Fratii Wachowski – care au revolutionat cinema-ul cu Matrix – se intorc pe ecrane cu o adaptare dupa cartea “Cloud Atlas”. (Ii au in distributie pe Tom Hanks , Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant, Hugo Weavin) Ca sa promoveze filmul, The New Yorker face un profil al celor doi frati – trecind de la ideea cartii si transformarea ei in scenariu, pe la schimbarea de sex a lui Larry – acum Lana, unul dintre frati, si mergind usor usor prin toata viata lor.
O demonstratie minunata de jurnalism. textul integral e aici, mai jos trei fragmente ca sa va conving sa cititi tot articolul care e lung:)
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The main challenge was the novel’s convoluted structure: the chapters are ordered chronologically until the middle of the book, at which point the sequence reverses; the book thus begins and ends in the nineteenth century. This couldn’t work in a film. “It would be impossible to introduce a new story ninety minutes in,” Lana said. The filmmakers’ initial idea was to establish a connective trajectory between Dr. Goose, a devious physician who may be poisoning Ewing, in the earliest story line, and Zachry, the tribesman on whose moral choices the future of civilization hinges, after the Fall. They had no idea what to do with all the other story lines and characters. They broke the book down into hundreds of scenes, copied them onto colored index cards, and spread the cards on the floor, with each color representing a different character or time period. The house looked like “a Zen garden of index cards,” Lana said. At the end of the day, they’d pick up the cards in an order that they hoped would work as the arc of the film. Reading from the cards, Lana would then narrate the rearranged story. The next day, they’d do it again.
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Perhaps not coincidentally, Lana’s gender consciousness started to emerge at around the same time. In third grade, Larry transferred to a Catholic school, where boys and girls wore different uniforms and stood in separate lines before class. “I have a formative memory of walking through the girls’ line and hesitating, knowing that my clothes didn’t match,” Lana told me. “But as I continued on I felt I did not belong in the other line, so I just stopped in between them. I stood for a long moment with everyone staring at me, including the nun. She told me to get in line. I was stuck—I couldn’t move. I think some unconscious part of me figured I was exactly where I belonged: betwixt.” Larry was often bullied for his betwixtness. “As a result, I hid and found tremendous solace in books, vastly preferring imagined worlds to this world,” Lana said.
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The blockbuster-film producer Dino De Laurentiis optioned the Wachowskis’ next screenplay, “Assassins,” while they were renovating their parents’ house. De Laurentiis entertained them with champagne and lascivious stories about beautiful actresses, and then sold the script to Warner Bros. for five times what he’d paid. According to Lana, substantial revisions by a hired writer removed “all the subtext, the visual metaphors . . . the idea that within our world there are moral pocket universes that operate differently.” When the movie was made, in 1995 (directed by Richard Donner, of “Lethal Weapon” fame, and starring Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Banderas, and Julianne Moore), the Wachowskis tried to get their names 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-time filmmakers
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Filmul “Cloud Atlas” are premiera mondiala peste citeva zile la festivalul de film de la toronto si intra in cinematografele din toata lumea pe 26 octombrie
