pantoliano, a lesbian thrillerwith a happy ending. “Bound” convinced Warner Bros. The Wachowskis shot “The Matrix” in ahundred and eighteen days. To make the movie, the brothers and their visual-effects teamdeveloped a number of new techniques, most famously “bullet time,” which allowed them tocreate the effect of a bullet progressing through space in slow motion, by using virtualcinematography to manipulate a series of still shots taken along the bullet’s trajectory.

“The Matrix,” which opened on March 31, 1999, took in nearly thirty million dollars in itsfirst weekend. Eventually, it earned close to half a billion dollars worldwide, and four AcademyAwards. Audiences responded to its cool, ultramodern style while rooting for its heroes, whose


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only reliable power was their old-fashioned humanity. “The Wachowskis have a mythicsensibility,” David Mitchell told me, “consciously clothing ancient stories in new dress,language, and form.” The movie’s philosophical underpinnings won it a cult following, as wellas numerous academic studies, with such titles as “Neo-Materialism and the Death of theSubject” and “Fate, Freedom, and Foreknowledge.” The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizekhas written about the “Matrix” trilogy, and titled his book on the responses to 9/11 “Welcome tothe Desert of the Real”—a quotation from the movie, which is, in turn, an allusion to a line fromJean Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation.”

The two former construction workers from Chicago were suddenly stars of the global movieindustry. In the contract they signed with Warner Bros., however, the Wachowskis included ano-press clause. Avoiding the scrutinizing glare of the industry press, they gave no interviewsand did no publicity; they stayed loyal to Chicago, close to their family. “My desire foranonymity is rooted in two things,” Andy told me in an e-mail. “An aversion to celebrity (I likewalking into a comics shop and nobody knowing who I am) and the fact that there’s somethingnicely egalitarian about anonymity. You know, equality and shit.”

ith the “Matrix” rage in full swing, the Wachowskis moved to Australia to work on thesecond and third parts of the trilogy. “The Matrix Reloaded” and “The Matrix

Revolutions,” released in May and November of 2003, respectively, earned more than a billiondollars worldwide, but the production process was notoriously difficult; the shooting alone tooknearly three hundred days. In addition to the usual stresses of movie-making—constructing aworld from scratch; managing hundreds of people; dealing with actorly egos—the crew had tocope with tragedy. Two actors died before filming all their scenes. Then a grip committedsuicide. At the insistence of his boss, the grip’s girlfriend went to Bali with a friend torecuperate, only to witness her friend’s death in the 2002 terrorist attack there, in which Islamistmilitants’ bombs killed more than two hundred people.

At the same time, Larry, who had separated from his wife, was dealing with depression andstruggling with his gender situation. During the production, he told Andy that the reason hewent swimming in the bay every morning, rather than in the pool, was that he was half hopingto be hit by a boat or attacked by a shark. “For years, I couldn’t even say the words‘transgendered’ or ‘transsexual,’ ” Lana told me. “When I began to admit it to myself, I knew Iwould eventually have to tell my parents and my brother and my sisters. This fact would injectsuch terror into me that I would not sleep for days. I developed a plan that I worked out with mytherapist. It was going to take three years. Maybe five. A couple of weeks into the plan, mymom called.”


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Sensing that something was wrong, Lynne Wachowski flew to Australia the following day.The morning after her arrival, Larry told her, “I’m transgender. I’m a girl.” Lynne didn’t knowwhat he meant. “I was there when you were born,” she said. “There’s a part of me that is a girl,”Larry insisted. “I’m still working at that.” Lynne had been distraught on the plane, worried thatshe might lose her son. “Instead, I’ve just found out there is more of you,” she said. Ron, whosoon flew in, too, offered his unconditional support, as did Larry’s sisters and Andy, who hadsuspected for a while.

A couple of days later, the Wachowski family went out to dinner in Sydney. Larry was nowrenamed Lana and was dressed as a woman. A waiter referred to Lana and Lynne as “ladies.”The next day, Lana showed up at work in her new identity, as though nothing had happened.

But the news got out, and the blogosphere was abuzz with rumors. Among other things, theWachowskis’ reclusiveness was now interpreted in terms of Lana’s gender identity. WhenLynne and Ron returned to Chicago, reporters were camping in front of their house, the brazenones ringing the bell every once in a while.

