How The Wachowski Siblings Made the Whole World Take The Red Pill Pt.2 💊
The filming, the story and the success of the great movie.
In the previous part of this article, we talked about the beginning of “The Matrix”, its authors and the casting for the main roles. In this part, we will tell you more about the filming process and the future of this sublime franchise.
Training, wires, and injuries
Hugo Weaving in the documentary “The Matrix Revisited” said that the Wachowskis warned him that he will practice kung fu a lot. He agreed without any doubt but in fact, it was harder than Weaving expected.
Andy and Larry are huge fans of Hong Kong action films.
“They’re miles ahead of American action films in terms of the kind of excitement that the action brings to the story. American filmmakers have gotten to the point where they create their fights in the editing room. Those types of sequences are just designed for a visceral, flash-cut impact, and the audience’s brains are never really engaged. There’s a bunch of quick cuts — bam! bam! bam! — and then it’s over; the fighting never involves the audience on a story level. Hong Kong action directors bring narrative arcs into the fights, and tell a little story within the fighting.”, said Larry in an interview for American Cinematographer.
That is why it is not surprising that the siblings decided to combine all the things they enjoyed in their movie and added genuine Hong Kong fights in “The Matrix”.
The action scenes were all-around main characters: Neo, Trinity, Morpheus and Agent Smith. They had to learn fighting fast, somersault and even wall running. The Wachowskis invited their idol Yuen Wo-ping, a famous Hong Kong director and stunt choreographer. He coordinated all fight sequences in “The Matrix” and also was a personal martial-arts trainer for core cast members.
Wo-ping was not just preparing actors but also filmed the fights from a good angle. He prepared Neo, Trinity, Morpheus, and Smith for wire-fu, the kung fu on wires. It was used for difficult and intricate tricks.
In Hong Long action movies wire-fu is commonly used. No matter whether the character is running, jumping or just getting up. Because of the wire-fu, all motions look more gracefull, easy and surreal.
“We thought that was perfect for The Matrix.”, said Larry in an interview for American Cinematographer.
Wo-ping planned to coach actors for 2 months but they were not physically prepared and the training process was extended to 4 months.
After 4 months all key cast members were ready for the filming, besides, Keanu Reeves. At the beginning of the training, he seriously injured his cervical spine. Regardless, Reeves continued to train hard, but then he found out that every swing can cause paralysis.
He decided to do surgery. However, it could not solve the problem entirely and Reeves was able to move only his hands. He had to protect his legs and neck, so Reeves started with stretching. A couple of months later, he started practicing and perfecting blows with a collar on his neck. You may notice that Reeves doesn’t do many movements with his legs. He does a couple of false hits because Reeves couldn’t do more.
Hugo Weaving underwent hip surgery and skipped some training days too. Laurence Fishburne got hit in the head and eyelid sliced open. Each injury reduced the training process which was not sufficient. However, all actors were excited about the film and did not give up, conversely, they trained even harder. That saved “The Matrix”. For example, Reeves practiced with the injured neck even on the weekend, although, the actors were supposed to rest.
Wo Ping created an individual training program for each of the main characters relying on their abilities and strength. Wo Ping said that Carrie-Anne Moss movements were initially beautiful and gracefull because of her womanly figure, Fishburne was good in jumping and somersaulting. Weaving movements were like he is a robot and Reeves was the one who honed all movements to perfection. After 4 hard months of tiring training, all of them perfected kung-fu and wire-fu, they moved to Australia.
Filming “The Matrix”
Warner Bros. executives said the production of “The Matrix” would cost almost $95 million in the United States. That is why they decided to film it in Australia and the Wachowskis were sent there. This decision was good news for them because Andy and Larry thought that Hollywood’s influence and control would be less. They always cherished their vision more than the Warner Bros. managers’ opinion.
The film crew arrived in Sydney in March 1998. Everyone was so happy and excited about the filming process but the team was tempered by one problem. Reeves’s spine still was not healthy.
He was not able to fight for some time and the Wachowskis had to reschedule the production of “The Matrix”. They decided to film the first simple scenes and postpone fights and action for later.
