12 Supposedly Unfilmable Films That Actually Got Made

8. Cloud Atlas (2013)

Why It Was 'Unfilmable': David Mitchell's 2004 novel Cloud Atlas interweaves six different storylines across its 500-plus pages: a Pacific tale of adventure set in 1850, a musical romance set in 1931 Belgium, a mystery-thriller set in 70s California, a British comedy set in the present day, a dystopian sci-fi set in a megacity of the future, and a post-apocalyptic tale set in Hawaii. Six different stories, six different genres, six different sets of characters - who would want to turn that into a movie, let alone find a way to do it? How It Got Made: It took three directors to tame the beast that was Cloud Atlas, but Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer hit upon an ingenious way of giving the interlocking stories some synchronicity: by casting the same actors in multiple roles across the six different storylines. Three of the sections would be filmed by Tykwer, and the other three would be filmed by the Wachowskis, sharing the workload and keeping the budget down. The budget was still to be a hefty one, though, and the final $102 million - taken from numerous independent production companies from around the globe - was a miraculous sum. With a simplified story (a straight adaptation would have been unfathomable), the Wachowskis and Tykwer managed it. The final result of the Cloud Atlas movie is messy, but ambitious, and it's a wonder they got it to the screen at all.