Eventually, the press retreated. Lana completed her divorce and met and fell in love with thewoman who became her second wife, in 2009. “I chose to change my exteriority to bring itcloser into alignment with my interiority,” she told me. “My biggest fears were all about losingmy family. Once they accepted me, everything else has been a piece of cake. I know that manypeople are dying to know if I have a surgically constructed vagina or not, but I prefer to keepthis information between my wife and me.”

first met the Wachowskis in December, 2009, when they were in the midst of their struggle tofind financing for “Cloud Atlas.” Uncomfortable with being idle while they waited, they

were also developing “Cobalt Neural 9,” a project that had grown out of their frustration withthe Bush Presidency and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Curious about how the early aughtswould be perceived in the future, the Wachowskis imagined a documentary film made eightdecades from now, looking back at the country’s plunge into imperial self-delusion. In order towrite a script for “Cobalt Neural 9,” the Wachowskis were filming interviews with people, fromArianna Huffington to Cornel West, who they thought might be able to help them elucidate theirconcerns. I was invited to participate and was costumed to look as if I were speaking in 2090.Dressed like a Bosnian Isaac Hayes (with sparkling lights attached to my skull, a psychedelicshirt, and a New Age pendant), I ranted about the malignant idiocy of the Bush regime. Lana satnext to the camera, asking most of the questions, while Andy was somewhere beyond the lights,his voice occasionally booming from the void.

Usually, I experience an erosion of confidence around famous people—an inescapable


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conviction that they know more than I do, because the world is somehow more available tothem. But I got along splendidly with the Wachowskis. Seemingly untouched by Hollywood,they did not project the jadedness that is a common symptom of stardom. Lana was one of thebest-read people I’d ever met; Andy had a wry sense of humor; they were both devout Bullsfans. We also shared a militant belief in the art of narration and a passionate love for Chicago.

Eventually, I asked them to consider letting me write about the making of “Cloud Atlas.”They talked it over and decided to do it. By then, they’d sent the script to every major studio,after Warner Bros. had declined to exercise its option. Everyone passed. “Cloud Atlas” seemedtoo challenging, too complex. The Wachowskis reminded Warner Bros. that “The Matrix” hadalso been deemed too demanding, and that it had taken them nearly three years to get the greenlight on it. But the best the studio could do for “Cloud Atlas” was to keep open the possibility ofbuying the North American distribution rights, payment for which would cover a portion of theprojected budget.

Since Costa Rica, the Wachowskis and Tykwer had viewed the dramatic trajectory of thescript as an evolution from the sinister avarice of Dr. Goose to the essential decency of Zachry,with both characters embodying something of the Everyman. Tom Hanks, they agreed, was the“ultimate Everyman of our age.” “Our Jimmy Stewart,” Lana called him. They sent their scriptto Hanks, and he agreed to meet with them. On the way to his office in Santa Monica, thesiblings received a phone call from their agent, who told them that Warner Bros. had decided tohold off on a distribution deal. “Cloud Atlas” had been subjected to an economic-modellingprocess and the numbers had come back too low. The template that had been used, according tothe Wachowskis, was Darren Aronofsky’s “The Fountain” (2006), because it had threeautonomous story lines set in different eras; “The Fountain,” which had a mixed criticalresponse, had lost almost twenty million dollars.

“The problem with market-driven art-making is that movies are green-lit based on pastmovies,” Lana told me. “So, as nature abhors a vacuum, the system abhors originality.Originality cannot be economically modelled.” The template for “The Matrix,” the Wachowskisrecalled, had been “Johnny Mnemonic,” a 1995 Keanu Reeves flop.

In the parking lot outside Hanks’s office, the Wachowskis and Tykwer shook off the badnews before going in. Hanks had read the screenplay, though not the book. “The script was notuser-friendly,” he told me. “The demands it put upon the audience and everybody, the businessrisk, were off the scale.” But he was interested in working with the directors and intrigued bythe challenge of playing six different roles in one film. Hanks was in the middle of reading“Moby-Dick” and, when the filmmakers sat down, he engaged them in a discussion ofMelville’s masterpiece. Lana pointed at a poster for “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which was


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serendipitously hanging on the wall of Hanks’s office, and said, “ ‘Moby-Dick’ and this—that’swhat we want to do.” “I’m in,” Hanks said. “When do we start?” Looking back at that meeting,Hanks told me that he had been particularly impressed that the Wachowskis “were not ashamedto say, ‘We make art!’ ”