Everyone knows that the real world is transmitted through the cold, faint bluish tint, whereas the Matrix has an unnatural green color. However, it was not enough just to green the finished picture. Decorators, cameraman, and wardrobe had a lot of work to do to make viewers believe in this fake reality.
Owen Paterson, the production designer, created and built clear, monolithic, almost sterile environment for the Matrix and digital simulation.
This environment is severe. In this picture, you may notice that Anderson’s office consists of squares and rectangles. Other digital places like dojo, government building, and Neo’s apartment are almost the same.
The hovercraft “Nebuchadnezzar” has a different story. Geof Darrow, “The Matrix” concept artist, said that the ship was created before well before the beginning of the incident that is why it should look futuristic but fragile. He decided to show the facilities gloomy and with lots of hanging wires and pipes everywhere. Its opposite is the ideal ship from “Star Track”.
Paterson looked into shape and color Darrow’s sketches. He made “Nebuchadnezzar” almost alive. It suits well with the lifeless world and robotic beings but still looks like an ally of the crew. Even the wires are red and blue like arteries and veins. It is not just a ship, it is a living matter inside the steel exoskeleton. The fusion of engines and humans cuts across “The Matrix”.
Costumes are an iconic attribute of “The Matrix”. Kym Barrett, the costume designer, had to think of the materials for the costumes. Moreover, she faced the challenge of finding a way to make it look green in the Matrix. For the real world, the film crew tried not to use green, unless, for Tank’s monitors.
The costumes are black, perky, made from leather and latex. The costumes fit all actors perfectly during walking or tricks. Barrett created not only amazing and stylish looks but also thought out how to film complicated action scenes in it.
In the real world, actors are wearing rags. Their shirts are worn, punctured and grotty. It is another way to distinguish the Matrix from reality because the characters do not have time to keep up their appearances while hiding from pursuit. That is why even their hair is shaggy.
Barrett wanted viewers to guess evil in Agents Smith, Brown and Jones from the first sight. She created for them faceless, grey suits which are rather similar to the stereotype look from “Men in Black”.
Without Barrett not only costumes might look different but also the famous scene with The Woman in Red.
During filming the scene with the black cat, Barrett got the idea to repeat the Deja Vu effect on a larger scale. The Wachowskis liked this idea and decided to add lags in the scene near the fountain. They found a lot of siblings and triplets, dressed them and did their hair alike to create this effect. The result was really exciting. As it was supposed it was not eye-catching but only gave your subconscious a clue that something unusual is happening.
The main star of the fountain scene is The Woman in Red. Fiona Johnson, the Australian actress, played her. By 1997 she had only episodic roles in some TV shows. In “The Matrix” Johnson appears just for a few seconds too. However, this beautiful woman made a true commotion on the film set.
After “The Matrix” she had only one role. She played in the second episode of “Star Wars”. Some fans even created a hilarious theory that the action of both films is happening in the same universe.
You can find Johnson during the beginning of the episode. When Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker walked into the bar, a beautiful woman flirtatious is looking at Skywalker. Anakin is the chosen One as Neo. Funny coincidence, right? This coincidence becomes even funnier considering that the guy who tried to sell Kenobi junk was played by Matt Doran, Mouse from “The Matrix”.
The time has come to film the scene of a fight in the dojo. The crew was frightened about it. The choreography was incredibly complicated and the process might become more constrained because of Reeves’ injury.
Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne had rehearsed this scene a month before the beginning of the production. However, they spent eight months to learn all the actions. Although both actors moved synchronously and were able to improvise, filming this fight was very hard for the team.
Wo Ping praised Reeves for perseverance and diligence, and not in vain. He always tried to do his best but during this scene, his perseverance reached its peak. Because of the injury, he did the famous flying triple kick in an inappropriate way. Anyway, he did not want to stop filming, after all, Reeves ran out of gas, postponed the work until Monday.
It took 21 takes to film the Reeves’ flying triple kick.
The whole team was amazed by him. He burst to go into action, forgetting about moral and physical tiredness. Fishburne had a tough time too. Both drifted the studio stage out with bruises, scribes, and blisters, although they barely touched each other during filming.
The next difficult scene to shoot was the fight between Neo and Agent Smith. The filming process was going the right way. Reeves and Weaving were flying and somersaulting on wires. During the training process, both did not touch or beat each other because they did not want any injuries.
