As the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer have cast up their film adaptation of the David Mitchell novel Cloud Atlas, we’ve seen quite a few good choices being made. Tom Hanks, Hugo Weaving, Ben Whishaw, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon and Jim Broadbent are the major players who will embody multiple roles in the six slightly interconnected stories that make up Cloud Atlas.
That seems to account for most of the major characters, with one big exception: Sonmi~451, a clone grown to be a server in a dystopian future version of Korea. Casting a non-Korean actress is out of the question (or should be) but we haven’t heard anything until now. Seems that the team has made a good choice, as Bae Doona (Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance, The Host, Air Doll) has been picked to be one of the film’s most important characters. Read More »
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Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski are getting ready to turn David Mitchell‘s strange multi-narrative novel Cloud Atlas into a big-budget film. It will be shot entirely in and around Berlin, and is planned as the most expensive film ever to be financed in Germany, at about $100m.
The stellar cast includes Tom Hanks, Hugo Weaving, Ben Whishaw, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon and Jim Broadbent, each of whom will play multiple roles — as many as six each. We have pretty good ideas about some of the roles each actor will play, but have wondered quite a bit about how the script deals with the fact that the novel features six stories that take place in different time periods. Now David Mitchell offers some very slight clarification — or, for those who’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the adaptation, possibly some confirmation of the planned strategy. Read More »
There’s some major movement on Cloud Atlas, the adaptation of David Mitchell‘s ambitious novel that Tom Tykwer and Andy and Lana Wachowski are writing and planning to direct together. The project has been crawling forward for some time, and was recently announced as a definite ‘go’ with Tom Hanks in one of the key roles. Quite a few other people have been discussed as possible cast members, and the news today confirms Halle Berry and Hugo Weaving and adds Ben Whishaw. Much more info, including a long casting/character breakdown, is after the break. Read More »
Alan Ball goes to the well once again, Judd Apatow makes a return to TV and Professor Dumbledore bets the ponies. Just another day on the cable powerhouse that is HBO.
Ball, the Oscar-winning show runner of Six Feet Under and True Blood just shot a pilot called All Signs of Death, based on Charlie Huston‘s book The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, which follows a trauma cleaning unit, much like Sunshine Cleaning, but less cute. Apatow, who made his name with TV shows Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, is executive producing a pilot called Girls, which was created by Lena Dunham, currently riding the wave off her indie film Tiny Furniture. It’s a more realistic take on the Sex and the City formula. Both shows are only in the pilot stage and neither has been picked up for series yet. It they do, Ball and Apatow will executive produce. (UPDATE: HBO passed on All Signs of Death.)
Finally, Michael Gambon has been cast as a recurring regular on the Michael Mann-produced series Luck, starring Dustin Hoffman, which is about the seedy underworld of horse racing. Read more about all three HBO nuggets of news after the jump. Read More »
Holy AfterEffects! Word out of festivals in the past month wasn’t terribly positive with respect to Julie Taymor’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. And now that the first trailer is here it is easy to make a guess or to as to why. The cast is phenomenal: Helen Mirren leads as Prospera, with Russell Brand, Alfred Molina, Djimon Hounsou, David Strathairn, Chris Cooper, Alan Cumming, Ben Whishaw, Reeve Carney, Felicity Jones and Tom Conti. But the footage looks…well, see for yourself. Read More »
Ray Winstone is currently starring in 44 Inch Chest, which was written by Sexy Beast writers Louis Mellis and David Scinto. Mellis and Scinto have since stopped working together, and Scinto is now poised to make the jump to director. As leading man in his debut Night Flower, he’s tapped a reliable presence: Ray Winstone. From there the cast gets better, as Ben Whishaw and Andrew Garfield are currently in talks to join.
We don’t have many details on the script, which Scinto wrote and is called a “terrifying romantic thriller” in THR‘s report. As shooting is not scheduled to start until this fall we’ll probably have to wait a bit before hearing any more. But having Winstone, Whishaw and Garfield together should be great, and I’m excited to see what Scinto comes up with on his own.
After the break, the young version of Conan the Barbarian is cast, and the animated pic Monster in Paris gets some good voices. Read More »
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