How the Matrix created a bulletproof legacy

Before the release of this film, viewers did not see anything similar to this Wachowski science fiction creation, and did not know how much a shock awaits them

The film "The Matrix" turned 20 this year



Once in 1992, Lawrence Mattis, revealing his mail, found an unsolicited letter with a script from two unknown authors. It was a dark, disgusting, defiantly non-profit story of class struggle and cannibalism - just such a story that in Hollywood would want to tell an extremely small number of studio directors. However, Mattis was looking for just such a movie.



Just a few years before, Mattis, who was then a little under 30, quit his promising legal career and set up Circle of Confusion, a talent search company, to discover new authors and represent them. He opened an office in New York, despite the fact that he was constantly told that the most likely chances to find talent were in Los Angeles. And before he got this strange scenario, Mattis had already begun to doubt whether he should have listened to those tips. “By that time, I sold a bit of options at $ 500 each,” says Mattis. - I have already begun to think about how to return to jurisprudence. And then I received a letter from these two guys, with the caption 'Could you please read our letter?' ”



The script was called "Carnivore" and was a horror movie that developed in a free dining room where food was made from the bodies of rich people for the poor. “The script was fun, worked out, and it was clear from it that its author was well versed in cinema,” says Mattis. It was written by Andrew and Lawrence Wachowski [ since then changed sex / approx. perev. ], who called themselves "nerds from Chicago", which in the next years many colleagues and admirers will call simply "Wachowski".



By the time Wachowski signed up with Mattis, they had been working together for many years - as a child, they wrote scripts for radio shows, drew comics and came up with their own role-playing game. They were raised in South Side, a fairly non-poor area of ​​Chicago, their mother, nurse and artist, and father-businessman. Raising them, parents encouraged their interest in art, especially in cinema. “We saw absolutely all the films coming out then,” said Lana [n. Lawrence]. “I found them in the newspaper, circled them with a pen, and then I planned how we can see them all.”



Wachowski loved the dark classics of the 50s like Sunset Boulevard or Strangers on the Train, as well as thrillers of the 60s and 70s, such as Disgust or Conversation. One of the impressions of the movie screening, which was hard to repeat, occurred in 1982, when teenagers were taken to the replay of Blade Runner, a gloomy, sinister film noir about the future that was expelled from movie theaters almost immediately after the start of the rental. “Everyone hated Blade Runner except us,” Lana said.



Lana and Lily [n. Andrew] eventually dropped out of college; they founded their own construction company, while drawing comics and writing scripts. A significant part of their knowledge about making films was taken from the book “ How I made a hundred films in Hollywood without losing a dime ” by the famous independent director Roger Corman, who shot many class B films, for example, the 1960s Horror Shop. “We were inspired by this,” Lana said. “We wanted to try shooting a low-budget horror movie.” After completing the Carnivore scenario, they found Mattis in the agents directory. That time was great for finding new ideas for movies, no matter how eccentric, as the original script market exploded and the script authors became superstars. In 1990, Joe Esterhaz earned $ 3 million for the script of Basic Instinct, and the creator of Deadly Weapons, Shane Black, received a great review article in the Los Angeles Times after he earned $ 2 million for the script for the comedy action movie The Last Boy Scout. “Hollywood deals have been covered in the mainstream press,” says Mattis. “Every day, people managed to sell scripts for fabulous money.”



Mattis signed a contract with Wachowski shortly after reading The Carnivore. The gross scenario about eating the rich practically guaranteed that no one would shoot it, however, he attracted enough attention to the brothers so that their next scenario - the dark story of a 1995 duel of two hitmen of “Hired Assassins” - was bought for $ 1 million. During this transaction, Wachowski was engaged in the repair of the parents' house. Soon after, they left the construction business forever.

Hollywood connection

A variant of the movie “Assassins,” shown in cinemas - with Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas, from director Richard Donner, who shot Deadly Weapons and Warner Bros, shocked Wachowski. Their script was rewritten, and now Lana speaks of him as a "miscarriage." The brothers decided to tighten control of their next film “Communication”, a thriller with Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tili, playing lovers, tricking millions of mafia bosses into cheating. "Communication" was the directorial debut of the brothers, and they immediately made it clear who was the main thing on the set. On one version of the script, they wrote a warning: "This is a sex scene, and we are not going to cut it."



