A.V. Club: The Wachowskis explain how Cloud Atlas unplugs people from the Matrix
Passages to ponder properly:
LW: We feel like a lot of people in the press took us not talking to them personally. It wasn’t meant to be personal. It wasn’t a judgment on the people in the press. It wasn’t a judgment of the actual process. What it was for us was that, as soon as you give up your anonymity, you give up your ability to participate in certain civic spaces, and that was a precious thing for us. We really like that aspect of our everyday lives. And sometimes it’s a little odd, because people in the press look at us like we’re talking nonsense, like the way the machine is designed is to help manufacture celebrity, and the value of it is in the ability to manufacture celebrity, or at least public interest. And we are saying, “Well, we don’t find that valuable.” We understand it, and we think, “Great, it works for this aspect of the business,” but it’s not really valuable to us.
AW: (...) I feel like this is the instantaneous-gratification generation, where they can just look it up and say, “Oh, well, this is what it means.” Our movies require a little bit of effort.
LW: And you feel it in a lot of critics’ approach today toward cinema. As soon as they encounter a piece of art they don’t fully understand the first time going through it, they think it’s the fault of the movie or the work of art. They think, [dramatic voice] “It’s a mess.”
AW: [Dramatic voice] “This doesn’t make sense.”
LW: “This doesn’t make any sense.” And they reject it, just out of an almost knee-jerk response to some ambiguity or some gulf between what they expect they should be able to understand, and what they understand.
The Rule of Three:
AVC: You spent years trying to get Cloud Atlas funded, while working on other projects. How do you maintain excitement for one project over such a long period, especially while working on other films?
AW: Well it’s extremely difficult.
LW: There’s three of us. That helps.
AW: We’re a collective. Whenever somebody’s down—or in this case, often two people were down, and the third always seemed to yell at us to keep going, “Get on your feet!”
The Rule of Going Back to the Origin (Source
): Sometimes we would all be down. There was this one period where we ended up saying, “Okay, this probably isn’t going to happen. But why don’t we read the script one more time. If there is any doubt in our minds, we’ll let it go.” And we all separately read the script, and we all separately had this elation from reading, and we were like, “Okay, we ought to give this one more chance.”
The Rule of Carrying On:
LW: The more we worked on it, the more intensely we loved it. To the point where there was this feeling, even after three years, that no matter what happened, somehow we were going to get this movie made.
AVC: How did Tom Tykwer work into your usual shared dynamic?
AW: Well, he plugged in incredibly easily. Much easier than we thought he would. We went on a working vacation to try to work through the book to see if we could even turn it into a script. Writing is the most intimate process when you’re making a movie, so we knew that if we could write together, everything else would fall into place. Our relationship has gotten really good on a movie set, because we’re natural collaborators. We can write together, and the way we work together extends to all our crew members and as a department. We believe that a film is made by the collective, so we encourage [input], and we love it when we’re making the movie together. And so with Tom, he is philosophically very similar to us with his filmmaking family, so when we started making the script, it was very fluid.
LW: Everyone always asks this question, and we find it slightly interesting and quite telling that nobody asks us how do we write together, which for us was the much bigger task. We have this strange thing, I think, that’s happened in the world that has to do with wanting to understand cinema the way we understand other art forms. So we look at an art form like painting, or sculpture, or writing, and we think about this singular person working all by themselves and trying to say something from their one perspective. We try to project that traditional, conventional understanding of how art is made onto cinema. But this is a false assumption. Cinema is not like those other art forms. And people have trouble understanding this—it doesn’t seem to compute.
Cinema is a social art form. You cannot make a piece of cinema by yourself. No matter what you do, no matter how controlling, no matter how crazy and Fitzcarraldo-bizarre or how crazy generally you try to be, yelling at people with your bullhorn, you can’t push a single pencil across the table without help. It’s just the way it is. The final product will always be a sum of all of the parts that are working on it. So if you want to understand cinema, you have to think about it as a social dynamic. And you have to investigate it and unpack it as a social project. And so for us, we went away and wanted to see first if we could write together. And once we determined we could write, we have such a great time together, just socially, we knew that directing would be a snap.
AVC: But is there a way around that when you’re making action films? By making this film, are you trying to get away from action-centric films so viewers have more cues that this is something they should be analyzing and discussing?