With Hanks on board, the directors went back to Warner Bros. to plead their case. Theyinsisted that a project as narratively complex as “Cloud Atlas” had no precedent and thereforeno template. They presented the overarching story as a tale of redemption, of the continuity ofessential human goodness, whereby individual acts of kindness have unforeseeablerepercussions. They broke the story down into a simple progression: “Tom Hanks starts off as abad person,” they said, “but evolves over centuries into a good person.” Warner Bros. wasconvinced, and the studio was in for distribution, but with a lower offer than the directors hadhoped for.

he projected budget for the movie was around a hundred and twenty million dollars. Theonly other guaranteed money was coming from the German Federal Film Fund. The

directors tried to drum up investment from other European sources, but near-catastrophicreversals continued. “We realized we wouldn’t be able to raise the amount of money we neededin a normal way, selling territories for distribution,” Grant Hill, who has worked as a producerwith the Wachowskis since the two “Matrix” sequels, told me. “So we started talking withdistributors about taking equity in the project.” Eventually, the production signed up a numberof investors, including four in Asia, whose contributions totalled about thirty-five milliondollars. But this financing structure was inherently unstable. With so many separate investors,each providing relatively small amounts, the entire project could teeter if one of them pulledout. With troubling frequency, the filmmakers had to contemplate giving up. “It is hard to grasphow often this movie has been dead and resurrected,” Lana said. Each time they reread thescript to see whether it was worth proceeding, they emerged more determined, even if they hadto revise it to fit the diminished budget. But what they would not give up—the scale and thecomplexity of the project—was exactly what was worrying potential investors. “I’ll never beattached to anything like this in my life,” Tykwer said. “It is that one thing I actually waited forwhen I wanted to be a filmmaker.”

When a European investor said she would contribute to the project, then withdrew hersupport in a text message, the directors were desperate. But then, in the winter of 2010, theWachowskis sent the script to James Schamus, the head of Focus Features, NBCUniversal’sart-house-films division. Schamus called them the next day and offered to handle internationalsales for the movie. Reading the script, he told them, had brought back what it was like to see


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“2001” for the first time. Schamus teaches film theory and history at Columbia University. Inhis office there, the level of his excitement not quite compatible with the bow tie he waswearing, he told me, “The true genius of the screenplay is that it’s ridiculously narrative.They’ve managed to keep almost every little block of storytelling a cliffhanger. They’vemanaged to make you feel the kind of propulsive movement that makes you want to keepcoming back.”

Schamus cooked up a plan to presell the movie at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, that May.He and the filmmakers pitched the movie directly to an audience of distributors. “We got on thestage of the Olympia Theatre in Cannes and spent forty-five minutes in one of the mostridiculously fun cinephile conversations you can have,” Schamus said. “I was giddy at the end.”The three hundred industry people present seemed to enjoy it, too, a few of them approachingSchamus afterward to share their enthusiasm. But the numbers were disappointing, barelyreaching fifteen million. Word of the weak presale spread, and scared a few investors enoughfor them to flee the production. When news of the decampment got out, more investors backedoff. “It is super frustrating that people think that it’s like a stock market,” Andy said. “You beton the movie you like because you have taste. It’s not like buying Shell Oil. You get into themovie business because you like movies. Not because you like money.” The projected budgethad to be pared down to about a hundred million dollars, which, with all the contingency feesand financing costs, meant an eighty-million-dollar shooting budget. This still made “CloudAtlas” one of the most expensive independently financed movies ever. The Wachowskis, inaddition to deferring their directing fees, invested some of their own money in the project,betting their livelihood on its success. “No work of art can ever really testify to the scale of itsown impossibility,” Lana said. One of the Wachowskis’ favorite films is Jacques Tati’s“Playtime” (1967), for which Tati built a set the size of a small town on the outskirts of Paris.The project ruined him financially and almost ended his artistic career. The Wachowskis,however, did not appear daunted by the risks of “Cloud Atlas.” “When you have repetition ofcalamity, the calamity begins to lose its emotional weight,” Andy said, with a shrug.

y June, 2011, the cast included, in addition to Hanks, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon, JimBroadbent, Hugh Grant, Hugo Weaving, and the Korean star Doona Bae. The Wachowskis

moved to Berlin to join Tykwer, with the financing still in flux. Lana and Andy were going todirect the nineteenth-century story and the two set in the future, while Tykwer took thenarratives set in the thirties, the seventies, and the present. The plan was to work with twodifferent crews but to collaborate closely.

