Eternal Recurrence: The Music of Cloud AtlasTom Tykwer, Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek musically glue together thecomplicated story threads of the mind­bending new film.By Jim Lochner 

A young American notary saves the life of a stowaway Moriori slave. A feeble oldcomposer steals inspiration from his penniless young amanuensis. A feistyjournalist unearths a nuclear physicist’s dangerous secret. A vanity publisher isconfined to a nursing home against his will. A tribesman from the future learns thetruth of his past. And a genetically engineered fabricant becomes the voice of arevolution. These are the stories at the heart of Cloud Atlas, the new film writtenand directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski (The Matrix trilogy) and Tom Tykwer(Run Lola Run).

Based on David Mitchell’s “unfilmable” 2004 novel, the film intertwines these sixstories in a stunning display of editing, moving back and forth in time to form amind-bending fabric of regeneration and rebirth. From 19th century South Pacific toa post-apocalyptic future, the principal actors inhabit different roles in the variousstories. With such complicated interlocked storylines, composers Tykwer, ReinholdHeil and Johnny Klimek had to piece together the multiple threads with a cohesivemusical fabric.

The three composers, best known for their pulsating electronic score for Run LolaRun and the aromatic orchestral scents of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, met inBerlin. Heil had made name for himself as a producer and the keyboardist for theNina Hagen Band, while Klimek was part of the underground electronic scene thatformed in the late 1980s and early ’90s following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Thoughthey had known each other for years, it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the twobegan working together. “I was in a sort of semi-retired state at this point, a little bitdirectionless,” Heil said in our interview. “Johnny contacted me and kind ofpestered me to do something. So we got together and worked, and found out that thiswas really pleasant. There was none of this elbowing or competing, none of the sillySpinal Tap-like [behavior] that we both knew from the bands we had been in. It

was a much more pleasant, truly collaborative atmosphere.”

Enter Tykwer, who, in the summer of 1996, was directing his second feature, WinterSleepers, and looking for a studio where he could record the trailer music for thefilm. Klimek had a home studio in the back corner of a Berlin courtyard (“it wasright at the period where you could start producing your own records at home,” hesaid) and served as Tykwer’s engineer on the recording. “Johnny played him themusic he and I had done the year before,” said Heil. “Tom really liked it and wasenthusiastic about the fact that I was a part of it, because he had been an old fan ofthe Nina Hagen Band as a teenager.” Winter Sleepers was the beginning of acollaboration that continued with later successes such as the worldwide hit RunLola Run, Perfume and The International.

All three composers bring unique talents to the collaboration, though each of themadmitted in our separate interviews that as they continue to work together, the linesof who does what become blurrier. “I’m very strong in the first creation period,” saidTykwer. “Because I’ve been writing so long on the script, I can give the first pushinto the material and into the atmosphere of the movie. I can describe it probablybest because obviously I’ve been working on it so long. Usually, through the writingof the script I have already come up with a few themes that are developed on thepiano. So I can seduce them into the musical world.”

“I’m more responsible for harmonic progressions,” said Heil. “For instance,anything that sounds a bit more classical will have more of me in it, as I went tomusic academy and the other two didn’t. I have a knack for structure and harmonyand arrangement that surely helps. But I like to program some grooves and dointeresting electronic soundscapes.”

“I made most of the tea,” quipped Klimek. “Actually, I’m usually better at generatinga lot of material very quickly. Being able to take elements and come up withsomething from those elements within a day. I will often do that, do a day for eachcue and pound them out so we have a lot of material. I’m definitely stronger on theelectronic front within that team.”

“I think we’re a real truthful, deep collaboration,” said Tykwer. “We have thisparticular set of skills individually that combine together beautifully and that flowsso well into each other. Johnny is just fantastic in finding particular sound qualitiesand interesting instrumentations and also, of course, comes in with the mostoriginal electronic reinventions of the material. Reinhold ultimately, I think, bringsit all together, all the stuff, all my shitload of ideas, Johnny’s shitload of electronicsturning things upside down. And then Johnny puts it all together until it makessense as a real musical, orchestral, substantial composition.”

Triple Threat: Filmmakers Tom Tykwer, Lana Wachowski, Andy Wachowski.

On Cloud Atlas, like earlier collaborations, Tykwer also directs and writes thescript. Working with the Wachowskis this time around, the three directors splittheir duties—the Wachowskis took on the bookending (at least time-wise) storiesset in the 19th century and the future, while Tykwer handled the intervening stories.Work on the script took up most of 2009. The first meetings and discussions abouthow to approach the music occurred on several occasions in 2010. During that time,the trio composed the score for the German film Three (Drei), while financingissues were worked out on Cloud Atlas. While the team was working on Three, “wewere actually developing a lot of ideas for Cloud Atlas,” said Tykwer. “And thenwhen [the film] seemed to have a chance to happen, we went for anothersubstantial, condensed version of the screenplay—Lana, Andy and I—in early 2011.From April until July, those four months, we were full on in music.”