However, they had to hit each other for real at the filming, so that all scene looked natural. Chad Stahelski, a stuntman, doubled Reeves at critical times. In 1996 Stahelski was a stuntman in “The Pretender”. When he had a casting in Burbank, he cracked his head but anyway did not skip the casting. That day Stahelski passed the 1.5 hours audition and showed what he can do. The Wachowskis knew that Stahelski is a bright professional and they entrusted him entierly.
For example, he doubled Keanu on jumps from on high or hits the walls. Siblings entrusted him one of the riskiest fight scenes in “The Matrix”. He doubled Reeves when Neo hits the ceiling carrying Smith on his shoulders.
Everything was okay, but Chad and Weaving’s stand-in suddenly fell from a great height. Stahelski broke his knee-cap, put out shoulder and torn knee ligaments. Another stuntman who doubled Reeves almost plunged to death when Neo bumped into a counter.
This dangerous scene then became one of the most famous in action movies and it is, of course, one of “The Matrix” calling cards.
“The Matrix” is full of different interesting technical decisions that make this film iconic. For example, the scene when Neo and Trinity are rescuing Morpheus from The Agents. As we said before, the movie was shot in Sydney but the viewers had to see on the screen typical American city. The Wachowskis did not want to use a green screen and decided to film using translight (a large illuminated film backing typically used as a backdrop in the film). It was the biggest one in the world, near 58x12,2 meters.
Photos of Sydney was underneath this translight. They used a lot of pictures with different buildings which were combined in one huge photo using a computer program. Then it was printed and hanged in the studio. And then they placed a life-sized helicopter model in front of it.
The next challenge for the team was the water supply. During this scene, Morpheus and The Agents are dosed with water from the sprinkler system. It may sound easy but the crew had to take into account lots of non-obvious details.
The last scene to shoot was the awaking of Neo in the real world. Reeves lost 6 kilograms, totally shaved his hair and eyebrows. And again the filming was rather stressful. Reeves’ stuntman who was testing Neo’s capsule spent 8 minutes in ice-cold water until it was warmed. In the end, all went off quite well. The exhausted film crew went to rest, whereas editors’ torments had only just begun.
Special effects, bullet time and the most expensive scene of “The Matrix”
Long before the production process, the Wachowskis knew that they had to find a visual effect supervisor as soon as possible. However, everyone thought that their visual effects ideas are impossible to turn into reality and they would remain as a storyboard. Luckily, the siblings found John Gaeta.
He was 30 years old professional whos skills and ideas became the most valuable insights for the team. Yes, he’s the one who found out a way to realize the effect better known as “bullet time”.
Indeed, the bullet time effect is just slow-motion. It is not brand new. Before “The Matrix” John Woo used it to highlight some special moments in fight scenes. The problem was not to film in slow-mo. The film crew wanted the camera to revolve around the shooting objects.
“We wanted to shoot much of the action in super-slow-motion — up to 300 fps. For certain shots, we wanted to shoot high-speed while keeping the apparent movement of the camera at regular speed, which is impossible. In preproduction, we looked into the idea of a rocket camera, which we were going to shoot across the set at something like 100 mph while filming at 150 fps, but [visual effects supervisor] John Gaeta came up with a different process that became the basis for these sequences.” Larry in an interview for American Cinematographer.
John Gaeta found the way to do it. Motion recorded on a video is just a set of consecutive frames. He decided to use lots of photo cameras. They were put around the actors and synchronized so that the pictures were taken with millisecond accuracy.
Of course, shooting just the actors was not enough and they used the green screen to create required instruction of the city, etc. The film crew created new the production cycle.
The process begins with creating a computer simulation of the scene. It shows how all actors will move. The cameras are set up based on it. Then, you have to prepare a virtual terrain to impose the image. To make such a terrain, the film crew of “The Matrix” photographed the different locations and based on the photos recreated them.
Then the actors were shot on a chroma key. After that, they cleared the frames from unnecessary objects like wires, imposed them on the virtual area and added special effects. Here’s how each stage looked like to the filmmakers:
This process was very laborious. The scenes with bullet time, even if they lasted for a few seconds, took months of work.