Around Thanksgiving, I visited the set in Babelsberg and sat behind the Wachowskis as they


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shot a scene from the post-Fall story line, in which Hanks’s Zachry takes Meronym (Berry), oneof the last of a tribe known as the Prescients, people who still have some access to pre-Falltechnology, to a defunct satellite-communication center, where she hopes to put out a call forsalvation for her people. Old Georgie (Weaving), a hallucinated devil whom Zachry can’t shake,urges him to kill her. (In addition to Zachry and the malevolent Dr. Goose, Hanks also plays athieving hotelier in the thirties, a nuclear scientist in the seventies, a memoir-writing thug in thepresent, and an actor who plays Timothy Cavendish in a movie in the twenty-second century.)

Berry was suffering from a cold that day, in addition to her sore foot, so the Wachowskiswere working on closeups of Hanks and Weaving and hoping that she would be well enough toshoot in the afternoon. There was no apparent anxiety on the set. The Wachowskis were casualand relaxed. A second camera was added, and they discussed the setup with their director ofphotography, John Toll, a 1995 Academy Award winner for “Legends of the Fall.” Hanks wasin his chair, entertaining a crew member. “I work for free. I get paid for waiting,” he quipped,quoting Orson Welles. The Wachowskis decided to use 50-mm. and 100-mm. lenses, going forsome extreme closeups and a few “ ‘Batman’ angles.” Lana climbed a ladder to point theviewfinder from above at Hanks’s stand-in. She joked with a camera assistant, while Andy, in aMotörhead T-shirt, began each suggestion to a crew member with “It might be quite nice . . .”When I asked why Lana was always the one looking through the viewfinder, while Andycovered the sight lines and the over-all architecture of the shot, they were stumped by thequestion. Mitchell refers to the two as “a kite operation”: “Andy is on the ground, handling thespindle, anchored, while Lana is up there, performing the loops.”

Ron Wachowski remembers watching his children direct a scene on the set of “Bound.” Nothaving discussed anything between themselves, Larry and Andy got up from their chairs to talkseparately to the actors, then sat back down without exchanging a word. Each of them alreadyknew what the other one had said. “They have the same picture in their mind without talking,”he told me. “I watched two bodies and one brain.” The phrase “two bodies, one brain” is oftendeployed by people who have worked with the Wachowskis. According to James McTeigue,who was their first assistant director on the “Matrix” films, “There’s a little bit of myth in it.The unification of mind comes through the filmmaking.” The siblings develop their ideastogether, arriving at a common vision after a long process of creative negotiation; by the timethey’re on the set, all possible disagreements have been worked out. Their relationship, ifanything, has improved since Larry became Lana. “She’s a lot easier to work with than Larry,”Andy told me. “Understandably, Larry had issues, but he could take them out on people. On me.Lana is much more open-minded.” “They have the best marriage I have ever seen” is how RonWachowski puts it.


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If the Wachowskis have a kind of marriage, their cast and crew are their family. (Toward theend of the shoot, Hanks even took to calling them Mom and Dad.) Steve Skroce, who hasstoryboarded for them since the “Matrix” films, told me, “After the success of the first ‘Matrix,’they were able to get points on the box-office, video games, etc. They had a dinner at this greatItalian restaurant in Santa Monica and all their key collaborators were invited. At each placesetting was a golden envelope with a check inside. I’m not sure who got what, but I know whatI received was far beyond what I could ever have guessed or hoped for.”

At Babelsberg’s Stage 9, on one of the two monitor screens, Weaving, as the devil OldGeorgie, was now hissing, “Lies . . . nothin’ but lies,” while Hanks’s lower lip trembled. In thescript, much depends on whether Zachry will decide to obey Old Georgie’s command to killMeronym, so Hanks went through a series of takes exploring his moral entanglement. WhenOld Georgie advised Zachry to “slit her throat,” Weaving relished the succulence of thesibilants, and the directors giggled with joy. The set was rudimentary: the control room of thesatellite-communication center would be completed with computer-generated imagery,imagined by the Wachowskis down to the minutest detail. The scene in the control room, forexample, features an “orison,” a kind of super-smart egg-shaped phone capable of producing3-D projections, which Mitchell had dreamed up for the futuristic chapters. The Wachowskis,however, had to avoid the cumbersome reality of having characters running around withegg-shaped objects in their pockets; it had never crossed Mitchell’s mind that that could be aproblem. “Detail in the novel is dead wood. Excessive detail is your enemy,” Mitchell told me,squeezing the imaginary enemy between his thumb and index finger. “In film, if you want toshow something, it has to be designed.” The Wachowskis’ solution: the orison is as flat as awallet and acquires a third dimension only when spun. Mitchell, who had been kept in the loopthroughout the process (and has a cameo in the film), was boyishly excited by the filmmakers’“groping toward exactitude.” “I was like Augustus Gloop in the Wonka factory,” he told me.“I’ve witnessed a long sequence of decisions, which I never had to make while writing a book.Intellectually, I know it’s a replacement, but I don’t feel a loss at all.”

