Hanks, Halle, Portman In for Tykwer's 'Cloud Atlas'

I'm a huge fan of Run Lola Run, the breakthrough film for director Tom Tykwer. He's been hit-and-miss since, but always aiming very, very high, even when the films don't work as well. Perfume probably wasn't ideally suited for a cinematic treatment, since it's about the sense of smell. And it bombed in the US (not worldwide, however, where it made 98% of its money). The International was a lot more mainstream. And it didn't do that well, either. But the guy can absolutely direct. Now The Playlist says Tykwer has recruited Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, James McAvoy, Ian McKellen, and Natalie Portman for Cloud Atlas, an adaptaion of David Mitchell's novel from 2004. You would hope that it has to be good to attract that cast (everyone's attached except McKellen at this point), and that's what the evidence shows. It's a multiple award-winning book and it caught the attention of the Wachowskis, who bought the rights last year. And, in typical Tykwer fashion, the book has been seen as nearly impossible to film. Here's the New Yorker summary:

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. Against such forces, Mitchell's characters reveal a quiet tenacity. When the clerk is told that his life amounts to "no more than one drop in a limitless ocean," he asks, "Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"

Tykwer has been working on the script for over a year and even though this would be an absolute bear to adapt, he plans to shoot next year. Gotta raise that money, and that's where the names come in.