The most difficult and expensive scene of “The Matrix” is when Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus are fleeing from The Agents using the helicopter and then it crashes into a skyscraper. Warner Bros. wanted to remove this scene from the movie because The Wachowskis had to create and make an incredible number of special effects. However, the siblings, of course, designed it carefully. They planned everything: how the glass will crack and from what angle they will shoot the helicopter, so the studio stepped back.
The scene was challenging to create because of the combination of special effects, miniatures, live shooting and computer graphics. The Wachowskis looked for and tested glass and explosives, which could be used to film the effect of “circles on water”, for three months. Then the decorators built a square glass wall with a side of 7.6 meters and pushed against it a model of the helicopter.
In this video, you can see almost everything that made up the scene: a preliminary simulation on a computer, live shooting on a green screen, a mock-up of a helicopter and the glass wall with explosives hidden behind it and a real explosion.
How “The Matrix” influenced our world?
“The Matrix” was released on March 31, 1999, in the USA and on April, 8 in Australia. Nobody knew what a great success it would be. However, not everyone was happy. Carrie-Anne Moss thought that her acting was weak and she ruined the whole movie. But fans didn’t agree with her. Trinity and other main characters became almost religious figures.
The Wachowskis were recognized as prophets. The movie was an incredible combination of breathtaking action and philosophical talks about the nature of reality. Such movies are exceptional even now. The critics and the audience shared an opinion that the movie was magnificent.
At the Oscars, the film took half of the “technical” awards: for the best editing, sound, sound editing, and visual effects.
Actors did not expect such fame to fall on them. Hugo Weaving’s double loved Agent Smith so much that he memorized all his lines and recited them all the time.
A woman once approached Carrie-Anne Moss and thanked her for the strong female image, adding that now she as an action scriptwriter will have more opportunities for creativity.
Zach Staenberg who edited “The Matrix,” said that people confessed that “The Matrix” changed their worldview.
Even Reeves, who had been filming for a long time and knew what fame was, could not imagine that one could be so imbued with the film and its characters. He was surprised that people go to “The Matrix” three and ten times.
The movie was also a blast in Hollywood. It was a wild card among such titans as “Fight Club”, “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace” and “American Beauty”. “The Matrix” was the last great movie of the millennia. “Fight Club” will be popular in the 2000s, “American Beauty” will become popular after the Oscar and “Star Wars” will disappoint half of the audience. Only “The Matrix” will be instantly recognized.
A new era has truly come. It showed, how important the author’s idea is: “The Matrix” didn’t have a single movie star in the credits, but it managed to earn an astonishing $463 million.
The DVD format, which was still very young at that time, also flourished thanks to “The Matrix”: the film was released on CDs in September 1999, and fans almost immediately sold out three million copies, by November 2003, 30 million discs were sold.
What’s next for the franchise?
The Wachowskis continued their career with varying degrees of success: the mediocre “Speed Racer” and the wonderful “V means Vendetta” and “Cloud Atlas”.
They did not want to return to “The Matrix”, but the press periodically wrote that the new part was about to be announced.
Finally, in August, Warner Bros. officially announced: the fourth “Matrix” will indeed be released, with Reeves and Moss returning to their previous roles, and Stephen Scrousey and Jeff Darrow will draw concepts and storyboards once again. Only Lana will direct it, Lily is not so much interested in science fiction and is also busy in another show.
SPOILER ALERT!
ComicBook wrote that filming will begin in Wachowskis’ hometown, Chicago, in February 2020. One can only wonder why Reeves and Moss will be in the film — Neo and Trinity died in the “Revolution”.
SPOILER ALERT!
Zach Penn, the screenwriter for another mysterious film in “The Matrix” universe, said Lana was preparing a sequel. The sequel about the resurrection? Who knows. Even less is known about Penn’s film, only that it will be a prequel.
For two decades, “The Matrix” has come a long way. It started at the pinnacle of success, then gradually went down and ended somewhere where viewers usually leave the failed parts of their favorite franchises.
Any series has the right for a triumphant return, and “The Matrix” seems to be lucky. Keanu Reeves liked the script of Lana Wachowski — after all, who else to believe, if not the Chosen One? 😎
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How The Wachowski Siblings Made The Whole World Take The Red Pill 💊