Though Heil and Klimek often collaborate on their own—for films such as OneHour Photo and Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, and television series like Without aTrace and Deadwood—collaborating with Tykwer as the director and screenwriter“makes it easier, a lot easier actually,” said Heil. “He’s a real musician. He’s not oneof those directors who just wants another credit. When you collaborate in a group ofthree, everybody gets to have his ideas and throw them around. You can get into asituation that is a little bit ‘band-like,’ but democracy doesn’t really work. I canreally contribute and get a lot of my musical desires, but it is really good that Tomhas the final say. It just avoids unnecessary, lengthy discussions. Sometimes we

give him a piece of outlines or give him our opinion, and sometimes we campaignfor certain things, sometimes it takes a little longer to persuade him, but at somepoint you just need to move on. The movie-making process has gazillions ofdecisions that need to be made, so it’s just best that someone can say, ‘Okay, this ishow we do it,’ and then we move on.”

The process of composition begins with meeting and “filling up a whole bunch ofthemes with Tom,” said Klimek. “Then Reinhold and I will come back to L.A. andstart doing huge remixes—Reinhold in his studio and I’ll do a bunch at my place, sothat Tom will end up with a few hours of music sitting on the editing table when hestarts editing.” With the numerous storylines, the composers knew they were goingto have to put all the themes on top of each other. “I’ll take different elements fromvarious pieces and put it in the audio window and see what comes out of it,” saidKlimek. “I actually enjoy that process, taking orchestral elements and messing themup and electronically treating them and adding the real orchestra on top. So we justsort of throw things at each other then we go sit with Tom for three or four monthsas he’s going through the editing process.”

As he had done on earlier films, Tykwer wanted the score written and recorded priorto a single frame of film being shot. “We’re like a band,” said Tykwer, “that reallyloves preparing and understanding the material by not being under time pressure,not having anybody waiting for delivery in some editing room. We don’t think thathelps the movie at all. We also have a strong belief in the philosophy that the movieunbelievably profits from the fact that there will already be pre-existing musicpreviously recorded and well-conceived once the cameras start rolling and theediting starts going, because the editor can then re-use our music and never have togo for a moment with temp music.”

“Music is a character in the film,” Tykwer continued. “It’s a real central character,more in this film than in many other films that we’ve made. We know that it’s thefabric of the movie in a way that you would never be able to develop if it you had twomonths at the end of the editing process just before mixing starts. There are so manythoughts going backwards and forwards, and people relating to musical momentsin the film that you can only do in this way if you start that early.”

Nearly three hours of music was pre-recorded prior to filming. In this way, “thescore is much more intertwined with the actual development of the film itself,” saidTykwer, “and with the exploration of the movie itself by the filmmakers and all theother artists—the actors, the production designer, the cinematographer and, ofcourse, for the directors. We can play music and we can hear music to complete ourimagination about what we want to do in the movie. When we did the big read-through with all the actors right before filming started, they all came to Berlin andwe all sat together for a long day. We read the script and discussed it and all the wayalong we were hearing the music.”

Work on the score began at Tykwer’s house in Berlin where the trio set up aprovisionary studio “and we put our ideas together, listened to music and tried to getinspired and find all kinds of ideas for the various aspects of this score,” said Heil.Though the daunting task of “Cloud Atlas Sextet” was looming, “we actually had lotsof wonderful ideas—some that made it into the movie, some that didn’t make it intothe movie—that didn’t result in the ‘Cloud Atlas Sextet.’ So actually the sextet wasonly written three months later when we came together for the second time.”

Tykwer describes the “Cloud Atlas Sextet” as “the centerpiece of the film.” “It was theobvious thing that needed to be done but wasn’t done as the first thing because wewere really struggling with it,” said Heil. “It has such a pivotal role in the novel andit is part of the narrative, so it’s a piece that needed to be ready before the film wasshot. In this particular case, anybody would have had to do it this way. Anyfilmmaker who did Cloud Atlas would have had to take care of writing it or had the‘Cloud Atlas Sextet’ written before the film was even in production.”

One of the challenges surrounding the composition of the sextet was DavidMitchell’s description of the music in the book as avant garde, early 20th century

chamber music. “That wouldn’t necessarily have been a beautiful piece the way itthen shows up in the other stories of Cloud Atlas,” said Heil, “where everybody is sofascinated by it that it becomes this theme that everybody whistles in 2012 and thensome sort of almost religious piece of music for the science fiction story in 2144. Sowe were thinking, ‘Okay, if we take the piece as it’s described by David Mitchell, it’llnever be credible that this is a melody that everybody knows.’ At the end of the day,we just caved in, so to speak, upon the challenge of reconciling these two thingsthat David nonchalantly put in his novel, and just tried to write a beautiful piece ofmusic as good as we can.”