After debuting at the Sundance festival in January 1996, the movie Svyaz made a strong impression, and after it was released in the fall, it became a small hit - especially in Warner Bros. offices. The studio was just watching how their erotic payback thriller, an expensive remake of Diabolique , a French film from the 50s, could not attract viewers. And then, as Loretsno di Bonaventure, then director of studio development, one of the chairmen of the studio’s board of directors, Terry Semel, said “Communication” and exclaimed: “Damn it - this thing probably cost a small part of our picture, but it’s so it turned out interesting. ”



Di Bonaventure already knew which film Wachowski wanted to shoot further. They already brought the script - which confused almost everyone who came across it. The new Wachowski story was so bold and futuristic that one could only read it and think: what is the Matrix?



For most of the 90s, during a time free of writing random scripts and building elevator shafts, the brothers fantasized about creating an NF comic that could accommodate all of their cultural icons. “We were interested in a lot,” Lily said, listing their common interests: the modernization of mythology, the relationship of quantum physics with Zen Buddhism, the study of our own lives. ” They also loved Hong Kong action movies such as The Space Odyssey 2001 and the NF Noir film by Jean-Luc Godard 1965 Alphaville ; they liked the possibilities of the emerging Internet; they adored Homer's Odyssey, which each of the brothers read many times.



Wachowski handwritten filled notebook after notebook with his ideas about what they called the “Matrix”. Their creative sessions were held to the white noise of aggressive rock Rage Against the Machine and Ministry. As a result, they composed a concept for a comic book and decided to unload whole years of concepts and sketches into one scenario. Their ingenious screenplay for the movie The Matrix describes the life of a young, bored office worker moonlighting as a hacker named Neo. One evening, Neo meets Morpheus, the mysterious sage, revealing to him that all people live in computer simulations controlled by evil computers called the Matrix. Morpheus offers Neo a choice: swallow a blue pill and return to his boring office life, and live calmly and not noticing anything in a fake reality. Or swallow a red pill and undergo a transformation-changing consciousness, acquire many opportunities, and ultimately defeat the Matrix - fulfilling a prophecy that says that he is “the chosen one”. Neo picks a red pill and begins his journey to the armed super-soldier who owns kung fu with a completely understandable reaction: “Wow.”



Mattis, a college student in philosophy, noticed the similarities between The Matrix and the ideas of Rene Descartes, a 17th-century French thinker who wrote that a person is unable to recognize true reality. “After reading the script for the first time, I called them and said: Terrific! You wrote a script about Descartes! But how can I sell it now? ”Mattis began handing out their script in 1995, around the time that the Internet — where you had to go on dialup, and where mostly scientists, hackers and military personnel met — was gradually turning into a broadband social phenomenon. Online, reality has been subject to change. By choosing a nickname or even an email address, the user got a chance to rewrite his own existence and create a completely new version of himself - a new name, a new gender, a new hometown, a new anything. People entered virtual worlds every day, and the script of The Matrix by Wachowski asked them a question: Now that we can create as many realities as we want, how do we know which one is real?



The question was timely, although it was wrapped up in a script full of action, plot twists, chases, endless firing; there was even a helicopter crashing into a skyscraper. However, there was no tablet that could convince most studio directors that Matrix was a viable film. The only company that showed real interest was Warner Bros, which already bought the script for Matrix many years ago, and then got rid of it when the duet worked on Svyaz.



“No one understood him,” says di Bonaventure, one of the first proponents of the film, along with producer Joel Silver. - They started asking: And how does it work? I am sitting in a room, but actually live in a car? What kind of crap is this? ”Di Bonaventure asked Wachowski to cut the script - in which there were three films of ideas - and proposed to first shoot Svyaz to prove that they could be directors. But even after the success of the film, Warner Bros executives had to be convinced. Wachowski ordered from the artist Geoff Darrow, the author of hyperdetailed comics, drawings of all the technological stuff of The Matrix, including The Sentinel, a war machine resembling an electric insect, and The Power Station, which receives energy from bodies. Wachowski also hired artist Steve Skroce to draw nearly 600 detailed storyboards, breaking the film into separate scenes.



