THE movie ‘Cloud Atlas’ starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry, will be filmed in Mallorca this September, the Mallorcan Film Commission confirmed.
Other actors include Susan Sarandon, Hugo Weaving, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw.
Filming is set to begin around September 15 and end around September 30, but it will not be released until October 2012.
The hope is that the movie will popularize Mallorca as a destination in the same way that The Lord of the Rings did forNew Zealand.
The directors, the Wachowski brothers (The Matrix) and Tom Tykwer, have already reserved 180 rooms at a Pollença Hotel.
‘Cloud Atlas’ is based on the award winning novel by David Mitchell and follows the story of six characters living in different time eras, from the 19th Century to a post-apocalyptic future.
All but one of the main characters are the reincarnation of the same soul.
There will be four film locations on the island including Port de Soller, Sa Calobra and Formentor for the 1850 era and Puig Major for the 2300 post-apocalyptic world where the only survivors live in a kind of Stone Age but with technological equipment, offering various special effects.
The rest of the €140million movie was filmed at the famous Babelsberg studios in Berlin.
Cloud Atlas is composed of six separate storylines, which can be summarized as follows:
- A naïve clerk traveling on a Polynesian voyage in the 19th century
- An aspiring (British) composer who takes up residence with a brilliant composer who has syphilis in the 1930s
- A journalist investigating a California nuclear power plant in the 1970s
- A 21st century publisher who gets his hands on a novel that could change the world
- A human clone designed for slave labor in the future
- A Hawaiian tribesman who has survived the apocalypse and recounts aloud the history of the world from a remote island
Each storyline addresses issues related to the power struggle between various members of society, and how the ruling class often re-fashions history as it sees fit. The Cloud Atlas film adaptation will further connect these stories by having cast members play different roles in each one.
It’s expected that Tykwer will direct the pre-21st century storylines in Cloud Atlas, while the Wachowskis tackle the futuristic portions. That’s all the more fitting, since Tywker has experience with recreating period settings (see: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer), while the latter are best-known for their ability to craft eye-catching visuals of a post-apocalyptic world.
