Cloud
Atlas
stars Hugo Weaving and Susan Sarandon, pictured at the Toronto International
Film Festival. Photo: Getty
Images
Ed Gibbs, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports
The
world premiere of Cloud Atlas met with a mixed reception, but its star Hugo
Weaving isn't fazed.
It was greeted with a lengthy standing ovation, then just as
quickly slammed by critics, following its world premiere at the Toronto
International Festival on Sunday night.
Cloud Atlas - the Booker-shortlisted, multi-layered
novel that many believed impossible to turn into a film - even has Hugo Weaving
donning a women's fat suit.
Yet the controversial film - a sprawling, multi-story tale of
karmic repercussions throughout time and space - also offers its all-star cast,
including Tom Hanks and Halle Berry, the chance to have fun and ''play
dress-ups'', as actor Jim Broadbent puts it, with its cast playing multiple
characters that bizarrely jump gender, race and age.
For Hugo Weaving, Cloud
Atlas offered the chance to re-team with two of the film's three
directors, the Wachowski brothers: the duo responsible for The Matrix movies that
made him a star. Ten years on, much has changed, though - notably Larry
Wachowski, who has since become Lana.
''I don't think it's ironic at all,'' Weaving says, of the
gender-swapping roles the film's cast has to perform. ''I think there are
certain things that Larry - now Lana - is interested in. A lot of them connect
up with his - now her - journey. This feeling of being trapped inside a body
since the age of nine, feeling like, 'I'm not this person, I'm actually that person',
I guess whoever we are, there are certain things that we want to express.
''When I first worked with them, in The Matrix days, they'd finish each other's
sentences, or talk together. They're incredibly tight-knit. Now, they're more
individual, I guess.''
Their new film, co-directed with Run Lola Run's Tom Tykwer, takes the viewer
on a lengthy, troubled journey, from the South Pacific of the 18th century
through to a post-apocalyptic future rife with warring factions and cannibalism.
Weaving's other characters in the film include a Machiavellian figure named
Georgie and Bill Smoke, an authority figure reminiscent of his Agent Smith
character in The Matrix.
Playing a nurse, though, was more extreme than even he could have imagined.
''The prosthetics came in at a very late stage, so I spent a lot
of time in my fat suit just trying to get used to it,'' Weaving says of Nurse
Noakes, a fearsomely full figure far removed from Mitzi Del Bra, his drag
persona in Priscilla, Queen
of the Dessert. ''Whenever I look at it, I'm still uneasy about
it.''
Weaving joins a substantial number of Australians in Toronto,
where local cinema has been enjoying its biggest showing in years. The event -
the single largest gateway to the lucrative US market - has premiered Cate
Shortland's Lore
and Tony Krawitz's Dead
Europe to great acclaim, in addition to Wayne Blair's musical smash
The Sapphires,
the big-wave documentary Storm
Surfers 3D and Robert Connolly's Julian Assange biopic Underground. Catriona
McKenzie's indigenous drama Satellite
Boy has rounded out what festival programmer Jane Schoettle
describes as Australia's ''splashiest'' showing to date at the event, now in
its 37th year and second only to Cannes for market dominance and star-pulling
power.
Cloud Atlas, meanwhile, will have a release in Australia
early next year, and joins a string of films that have generated Oscar buzz at
the festival - an event that provides early indicators for award favourites.
Among the most notable is Derek Cianfrance's The
Place Beyond the Pines, which stars Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper
as a pair of troubled fathers, and features an excellent performance by
Australia's Ben Mendelsohn.
The 2012 Toronto International Film Festival runs until September
16.
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