Finally, Wachowski posted all of his materials to directors Semele and Bob Daly. “It was an unusual performance,” says di Bonaventure. “One of Wachowski was telling a story, and the other imitated sound effects.” After that, according to the memoirs of di Bonaventure, Semel asked the Executive Director whether the company will work on the Matrix. "I thought for half a second, and said: We definitely won’t lose money." The budget of the Matrix was estimated at $ 60 million, and this was a pretty big investment in an idea that cannot be expressed in one sentence. However, it was much less than the amount that the company spent on the movie "Batman and Robin", a catastrophically overestimated movie from the famous franchise, which everyone had already forgotten by the end of 1997. Warner Bros, like other movie companies, noticed that viewers began to tire of endless remakes and restarts. They needed new adventures, new ideas. “The sequels were losing ground,” says di Bonaventure. - Many genres were bent: comedy action films, films about police buddies. We knew that we needed something new. "



His bosses agreed with him. Wachowski promised to give $ 60 million if they make films in Australia, where it will be much cheaper. After years of waiting for the nerds from Chicago, they will finally be able to create their own “Matrix”. Now they only had to find the Favorites.

Searching for Favorites

By the end of the 90s, Keanu Reeves's career could be called one word: failure. The decade began with promising accomplishments when Reeves played an undercover cop in the movie “On the Crest of the Wave”, a time-traveling metal fan in The Adventures of Bill and Ted, and a gentle prostitute man in “My Private Idaho” - and that’s all one 1991 year. The success of the 1994 high-speed thriller Speed, released a few years later, seemed to promise to turn Reeves into the next star of a tough-nut action movie. Instead, he moved from one strange and incomprehensible point to another in his career. These were the historical tearful melodrama Walk in the Clouds and the modern tearful melodrama Feeling Minnesota, not to mention worthless action films like Johnny Mnemonics. Towards the end of the decade, when Reeves was barely over 30, he began to worry a little about his place in Hollywood. He recalls how he worried about whether he had disappeared from the screens and whether any studio would like to deal with him.



He was worried not in vain. He recently finished acting in Warner Bros' Devil's Advocate as a lawyer who went against Satan. After the release in 1997, the film is destined to become a small hit, but during the casting for The Matrix, Reeves was not in the forefront of the list of candidates for Neo. Dee Bonaventure says that this role was offered to Will Smith (but he wanted to make Wild Wild West), Brad Pitt (who had just finished “Seven Years in Tibet”) and Leonardo DiCaprio (who did not want to star in the next film with special effects after “ Titanic "). "It got to the point that we proposed the role of Sandra Buloc, promising to change Neo gender." She also refused.



In early 1997, Reeves ended up at Warner Bros headquarters in Burbank, California. He came to his first meeting with Wachowski, who shortly before had sent him his script for The Matrix. “When I first read the script,” Reeves said, “my blood rejoiced.” That day the brothers showed Reeves some of their best practices, and by the end of the dialogue it became clear that this meeting would not be the last. “They told me they wanted me to train four months before filming,” Reeves recalls. “And I grinned broadly, and said yes.” Lana notes: “We knew that the film would require manic commitment, and Keanu was our maniac.”



Reeves also adored NF and philosophy, and did not blink an eye when Wachowski asked him, in preparation for the shoot, to read such a treatise as Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation , written in 1981. “One of the main misconceptions about Keanu is that people do not consider him smart,” says di Bonaventure. - Perhaps this happened with films about Bill and Ted. But Keanu gives me books that I just can't figure out. And in Keanu Wachowski found the intellectual seeker they needed. ”



The hunt for an actor for the role of Morpheus, the calm and impassioned guide of Neo to the Matrix, turned out to be even longer. Warner Bros offered these roles to stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Michael Douglas, and both refused. Wachowski insisted on the candidacy of Laurence Fishbourne, a teenager who starred in the epic and tough film Francis Ford Coppola about Vietnam “Apocalypse Today”, and earned an Oscar nomination, just like for the role of the brutal Ike Turner in “What Love Can Do” 1993 of the year. They met with the actor in the summer of 1997 at a boxing match in which Mike Tyson bit off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear. “I had a dream about a man in mirrored glasses talking in riddles,” Lana Fishburn later said, “and when I met you and heard your voice, I realized that it was you.”



