TORONTO -- “Cloud Atlas,” among the most anticipated films of the season, had its world premiere on Saturday night at the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto. It's directed by the trio of Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer and Andy Wachowski, who wrote the adaptation of the popular 2004 David Mitchell novel.

As the festival’s Cameron Bailey noted in introducing the filmmakers, many declared the novel un-adaptable for the screen, in essence too big, too sprawling, too epic to be harnessed into a single movie. The story traverses six story lines that jump across some 500 years: a sailing ship returning from the Pacific Islands in 1849, a composer in pre-WWII Britain, San Francisco in 1975, the present day, the futuristic 2144 and some unspecified future when things have become a mixture of the primitive and the high-tech.

When the filmmakers took the stage, Andy Wachowski began by saying, “Hello, citizens” before noting, “We’ve never really introduced one of our films before so we weren’t sure quite how to do it. I said to go with – behold!”

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Lana Wachowski balked at speaking next, saying, “I’m not ready,” allowing Tykwer to make a few remarks. Then Lana Wachowski stepped to the microphone and said, “The movie speaks a lot about human courage, and the producers obviously had a lot of courage, or stupidness, to get this thing produced.”