Halle Berry, Tom Hanks and Natalie Portman in the Wachowskis’ next: Cloud Atlas

We’ve heard tiny scraps over the past year about the Wachowskis’ clandestine futuristic cinéma vérité gay war romance (whew) COBALT NEURAL 9, but it sounds like their next project will be a different ambitious sci-fi project.

While promoting her film FRANKIE AND ALICE, actress Halle Berry let slip that she would work with the Wachowskis next summer on a movie that she says is “sort of what they did for THE MATRIX, they have another really amazing idea that’s going to stretch our brains even further.“

Berry says the movie also features Tom Hanks and Natalie Portman, verifying that it’s the $80 million adaptation of David Mitchell’s novel CLOUD ATLAS — earlier in the year the project was pursuing the trio, along with Ian McKellan and James McAvoy. At the time, Tom Tykwer (RUN LOLA RUN) was going to direct and the Wachowskis just produce and/or contribute a segment to the film, but now it sounds like they may be directing the entire thing.

The book involves multiple characters across different time frames, and is described by Amazon as so: “Mitchell’s virtuosic novel presents six narratives that evoke an array of genres, from Melvillean high-seas drama to California noir and dystopian fantasy. 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. Only after this do the second halves of the stories fall into place, pulling the novel’s themes into focus: the ease with which one group enslaves another, and the constant rewriting of the past by those who control the present.”