It seemed as if the mysterious Iraq war romance Cobalt Neural 9 was top of the Wachowskis' to-do list, but their immediate next project now appears to be their equally intriguing Cloud Atlas** adaptation, which Halle Berry says is shooting in the summer.
The film of David Mitchell's ace novel has been coming together for a while now, with Berry, Natalie Portman and Tom Hanks all already attached, and talk of James McAvoy and Ian McKellan joining them. Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run, The International) has been hard at work on the script and looked to be directing, but there's been a recent question mark over that bit of info, with rumblings that producers Andy and Lana Wachowski might be getting behind the camera themselves, "possibly directing a few of the novel's six interlocking storylines".
So are we looking at some kind of multi-director portmanteau movie here? Or at the very least, Tykwer and the Wachowskis dividing the film between them? This being Wachowski World, nothing is yet clear, although with the novel spanning centuries, from an 1850s Pacific voyage to post-apocalyptic Hawaii, via 1930s Belgium and 21st Century England, splitting the workload seems like a plan.
"They have another really amazing idea that's going to stretch our brains even further than The Matrix," says Berry. More news as it arrives...