Jim Sturgess straddles the many worlds of Cloud Atlas

IAN SPELLING

NYT SYNDICATE

JIM Sturgess can – and does – rattle off the reasons why he had to participate in Cloud Atlas, an ambitious sci-fi epic that bounces from the past to the present to the future, explores the connectivity of life and boasts three directors and an all-star cast. Andy and Lana Wachowski, along with Tom Tykwer, directed the adaptation of David Mitchell’s 2004 novel of the same name, while the onscreen talent is an international Who’s Who that, besides Sturgess, also includes Doona Bae, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Keith David, Hugh Grant, Tom Hanks, Susan Sarandon, Hugo Weaving, Ben Whishaw and Zhou Xun, most of whom play several roles.

“I love the idea of your legacy, what it is that you choose to put out into this world in the short amount of time you have here, and how important every decision you make is, whether it’s good or bad,” Sturgess says. “Everything sort of floats around on this Earth, and it doesn’t disappear. Your energy and what you do just doesn’t go away.

Those are the basic themes.

“Also, this was just such a highly ambitious project and a chance to work with three directors, Andy, Lana and Tom,” Sturgess continues.

“That’s something that had never really been done before, or not quite like this. I knew that Tom Hanks and Halle Berry and all these other incredible people were going to be joining this insane exploration.

“So, before I even read it, I knew I wanted to do it,” he says. “Just out of the pure nature of what it was and what it could be, I wanted to do it.” Sturgess, a 31-year-old Brit, is best known for his performances in Across the Universe (2007), 21 (2008) and One Day (2011). He appears in Cloud Atlas in each of its six stories, spanning past, present and future, playing a total of four roles. Two of them, Adam Ewing in the past and Hae-Joo Chang in the future, are lead parts.

“I was really blessed, really, because I felt my story line was about love and about kindness,” Sturgess says, speaking by telephone from his home in London.

“It’s about doing something for somebody else, for the greater good of mankind, the greater good of the future, the greater good of life itself.

“Adam is a young lawyer who, almost by accident, helps save a young slave and, by doing that selfless act, it perpetuates into the beginnings of people standing up against something as abominable as slavery,” the actor continues.

“Adam is very unaware of what it is that he’s doing. He has no concept of what sort of marks he might be making on the future to come. He’s just doing it because of an innate feeling, because his makeup and DNA just know right from wrong, even at a time when everybody thought that black people were on a lower social level than white people.

“Adam felt, deep in his soul, that something was not right about that,” he says. “It didn’t ring true to him or feel right.” Ewing’s soul then develops into Hae-Joo Chang, who appears in the future, where he tackles pretty much the same issues Ewing faced.

“The problems of the past have evolved into the problems of the future,” Sturgess says, “and now the problems of slavery are coming from fabricated, genetically engineered people. So the problem is the same as many years ago, but it’s evolved with time, as the people have.

“Hae-Joo Chang, though, is very much aware of the impact that he’ll make,” the actor continues. “That’s why he’s doing what he’s doing.

He’s trying to save this fabricated slave, and he’s very aware of what his mark will be in the future.” There were multiple characters for everyone involved in Cloud Atlas, and also multiple occupants of the director’s chair. Sturgess estimates that 98 percent of the scenes in his two main story lines were directed by the Wachowskis, the masterminds behind The Matrix (1999) and its two sequels.

However, he reports that several other actors bounced back and forth between Wachowski-led sets and Tykwer-run ones.

“They had their days and we had our days,” Sturgess recalls, laughing.

“We’d sort of visit theirs and see what they were doing over on their side. Then we’d have a day on Tom’s set and, for me, I’d be much more of a guest player than a main character. I had a lot of fun with that.

“It was like a madhouse,” he says.

“You had all these people in different make-ups. You’d see Halle Berry dressed as an old Korean man or you’d walk past Hugo Weaving and he’d be dressed as a female nurse. You just never knew what you were going to come across each day.” Though Warner Bros will release Cloud Atlas, most of the film was financed utilising other resources, thereby making the $100 million production the most expensive indie feature ever made. However it got made, though, Sturgess hopes that Cloud Atlas will not be the last of its kind.

“I’m such a fan of cinema and I’m such a fan of films,” he says. “I love beautiful, interesting, complex story lines. I just hope that people really come and support the film for that reason, because it’s getting harder and harder to get films like this made. Anybody who actually gets something like this up on the screen has gone through a battlefield.

“I really hope that people support this one,” Sturgess concludes, “because more films like it have to get made. Otherwise it’ll just be a string of superhero films, one after the other, and it’ll all pretty much start sounding and looking the same after awhile.”

Related Posts

Post a Comment

Subscribe Our Newsletter