But the owners of the studio were worried that Fishburne, despite the fact that he earned awards from Emmy and Tony, was not a well-known actor outside the United States for this role. They wanted to take Val Kilmer, who had recently played The Dark Knight in the 1995 hit Batman Forever. However, he earned the reputation of being too capricious actor during the filming of the recent remake of “The Island of Dr. Moreau” (and for this he had to try, given that his partner was the legendary brawler Marlon Brando, who part of the filming went around the site with an ice bucket on his head). “Wachowski heard all these stories about Val,” says di Bonaventure, “and I said, 'Yes, but we’ll make a film.” And we met with him at the Bel Air Hotel, where he proved to us that Morpheus should be the main character. A few minutes after the start of this meeting, I already knew that nothing would come of it. " Soon Kilmer dropped out of the competition, and Fishburne got the role, saying that he always imagined Morpheus as "a hybrid of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader, with a little admixture of Yoda."



The third main role, for which it was necessary to find an artist, was the role of Trinity, an ambitious and nimble operative, helping Morpheus aboard their underground ship Nebuchadnezzar. Jada Pinkett Smith auditioned for the role, “but Keanu and I didn’t work together,” she said. “There was no chemistry.” In the end, Wachowski chose Carrie-Anne Moss, an actress of Canadian origin, who starred in such television dramas of the 90s as Models Inc and the TV series F / X (as well as in the Canadian fantasy series The Matrix). As part of the multi-day screenings, Moss sparred and trained with stuntmen. Then she said that "I could not walk for several days." Wachowski wanted the actors to perform most of the physical tricks, so that there was no need to do the gluing when changing to stuntmen. Moss says: “I remember thinking: Well, they do not seriously consider that I will do all this, such as jumping from one building to another. Of course I'm not going to do this! ”

Training days

In the fall of 1997, before the start of filming, the Matrix team spent several months in a huge deprived of excesses warehouse in Burbank, where the actors had to endure daily training under the guidance of Yuen Wu Ping, the legendary Chinese director and battle director, author of such a hit as “The Drunken Master” , a breakthrough kung fu movie with 1978 Jackie Chan. The actors who worked with the stunt team of Yuen were involved in stretching, striking, sparring - and all this for many hours. Sometimes they were tied to ropes and transported above the ground - and then the stars of a high-tech film with great ambitions hung over a bunch of shabby mattresses. “After the first day, I was completely shocked and overwhelmed,” said Hugo Weaving, who played the role of Agent Smith, the obsessed enemy of Neo. “I realized how poorly prepared I was physically.” Soon after training began, Weaving injured his hip, which caused him to walk on crutches.



Reeves also had to be careful. In the late 90s, the actor found out that he had seriously damaged his spine. “It used to be, I fell in the shower in the morning because I was losing balance,” he said. As a result, he found out that he had two vertebrae fused. “Dr. Keanu told him he had to have surgery, or Keanu will be paralyzed,” says Barry M. Osborne, executive producer of The Matrix. Reeves had surgery before filming, and when he arrived at Burbank for training, he wore a neck corset and could not stab for several months. Fortunately, there were other ways of preparing: during pre-production and filming, the actor said, they did a “kung fu dojo” for them, where the film crew could “warm up and watch movies about kung fu”.