The sextet began life as a simple melody that was then turned into a four-minutepiano piece. The piece was subsequently arranged in numerous ways—for choir, acappella, string orchestra, full orchestra. The piece was also arranged for a properchamber ensemble of the six instruments Mitchell described in the book, thoughthat version didn’t make it into the final film. The sextet weaves through the film,from Frobisher’s composition in the 1930s to the recording Luisa Rey hears 50 yearslater in the record shop, and as Muzak in the nursing home. “That melody has allthese shapes and incarnations in a kind of industrialization of music,” said Tykwer.“Ultimately, it becomes the death song of the clones, of the fabricants, thewaitresses from Papa Song, who think they’re going to heaven but instead they’regoing to their execution. This theme, even though it’s their death song, is theirrequiem, which closes the circle because it was initially written by Frobisher himselfas his own requiem.”

The theme that the aging composer (Jim Broadbent) hears in his mind was alsoinspired by a description in Mitchell’s book as Der Todtenvogel. Lana Wachowskiinstead coined the term “eternal recurrence,” “which has to do with this wholerebirth,” said Heil, “the traveling of the soul through different characters throughtime, and evolving or not evolving, as the essential theme of the movie. Wheneverfate happens or any big events in everybody’s lives happens in the movie, this is thetheme that drives them. It has sort of a motoric character in its bass riff. It’s a reallydriving thing that still has very emotional components as well.”

Another main theme, the “Cloud Atlas March,” has what Heil calls “a very simplemelody.” The original arrangement of the theme was 10 minutes long, in whichevery round of the theme went higher and higher, while the arrangements becamemore complex, until the sequence ended on a triumphant orchestral ending. “Thatpiece happens several times in the movie in very reduced versions,” Heil said,“because the movie just didn’t provide the 10 minutes to play that thing out.”

Even with three composers, the team still had to employ orchestrators. “None of usis a particularly great orchestrator,” Heil explained. “In film scoring theorchestrator gets a credit even if the composer says exactly ‘I want the flute to playthis, I want the oboe to play this, the bassoon to play this, the strings voiced exactlylike this,’ the orchestrator who puts this on the page gets the orchestration credit. Interms of classical composition, the definition of orchestration is exactly what I justsaid—the composer orchestrates his piece when he makes those decisions, when hesays, ‘I want this passage to be the three flutes, I want this to be the string sections,and the harps are supposed to play this.’ So in some ways you could say thecomposer actually does orchestrate. And we do orchestrate a lot, but we don’t do thetechnicality of the orchestration. So we actually give the music to orchestratorssometimes in this way that we say precisely what we want and where we want it andhow we want it orchestrated. In that way, we are all orchestrators as well but wedon’t get the credit for it. It’s really an iffy thing how the term orchestration is beingused in this industry.”

The composers like to work with orchestrators “who are creative,” said Heil. ForCloud Atlas, the trio turned once again to Gene Pritsker, an avant garde, New York-based composer who had worked with the team on Perfume and The International.“Gene is the type of orchestrator where we can use electronic soundscapes and weirdsounds and say, ‘Orchestrate that! Good luck!,’” said Klimek. “Occasionally he’llcome up with totally unexpected things that we would never think about. Thatpushes us again to be more creative and head in different directions. He’s part of thejigsaw puzzle as well when it comes to experimenting with the orchestra.”

Once the recording was done, the composers had what Heil called “a whole‘catalogue’ of music” that was then remixed and used by the editors as a temp trackto assemble the film. Naturally, other challenges popped up during editing wherecertain sequences needed new music written. For instance, in one of the earlysequences where Frobisher travels from Cambridge to Edinburgh, “it looks like avery typical English period movie,” said Heil, “so we sat down and whipped up anarrangement [of the march] in that way.” For the source music during the partyscene in 1973 San Francisco, “we could have just licensed music from somewherebut instead we did a version of the ‘Cloud Atlas Sextet’ using that same melody, butkind of resembled this vintage rock classic called ‘In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida,’ a piecefrom 1969 that was huge when I was a teenager. So the piece kind of sounds likethat. It’s not a piece of licensed music, it’s a piece of rock and roll which if you listenvery closely, the bass riff is taken from the sextet. So as much love and attention todetail as the filmmakers put in there, certainly is also in the score.”

“We finally managed to have a very rich score that comes only out of a few coreelements,” Heil summed up. “If we compare it to Perfume, we’d have to reduce it to asemi-tone motif and there are eight or nine different themes. [Cloud Atlas] is sort ofthe opposite, like Lawrence of Arabia, where you have that one melody that comesback in the movie all the time. I’ve been kind of preaching to everybody that I thinkthe Lawrence of Arabia method is better than the Perfume method. As cool as thePerfume score is and as rich as it is, it would be nicer to just have a themehappening more often and gluing together the movie. In this case, we have sixstories and we are the ones who have to glue them together. So we definitely workedhard on this melodic material and very consistently applied them. For the first timewe wrote a really classic film score with just a few themes and then worked them inas many ways as you could possibly imagine.”

Cloud Atlas is nothing if not ambitious. From its complicated structure to itssurprising emotional resonance, the film's "eternal recurrence" is an aural andvisual feast. Though Klimek jokes, “I don’t think we need visuals. It should have justbeen a black screen and our names up at the top for two and a half hours. That’show you get an Oscar nomination!”

—FSMO