Even though it’s still hard to completely compute what The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer have in store for us with CLOUD ATLAS, their massively ambitious time-jumping anthology with an A-list cast and “out there” storyline, it’s quite clear that it’s one of this year’s most unusual offerings and shouldn’t be ignored. (Just take a look at some of its concept art.) The film has wrapped and is working toward an autumn release; in the meantime we’ll have to ponder just what it is we’ll be seeing come October.
These quotes from Hugh Grant should intensify the pondering… Empire Online sat down with the affable actor to discuss his contributions to CLOUD, and came away with a few very revealing quotes.
“I have six cameo parts in this strange, ambitious film,” Grant told the site. “I do a lot of killing and raping. I wear an awful lot of prosthetic make up, too. You probably won’t know that I am in the film!”
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. “In one of the parts I am a cannibal, about 2000 years in the future, and I thought, ‘I can do that. It’s easy.’ And then I am suddenly standing in a cannibal skirt on a mountaintop in Germany and they are saying, ‘You know, hungry! We must have that flesh-eating, like a leopard who is so hungry…’ and I am thinking, ‘I can’t do that! Just give me a witty line!'”
NOTTING HILL this isn’t, is that what you’re saying, Hugh?
Grant is joined by Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Susan Sarandon, Hugo Weaving, Ben Winshaw, Jim Sturgess, and Keith David in CLOUD ATLAS, which consists of six nested stories that take us from the remote South Pacific in the nineteenth century to a distant, post-apocalyptic future. Each tale is revealed to be a story that is read (or watched) by the main character in the next. All stories but the last one get interrupted at some moment, and after the sixth story concludes at the center of the book, the novel “goes back” in time, “closing” each story as the book progresses in terms of pages but regresses in terms of the historical period in which the action takes place. Eventually, readers end where they started, with Adam Ewing in the Pacific Ocean, circa 1850.
For the rest of Grant’s interview with Empire, head on over HERE.
Halle’s Berries
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