Wachowski wasn’t tormented by such tough pursuits, since they only needed to write a script and direct for a film worth tens of millions. And yet they were always somewhere nearby. Wachowski did not consider themselves Hollywood stars, Moss said during the filming of the film. “They were from Chicago. They wore shorts. They wore caps and watched basketball games. ”



Their love for their Chicago Bulls team was so strong that they asked a Warner Bros satellite dish to watch the 1998 NBA Finals matches. They also insisted on attracting many of their Svyaz co-stars to the set, including cameraman Bill Pope, editor Zack Stenberg and Joe Pantoliano, whom the brothers took on the roles of Cypher, a team member of Morpheus and Trinity. Cypher - the most skeptical inhabitant of the "Matrix", and in a sense, causing the greatest sympathy. Having lived for many years in a high-tech hole in the real world, he betrays his friends to escape to the blue pill and life in the Matrix.



Pantoliano played charismatic sneak for years, the most famous of which were such hits of the 80s as "Dunce" and "Risky Business"; in the last, his hero Guaido mocked Tom Cruise. However, he had never had to prepare for the film as intensely as for the Matrix. “They wanted me to get the best form in my whole life,” says the actor, who was in his 40s at the time of the shoot. “Don't drink, eat paired vegetables, work out in the gym.” Yes, I, damn it, a characteristic actor! The trainer they hired said to me: "You can do three hundred press lifts a day and not achieve anything." So I talked to a friend of mine, a plastic surgeon, and decided to undergo liposuction at a cost of $ 8,000. " Pantoliano sent the invoice for the studio’s procedure, stating that liposuction is under research and development (he says he wasn’t paid).

Bullet time

After the Matrix team finished redrawing their bodies at Burbank, they were taken to Sydney, where Wachowski was supposed to film his famous NF story. For years they imagined what the Matrix might look like, and prepared everything for work as clearly as possible. Months of physical training. Many pages with detailed storyboards. Many hours of meetings with an explanation of what is happening. But one of the most difficult tests on the set of the film was one of his greatest revelations: bullet time .



This term appears near the end of the script, in a scene where Neo is attacked on the roof of a skyscraper.The Matrix agent Jones shoots him at close range, but at this point Neo had already spent so much time in the Matrix that he had learned to manipulate it. Here is how this moment is described in the script of the film from August 1998:



Jones gun makes a loud sound at the moment when we enter the liquid space of bullet time.



The air boils from pieces of lead, similar to angry flies, and Neo wriggles, bends and deviates from them. In a neo-impossible way, it bends backward, holding one hand on the ground, and a spiral moving gray ball cuts into his shoulder.



Wachowski’s description of this scene was concise, interesting, and completely incomprehensible. "Liquid space"? What does that even mean? And how will Keanu Reeves, right after the neck surgery, “be impossible to lean back”? For a long time no one was sure how to shoot bullet time, including Wachowski themselves. “People said: Well, how are you going to do this? - Lana recalls. “We said: We are working on it.”



The idea of ​​a bullet-time is that the camera should move at normal speed, but shoot everything slowly [ more precisely, shoot fast, so that later it looks slow on the screen / approx. perev.]. This was supposed to create the effect of "liquid space", in which it seems that the all-seeing camera is able to penetrate anywhere and remove any detail. Wachowski wanted the picture to "go beyond the bounds of reality." But the reality of filming resisted. At first, the brothers studied the idea of ​​placing the camera, which shot in slow motion, on a high-speed device such as a rocket - this idea was dismissed for many reasons, in particular, due to security problems and impracticality. Instead, they wanted to make a bullet time with the help of digital visual effects, which recently allowed filmmakers not only to create new creatures and galaxies, but also to change the world we know.



For decades, San Francisco-based Industrial Light & Magic, founded by George Lucas in the mid-70s to shoot his first Star Wars movie, dominated the visual effects world. But the surge in CGI in the 90s spawned many small competitors, including Mass Illusions (later renamed Manex Visual Effects). The breakthrough of the company was the 1998 drama with Robin Williams “Where Dreams May Come,” which developed in the luxurious ambience of life after death, completely created on a computer. The film brought Oscar to Manex for visual effects. But by the end of the decade, the company was still operating in the old building of the disbanded military base in San Francisco Bay.The tattered hangar was filled with empty dashes and the remains of broken computers - Manex Vice President of Technology Kim Libreri described it as "a strange techno-garden from dead electronics." While working there, you understood that the organizations that should protect you - and the technologies on which their work is based - are as unreliable as you are. And sometimes they can even turn against you. At Manex headquarters, “if you blow your nose, something black comes out,” says Libreri. “It looked like something was eating us up.”- says Libreri. “It looked like something was eating us up.”- says Libreri. “It looked like something was eating us up.”