LW: We don’t like boring movies. Dickens, Hugo, Melville, even Homer… these are artists who examined some very complex subjects, especially around power and responsibility and the grappling with understanding what humanity is underneath. These are people who worked very hard at that, but put their stories in a context that was really exciting to read. And in our market-driven approach to cinema, we have separated those things. We can no longer make movies that are exciting and thought-provoking. In our market-driven assessment of art, we say, “This is for the arthouse crowd, this is a mainstream movie for the mainstream crowd.” And if you make a movie that [isn’t narrowly defined], a lot of critics will automatically say, “Well this doesn’t even know if it’s supposed to be an arthouse film or a mainstream movie.” This projects a bias, this horrible, hideous bias of a market-driven approach to understanding art: First you have to separate it and categorize it before you can really understand it. David Mitchell basically said, “I don’t believe all of that, I don’t want to separate anything. I want everything in one thing.” It was almost like a political act, the publishing of Cloud Atlas.
There’s really complex ideas in the [Matrix] trilogy. [Laughs.] We think in some ways, it’s the most experimental, complicated trilogy ever made. And it’s frustrating to see people try to will that to not be true. But we know it’s true. And in the same way, people will try to will Cloud Atlas to be rejected. They will call it messy, or complicated, or undecided whether it’s trying to say something New Agey-profound or not. And we’re wrestling with the same things that Dickens and Hugo and David Mitchell and Herman Melville were wrestling with. We’re wrestling with those same ideas, and we’re just trying to do it in a more exciting context than conventionally you are allowed to.
AVC: Do you think about your audience at all? Do you think that The Matrix was made for the same audience as Cloud Atlas?
LW: Why are you asking a market-driven question when I just said, “Please don’t consider market-driven understandings of art”? Why do you want to delimit either of them?
AVC: Because I’m not talking about packaging or selling the film, I’m talking about your personal mindsets. Did you make both movies with the same intentions?
AW: Of course. Cloud Atlas is for everybody. The main character in the movie is humanity.
LW: The Matrix trilogy is for everyone. We approach our art in the same way with every story. We didn’t make Bound for just lesbians.
AVC: How do you keep passion and emotional intensity in a movie created via deconstruction theory? How do you keep it exciting and immediate when it’s an intellectually crafted conceptual object?
AW: We’ve got love in our hearts. We’ve got love for our craft, we’ve got love for the people that we collaborate with.
LW: And we’ve got love for the audience. We believe there are audiences out there like us. We think our careers are a testament to that fact that there are people out there like us.
AVC: Do you think of Cloud Atlas as being about literal reincarnation? Is it more about the commonality of human experience, or the eternal-recursion concept?
AW: We think it is equal parts spiritual and secular.
LW: Again, we don’t want to delimit interpretation, and we don’t want to say, “We are making this to mean this.” What we find is that the most interesting art is open to a spectrum of interpretation. We love that in the book, you can have a very secular understanding of something like reincarnation. We have the José Saramago line in there, which says the nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences of our words and deeds, which go on apportioning themselves throughout all time. This is a very secular understanding of karma. But there are also other things… my brother this week had the sweetest line ever, where he was like, “Of course I believe in reincarnation—look at my sister.” We, in our own lives, reincarnate as well. We have new lives. I’m sure there are people in your life who would see this version of you, as opposed to 20 years ago, and would say, “Wow, you’ve changed.”
AVC: There are certainly people trying to interpret the movie thematically, entirely through the lens of your own life. Do you think there’s value to that? Is it just another form of limitation?
LW: It’s a limitation.
AW: Yeah, Lana’s experience is a component to the film, certainly. But the book and the movie are much more than that.
LW: Andy’s life is in it, Tom’s life is in it, David Mitchell’s life is in it. There are things that are so profoundly David Mitchell, if you got to know him, you’d be like, “That is David Mitchell in there.” That’s what art is. So we are in a dialogue with the rest of the humans that are interested in being in a dialogue with us, and they’ll see parts of me, they’ll see parts of David, they’ll see parts of Andy or Tom.
AVC: Is there an ideal response to your work?
AW: “It’s great!” [Laughs.]
LW: The work in general, or Cloud Atlas?
AVC: Either. “It’s great” is a very positive response, but it’s on that surface level, as opposed to engaging in a dialogue or dissecting and absorbing the themes.