Weaving now lowered his voice to reach the outer ranges of whisper, his tongue menacinglyclose to Hanks’s ear: “How long you goin’ jus’ stand there an’ let a stranger keep fuggin’ yourb’liefs up ’n’ down ’n’ in ’n’ out!” The Wachowskis exchanged glances and nods. Hanks’s facetightened into resolution as he walked out of the shot.

ventually, Ralph Riach recovered from his illness and was able to finish his scenes. Theproduction went over schedule by only a few days, and the shooting of “Cloud Atlas” was

completed in December. In March, the Wachowskis and Tykwer flew to Los Angeles to show a


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hundred-and-seventy-minute cut of the movie to Warner Bros. executives in Burbank. A smallgroup, including Jeff Robinov, the Wachowskis’ former agent and the current president ofWarner Bros. Pictures Group, had gathered for the morning screening. The directors werenervous, not only because much depended on the reaction of the studio honchos but alsobecause Hollywood executives were not their ideal audience. If what you’re aiming for isrebellious originality, the suits should have trouble liking and understanding your work. Thedirectors introduced the movie, then left the screening room. When the film was over, theexecutives tracked them down in a nearby office and delivered a spontaneous burst of applause.“That almost never happens,” Lana said afterward, with a disbelieving head shake. Perhaps, sheadded, the applause would translate into an enthusiastic marketing campaign—starting withplacement of the “Cloud Atlas” trailer before “The Dark Knight Rises,” Warner’s flagship 2012summer release. (In the event, that didn’t pan out.)

The Wachowskis had told me that one of the “orgasmic” moments in their filmmakingprocess is showing a movie to their friends and family. I attended that screening, later the sameday. “Cloud Atlas,” I discovered, would have been the perfect movie for a Wachowski familyfilm orgy. It seemed poised to usher audiences into an era of imaginative adventure filmmakingbeyond the mindless nihilism of “Transformers” or “Resident Evil.” The movie carefully guidedthe viewer through its six story lines with just enough intriguing unfamiliarity, while succeeding—nearly miraculously—in creating a sense of connectedness among the myriad characters andretaining Mitchell’s idea of the universality of love, pain, loss, and desire. Doona Bae, whoplays (among others) Sonmi~451, the “fabricant” who evolves into full humanity in 2144, was arevelation. The Wachowskis’ formal boldness, balanced with heartwarming redemption, was aperfect match for Tykwer’s precise filmmaking and gorgeous music. (He and his musicalpartners composed the “Cloud Atlas” soundtrack before shooting even started.) In addition toapplause at this screening, there were tears and triumphant hugs. The Wachowskis and Tykwerwere visibly touched. Their rocket ship had reached its cosmic port. (The movie will première atthe Toronto Film Festival in September, and open nationwide on October 26th.)

he previous fall, the “Cloud Atlas” production had spent six weeks on location in Mallorca.The Wachowskis were shooting scenes set on the Prophetess, the schooner on which much

of the nineteenth-century story takes place. The filming proved challenging—the weather wasnot coöperative; the ship was hard to maneuver; shooting in its cramped spaces wasdifficult—but through it all Lana had, she said, “a self-awareness of gathering memories . . . asense of witnessing” something extraordinary. More than ever before, she was convinced thatthe experience of making “Cloud Atlas” was going to be special.


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One day, the siblings had planned a helicopter shot of a nearby mountain. Andy and Lanahoped to swoop down from above with an aerial camera. But, as the helicopter was ascending, amass of clouds moved in, and the Wachowskis and the camera crew found themselves lost inwhiteness. While waiting for the fog to disperse, the helicopter climbed above it. “The sun wasbutterscotch yellow,” Lana recalled. “And there it all was, you know—an atlas of clouds.” Sheand Andy watched the celestial landscape until a hole opened in the cloud bank and thehelicopter was able to sink through it and below to discover the verdant landscape of theirimaginary world. ♦

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