This environment was suitable for creating such a rich and intrusive world as the Matrix world, consisting of 0 and 1. Libreri and the chief effects supervisor John Geta first met Wachowski in 1996, when the directors were just honing their script. “They tried to figure out how to express what they had in their heads,” Geta says, and notes that Wachowski wanted to evoke “a sense of virtual reality, power over time and space, while remaining tied to physical cameras.” The concept seemed overly ambitious, especially for the two filmmakers who had never before made films full of effects. “People were very skeptical about Wachowski’s ability to create bullet time,” says Libreri. - But it was already difficult to get artists to work on the Matrix. Some of them said:Keanu Reeves? Virtual reality? Are you filming another Johnny Mnemonics? ”



Bullet-time technology should have come in handy in several critical Matrix scenes, including a showdown with Reeves on the roof. On a set entirely made up of green screens, Reeves was tied to cables and placed in the center of converging semicircles consisting of 120 cameras. The cables bent Reeves to the ground, bending his body at an angle of 90 degrees, and the cameras around him sequentially and very quickly worked. The picture combined from their frames circled the actor around while he fell back. At the same time, two cinema cameras filmed its deflection. Later, all these elements were gathered together, a digital background and several flying bullets were added to them.



This one frame took almost two years and about $ 750,000 to pay for computer special effects. This investment quickly proved worth it. Libreri remembers one of the Matrix’s internal views, during which Reeves, sitting in the front row, began to recline in his chair, recreating his “roof” arch. At the same viewing, the team was looking at another key scene with effects, in which the camera goes around Trinity when it jumps and kicks the cop. The Libreri says, “Joel Silver got up and said: Here it is! Here everyone jumps up and yells! ”



The Manex team will take more than 400 digital frames for The Matrix, and some of its members will suddenly appear in the frame, starring in extravagant scenes. One day off, Diana Giorgiutti, a digital effects producer, helped with a complex scene with a helicopter over Sydney's business center, and her parents nearby called her. “They ask: You don’t make a movie there, by any chance? - says Giorgiutti. “And I answer: Yeah, I was hung on a cable to the fence on the 44th floor of the building.”



Giorgiutti became close to Wachowski during filming, she often sat in their office when they complained about problems with the studio and obstacles during filming. She asked them if they would like to share the responsibilities of the director and save time. “We don’t do that,” one of the brothers told her. “We work together as one person.”



And during the filming of The Matrix, this united front never wavered. Filming in Australia geographically estranged the brothers from Warner Bros, and gave them some autonomy. “It seemed like we were a secret here,” says costume designer Kim Barrett. But sometimes filmmakers had to fight with the studio. “The Warners were worried about the budget,” says producer Osborne, noting that the studio had already chosen scenes that could be cut if the budget started to go beyond.

Decisive moment

The studio tried to realize this threat at least once. After about two-thirds of the material had been shot, Wachowski called in the editor Zach Stanberg and showed him the email they received from the director of Warner Bros. It said that the directors were exceeding the budget, and that some scenes needed to be cut. “They shot that morning, then left for lunch,” Stanberg says. “But they didn’t return from lunch.”



As a result, the producer sent Stanberg to the brothers' office, where they watched the Bulls game. “They had a way of talking like the twins had their own language,” Stanberg recalls. “And they said that if they don’t have these scenes, they won’t have a movie, and then the studio will have to find someone else to finish shooting.” A few hours later Wachowski called from the studio and told them not to worry about the budget. “They seemed to play poker, believing that they had good cards in their hands, and they were right,” Stanberg says. And he adds: “The Matrix shooting went beyond the schedule and budget, but it was filmed on Wachowski’s terms.”