AW: Yeah, the response is, we hope, people go home or go out to dinner and talk about our movies the way we would when we were young, when our parents were taking us to films, and we would talk about films. The idea of it sparking some sort of dialogue is a response I’m happy with.
LW: All art is an invitation to abandon your point of view. An attempt to see the world in a different way. And if people authentically attempt to abandon their points of view and see the world from our perspective, then I think all comments they would make through that process would be legitimate and wonderful.
AVC: Again, it seems difficult to approach such a rarified goal in a film that’s so action- and spectacle-driven, in a film with so many sequences that seem designed to overwhelm people’s intellects.
LW: Again, we don’t want to make it dull—I mean, it’s not like an experimental college film. It’s still a large-scale—it has an audience that transcends the audience that will ever understand deconstructionist theory. Yet people feel it emotionally. I mean, the end of the second movie is the scene with the Architect. And, I mean—[to Andy] should we maybe not get into talking about this?
AW: [Laughs.] Maybe not.
LW: But just in very broad strokes, we thought, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if instead of a traditional ending, where you have the hero combat the villain, or achieve something through force of arms, essentially, at the climactic moment of the film, if you could somehow insert the audience into that role of protagonist, and you could actually put the audience into feeling like they were in the fight?” We wanted to have the audience be Neo in a way they had never experienced before, in a more subconscious way.
AW: A kung-fu fight of understanding. [Laughs.]
LW: There’s a trick where if someone is saying something complicated, and in particular if they’re using big words, audiences will stare at the mouth of the person that’s speaking. We just do it unconsciously. It helps us understand what someone’s saying. So we thought, “Well, what if someone is actually saying this incredibly big secret, and then you show a background behind him, and at first, you leave the background consistent, but then you slowly start changing the background? And then your eyes will go from the Architect to the background to Neo in the background, and then back, and then you’ll start to miss things, and you’ll get a little lost and confused, and then you’ll get frustrated, and then you’ll have no idea what he’s saying.
AVC: Is that an attempt to make people re-watch and analyze the movies?
LW: There’s a conscious goal to offer a form that invites a kind of abandonment they’ve never experienced before, and if they want to keep going back to investigate that other perspective, that’s great. But at least in the beginning, they’re going to know it’s going to be like nothing they’ve been in before.
AM: I mean, those are the types of films that we want to watch. Why would you want to watch a movie that you instantly know everything about it, and you go home and you don’t have to see it again?
LW: Most films today, we could watch the first five minutes and tell you exactly what’s going to happen. And especially, there are, let’s call them arthouse movies, that have tones that are so militant, you know from just the tone in the first five minutes exactly how the movie is going to go. There’s no surprise whatsoever in the entire film.
AVC: What was the last really fundamentally satisfying movie you saw?
LW: Roy Andersson.
AW: Songs From The Second Floor, just beautiful.
LW: Genius.
AVC: It seems like for anyone who doesn’t like The Matrix, or has issues with it, the big criticism has always been that human beings don’t produce enough energy to make a worthwhile power source. That there would be more energy going into maintaining the system than it could produce.
LW: That’s like saying a car battery wouldn’t be able to power a car. The whole point is that it’s related to this other, larger energy source. [The pods humans are kept in] even look like spark plugs in the thing. It’s not that they’re the pure source of energy—they provide the continuous sparking that the system needs.
AW: There’s an ambiguous line in there that Morpheus says about it, that there’s a new form of fusion energy—
LW: But people don’t listen to the dialogue. They don’t try to think about it. [Sighs.]
... Хваща ме яд, като забравя колко умни творци работят в киното. И как забравяме, че ги има, понеже постоянно ни заливат с тъпи, тъпи, тъпи филми – тъпи в историите си, притъпени в чувството си, затъпяващи в посланията си...
Но това не е добро начало на разговор за „Атласа“.
Предложете вие.
P.S. Ако някой иска да преведе интервюто с Уошовски - цялото или избрани (от самия преводач) части, – мисля, че ще му намерим място в следващия алманах „ФантАstika“.
Някой?
... подозирам 2, че Сашо Кръстев не е харесал еднаквостта на езика в далечното бъдеще, защото е чел субтитрите; самият език е ПРЕВЪЗХОДНО променен, ако слушаш репликите – аз половината не можах да ги капична в първия момент...). 
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Антиутопия се създава лесно – но я опитайте да екстраполирате и плашещото, и радващото, и всичко останало, което се случва наоколо ни...
