Ariana Huffington, founder of the liberal news website The Huffington Post, has tweeted that she spent yesterday filming a part in a futuristic Wachowski Brothers (well brother and sister now) science fiction film. The news has left several film bloggers, including myself, scrambling overnight as to work out what the hell the Wachowski's are up to as we didn't even know they were due to shoot anything at all right now.
In a serious of tweets, Huffington writes about her time on the set of the movie, which she claims her part at least, centered on a hindsight perspective of the Iraq war set 90 years into the future. She even has a few photographs to prove it...
Huffington, in what looks like a filmed interview part.
Larry Wachowski (left), Huffington (center), Lana Wachowski (right). So what on Earth could this project be? It's hard to imagine that The Wachowski's have secretly got a science fiction movie to the filming stages without anyone noticing, so my first instinct was naturally to think of a short film test, or possibly a commercial. The only way I could believe a sci-fi project is what they are shooting right now is if it was made on the small scale allowing the same kind of hush-hush treatment that Cloverfield had for so many months, until a trailer was surprisingly unleashed upon us with the first Transformers movie.
Cinematical's Erin Davis emailed Slashfilm overnight with the very possible suggestion that the The Wachowski's could be filming Cloud Atlas, an adaptation of the David Mitchell novel they optioned a while ago and the last we heard was gearing up to shoot from Tom Twyker. It's been 11 months since we've heard anything on that movie, so it is likely that Twyker has moved on, and possibly The Wachowski's who were intrigued enough by the 2004 Man Booker Shortlised novel to buy the rights in the first place, have swooped in to make this their next project. But then, as far as I'm aware Cloud Atlas doesn't have studio financing yet, so unless The Wachowski's are shooting tests to present big studio's, then I can't imagine that's what they are filming? The compelling book, which I've read and is highly interesting but has a multitude of filming challenges for an adaptation (I spoke of them briefly here), consists of six stories "that take us from the remote South Pacific in the nineteenth century to a distant, post-apocalyptic future. Each tale is revealed to be a story that is read (or watched) by the main character in the next".
Obviously, the post-apocalyptic future section of the novel could have been what Huffington was shooting yesterday and you could certainly imagine that if The Wachowski's decided to film this book, as they already run the rights, the news might have slipped through the trades fingers. But again, it's the lack of a studio that still bugs me as to believing this. Expect answers from Huffington, Wachowski's, the trades, or someone somewhere, soon.