The situation was also helped by the fact that Stenberg glued together several early scenes and sent them to Burbank to reassure the directors. “The studio could see that the movie was very special,” says Osborne, “and it helped calm the situation.”



One of the things Warner Bros especially liked even in the form of a draft was a shoot-out with flying walls in the closed lobby of a skyscraper. This is a very physically intense scene in which Neo demonstrates a fourfold kick, and Trinity passes with a wheel, pushing against the wall. Moss was especially worried about this trick: “On the weekend, before I had to do it, I cried at the training site, and said: I can’t do it! I can't handle it! ”She said. An hour before filming, practicing with the trainers, she injured her ankle and fell to the floor; she moaned “oh no, oh no” while stuntmen massaged her back. She was able to perform the trick after this during training, but when the shooting started, the trick was given to her with great difficulty, and she cried out something that was very similar to the loud, suffering “FUCK!”



In the lobby scene, Moss and Reeves run and fight, dressed in impossibly tight leather outfits. Costume designer Barrett rummaged through fabric suppliers in New York, looking for inexpensive and lightweight materials, such as vinyl, that would give the characters a cool and brilliant BDSM look - and not stand out too much from Wachowski's story. “The script says a lot about how people appear and merge with the world,” says Barrett, before Matrix, who worked with director Baz Lurmann and his 1996 rococo film Romeo + Juliet. “I thought, how can I do this so that you are not noticed?” The solution was the shiny Trinity form. “I wanted her to move like an oil slick on water,” says Barrett, “with several layers of reflections.”



All the costumes from The Matrix were supposed to reflect the adventures of each character. Reeves’s long black jacket, which he wears during the battle on the roof, looks like a cloak with a hood - in it he faces the Matrix face to face - “was sewn to create the impression of an ancient thing, with a church admixture,” says Barrett. “I wanted him to change from an insecure hero to a character who took responsibility.” To work on the "Matrix" Barrett also had to come up with a lot of dark glasses, for almost every leading character - this is a reference to the theme of the characters' secret identities. “And all the lenses were mirrored,” she says. “Their eyes are visible only when we need it.”



Like many people who worked on the film, Barrett worked more than expected at first. Warner Bros was allowed to extend the shoot for 118 days instead of 90, giving the brothers enough time to shoot almost all the scenes they needed. On the last day of Reeves filming, at the end of the summer of 1998, he was almost naked in a giant techno-pod when Neo's energy was drained by spider-like robots - a grim reality awaiting us all in the Matrix. For the sake of the role, Reeves has already survived the operation, as well as several months of training that changed his body. But on the last day, Neo needed a final transformation - before shooting, he sat in the bath, shaving his hair from the eyebrow, head and entire body.



After that, the hairless Reeves noticed that people had difficulty meeting his eyes. But if they looked at him strangely now, then it was necessary to wait for the moment when they would watch the Matrix.

Another threat

During the months leading up to the release of the strange NF tale from Wachowski, Warner Bros had one major excitement: The Phantom Menace. The first Star Wars movie for more than 15 years was due out in the summer of 1999, at about the same time that Warner Bros planned to release The Matrix. But a visually intense R-rated cyber adventure will surely be crushed by the “Phantom Menace” hanging over this competition in the manner of a multi-million Death Star. The studio asked Wachowski to speed up the process of post-processing the film so that the Matrix could be released in the spring.



And the rest, Warner Bros confidence in his investment worth more than $ 60 million only grew. After one successful screening, the film’s creative team was invited to meet with directors Bob Daily and Terry Semel, and a dozen top managers. “Terry said: We love this film,” recalls editor Zack Stanberg. “They only asked us to cut five to ten minutes.” We cut out five and a half, and they did not even look at the final result. ” At the same meeting, after a screening, Semel predicted that "the film will make a ton of money." But Stanberg says the studio’s approach to filming was not based on the pursuit of profit alone. “For me, Matrix is ​​a studio version of a novice director’s film. She was treated almost the same way Warner Bros treated Stanley Kubrick's work: they sent him money, and didn’t really get it. ”



