For most of their shared writing/directing/producing career, siblings Andy and Lana Wachowski have steered clear of media attention; when they wrote, produced, and directed the groundbreaking 1999 film The Matrix , they had a no-press clause expressly written into their contract. And they've rarely spoken in public about their other films: 1996's innovative lesbian neo-noir Bound , the 2003 Matrix followers The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions , and 2008's Speed Racer . They've broken form by engaging the media over their latest film, Cloud Atlas , a nearly three-hour adaptation of David Mitchell's 2004 novel , which they scripted and directed with Run Lola Run director Tom Tykwer. The film is particularly personal for the Wachowskis: They spent years trying to find studio support for the $100 million project, and eventually made it as an independent movie, gathering the money from a roster of international backers, and putting in millions of their own when some funding fell through at the last moment. The Wachowskis have always been ambitious innovators, but Cloud Atlas is on another scale entirely. Closely adapting the book in content, though not in structure, it tells six stories in six different time periods, using a handful of actors who often play a different role -- sometimes across race, age, or gender lines -- in each segment. And it interweaves all six stories, leaping from the 1800s to the undated far future, while finding connections between them, and following an idea about how mistakes repeat over