Director Lana Wachowski is back at the box office with The Matrix Resurrections, which is sending people down a rabbit hole of her past work. However, fans might want to catch the 2013 drama Cloud Atlas, an infamous but ambitious flop, before it leaves Netflix on Jan. 31. Starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, and Hugo Weaving, Cloud Atlas tells the story of reincarnation, with souls traveling through different moments in time and showing how an act of kindness can have a ripple effect through history and the universe.
Directed by Wachowski, her sister Lilly Wachowski, and Tom Twyker, Cloud Atlas was an adaptation of the award-winning novel by David Mitchell. However, that acclaim didn’t quite translate to the film. It received middling reviews, sitting at 66% from critics and audiences alike on Rotten Tomatoes, and earned a paltry $27 million at the US box office. While its global take was $130 million, it is still considered a flop for failing to connect with American audiences.
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One of the craziest things about Cloud Atlas is the fact that actors would play several different characters over the course of the film due to the different storylines often taking place at different points in time. According to Hanks, that could present some unique challenges while filming. “Yes, it was great. We always knew who we were playing, the next day,” he told Collider. “We’d read the call sheet, so we knew where we were going to have to be and how long it was going to take to do it. Sometimes you make films where you’re playing the same guy, but you go to six different locations. You shoot part of it in Iceland, you shoot part of it in the Sahara desert and you shoot part of it in L.A. This was like that, but squared or cubed.”
“It was like an algorithm because the concentration and the output of each one of the characters was so completely different,” he continued. “They all required a different energy and a different vibe that you carried around with you all day, and they all felt different because the costume and the make-up changed the way you stood or sat or tried to take a nap, on occasion. It was almost like a huge amount of the “work” was done for us. So much of what we have to do is pretend it’s happening for the first time. On this movie, literally every day, you were doing something that would never, ever be repeated again because that character was going to go away in another day or two.”