And everything became clear immediately after the release of the film on March 31, 1999. The premiere was set on Wednesday evening to warm up interest before the Easter weekend. In the first five days, Matrix earned almost $ 37 million, and instantly restarted Reeves' career as an actor in the title role. And more importantly, from the very beginning, The Matrix has inspired countless discussions of the film’s deeper messages - these conversations surfaced on the Internet and lasted for months and then years. For some, this movie was just a roof-breaking action movie, ending in an incredible scene: Reeves, dressed in his black coat and dark glasses, flies off into the sky under the roar of Rage Against the Machine with the song “Wake Up”.



For others, the “Matrix” became an incentive for awakening, an attempt to comprehend the confusion and anxiety that gained momentum in the late 90s, when everything seemed to be going too well. “That decade was so comfortable,” says Mattis, a longtime manager at Wachowski. - Markets grew, people earned money. However, something was wrong. In all this comfort, people began to think that something was missing. ”



The "Matrix" stimulated the viewer to create their own slow, bullet-time point of view on the world around them: who controls my life? Am I happy, or am I happily distracted? Do I exist? Such existential concern was not unique to the 90th. However, it intensified during the decade when technology began to become soothing - and so controlling. When Wachowski began to invent the "Matrix", the web was still in its infancy. But after the release of the film, more than a quarter of homes in the United States have connected to the Internet - and in subsequent years this number will grow rapidly. Home computers, which were once used for editing texts, storing recipes and playing The Oregon Trail , now supported webcasts, multiplayer games, avatar-cluttered forums and comments, and various other time-consuming pleasures. Soon there will be access to many hours of free music thanks to the appearance of the Napster service in June 1999, one of the founders of which will be college student Sean Fanning, who loves the film The Matrix. When the hacker Neo, who has turned into a hero, describes his ascent to “a world where everything is possible,” he voices the optimism of the brave new web. “The Matrix is ​​10 years ahead of its time,” says Tom Tykver, author of Run, Lola, Run, and cites this movie as the first to try to make sense of how the online world is gradually becoming “our second home.”



However, this immersion in digital nirvana had all sorts of side effects: system-breaking viruses, the emergence of a new disease called "Internet attachment," the panic regarding the " 2000 problem ." By the end of the 20th century, a belief appeared that cars could become smarter than us. This view has fueled NF movies for decades, from Space Odyssey 2001 to Terminator. But now in the real world, it began to seem that humanity was losing its advantages. In 1996 and 1997, the chess legend Garry Kasparov played against Deep Blue, IBM's supercomputer, in a series of matches that were regarded as a battle between a man and a machine. “I'm just a man,” Kasparov said annoyed after losing in one of the games. “When I see something that I can’t understand, I’m scared.”



This fear was fueled not only by The Matrix - just a few weeks after its release, a couple of films appeared showing a no less shocking future. In the movie Existence, coined and directed by brilliant madman David Cronenberg, Jennifer Jason Lee plays the famous video game developer, whose latest creation takes players to such a believable fictional world that terrorists defend reality. In the Noir movie Thirteenth Floor, which references the Blade Runner, thrill seekers are transported to virtual Los Angeles in the 1930s, and this adventure inevitably leads to killing and madness in the real world.



Both films take viewers down the rabbit hole of virtual reality. However, the Matrix overshadowed them with both fears and opportunities. In this film, cars keep people in a soothing trance, sucking existence out of them (“Fear the Future,” one of the film’s earliest slogans advised), while also offering a way to fight: revealing the truth is a red pill. In the world of Wachowski Neo, agreeing to take a pill, breaks his mind, and grows into a utopian reality hidden by the Matrix, and then goes on a larger and poorly defined quest for freedom.



“In our world, the Matrix is ​​everywhere,” Lana said. - People accept the ways of thinking imposed on them, not trying to develop their own. Freethinking people question any Matrix, any system of thoughts or beliefs - be it political, religious or philosophical. ”



The reality was right in front of you if you looked closely enough. The question was, would you like to live in a world that sometimes goes beyond the understanding of any person.