The Matrix: Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, this show
that brings you the secret histories and little alone fascinating
facts and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows
and more. We are your two ones and zeros of
wonderfully zany facts. I'm Alex Heigel, your.

Speaker 1 (00:24):
Bent spoons of finality. That is that okay, and I
have Jordan run talk and we know hung food. That's
not true, but you do, don't you.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
I know taekwondo ah and some more time. But I
do not have an unction other than what I've seen
in Jackie Champions, which is probably a lot. Yeah, I'm comfortable.
I'm comfortable saying I've seen Legend of Drunken Master enough
times that I could drunk and box someone and have um. Jordan,
I'm just kidding. I've never been in a fight. Don't
get scared, advertisers. I desperately need money, Jordan. Today, we

(00:57):
are here to talk about one of the most icon
films of the past quarter century, a movie that flawlessly
blends old school martial arts and action movie fundamentals with
a new understanding of how the growing digital world affected
us all That is right, my friend. We are talking friends, listeners,
romans and so forth. That's right, we are talking about

(01:20):
the Matrix perfect film, No Notes episode over. What can
you say when this came out, I was primed to
think it was the coolest thing ever, and I was right,
and I have not been proved otherwise, So I mean, it's.

Speaker 1 (01:32):
Just it's a really researching.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
Of this for this episode like made me realize how
finally balanced on a knife edge of production, this whole
thing was, Like it could have done so badly any
of their casting, alternate castings, like if the technology had
looked a little bit bittier, if the people hadn't been
able to submit to four months of training to learn
kung fu, like it all could have sucked so hard.

(01:58):
And instead we got a masterpiece. And we got a
masterpiece that is so timeless and yet timely because it
came out in nineteen ninety nine, like we had stud
modems like modems are in this movie. But the national
interest slash panic over y two K was building, and
you know, people were already starting to theorize about how

(02:19):
the Internet was going to change all of our lives
cock cough for the worst. Jordan I'm guessing though, that
black leather gunfights and large kicks were not exactly your
wheelhouse as a preteen, though.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
That part of it was not. But I also had
a very seldom discussed flirtation with computers and technology when
I was a kid. My mom was a computer programmer,
and so we were probably one of the first houses
in the neighborhood that had the Internet and you know,
Windows ninety five and all the cutting edge technology stuff.
And I remember I remember being very skeptical of the

(02:49):
Internet because I was such a you know, just give
me books, give me big stacks of books, that's what
I want. And I remember my mom sold it to
me by saying, Jordan, you can look up the entire
passenger manifest of the type planet and it only takes
two minutes to download a word page. Yeah, And I
was like, what, There's a whole world out there, And

(03:12):
so that was very I was just for somebody who's
is like into old timey things, like I have a
lava lamp and a record player next to me. I
was surprisingly an early adapter to the Internet. And you know,
the characters in media that I identified with as a child,
they weren't usually the kids that went out on the adventure,
they were usually the nerdy ones who stayed home by

(03:33):
the computer and got the chair, the exact guy in
the chair with the with the headset Mike or walkie
talkie like relaying crucial information from the computer screen. That
was like who I always identified with, Like Penny from
Inspector Gadget was one of these figures. And the River
Phoenix character in my beloved Explorers movie. And you know
I've romanticized inventors. I love Doc from Back to the

(03:56):
Future and the Rick Morana's character Wayne Zelensky from The
Honey Shrunk the Kids movies, and one of my favorite
movies was Short Circuit, about a guy who builds robots.
So yeah, despite my penchant for all things retro, I
was into tech stuff and the whole kind of hacker,
not really the aesthetic, but just that sort of techno
punk vibe. I like that, at least before The Matrix

(04:19):
birthed a whole subgenre of hacker want to be people.
And there were a lot of kids at my school
who got long trench codes from the Salvation Army in
the wake of this movie coming out, and did like
their interpretation of Kung Fu moves in the courtyard at lunch. So,
I mean, it's basically it's what you told me about
Van Halen. I do not begrudge this movie. Their bastard

(04:39):
sons as unpleasant as they could be. But yeah, this
movie whips. I mean, it's the Matrix. And as you say,
the timing of it was perfect because it seemed to
come at this point at the dawn of the New millennium,
when the Internet was taking off, singularity seemed to be near,
and the line between reality and computers seemed to be blurring.
And now we are at a point when we literally

(05:00):
don't know what's real. So that's cool. And we describe
our chosen reality as being pilled, which is a phrase
taken directly from this movie, as we'll touch on. Yeah,
so pression in a terrifying way.

Speaker 2 (05:15):
Yeah, deeply. I mean, it's funny to me. You're not
like a Wachowski's fan, like you don't know their other stuff.

Speaker 1 (05:21):
I gather not really. No, In fact, I don't know.
I maybe have seen the first Matrix sequel, I don't
think i've seen the third, and I've definitely not seen
the fourth, which I kind of forgot existed until today.

Speaker 2 (05:33):
Yeah, I hate that fourth movie and I've gotten so
many arguments about it online, but they remained fascinating to
me because they just love to use an analogy from
a sport. I barely understand they're always swinging for the
fences every time they're at the plate, you know, because
they just took their matrix money and poured it into
stuff like V for Vendetta from the famously difficult to

(05:56):
adapt Alan Moore. They a speed racer film that people
still go to bad for, you know, and then they
did these two big, clunky sci fi things that lost
a lot of money, like Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending,
and then they made a Netflix series that didn't do well.
And it's just like, I applaud their vigor and in

(06:18):
making movies that do not seem to connect.

Speaker 1 (06:21):
The same way that this one has. God love them.
It's like good James Cameron. It's like not evil James Cameron.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
I mean, it's James Cameron if it's yeah, I don't know,
I don't know if I can cot in that comparison.
It's James Cameron if he didn't get results.

Speaker 1 (06:37):
Yeah, okay, wait Claire.

Speaker 2 (06:39):
Anyway, so from the grueling training that Keanu and most
of the rest of the cast underwent to become Neo
and the rest to the new technology the production innovated
to build the film's world to the equally depressing and
inspiring shadow the film cast twenty five years later. Here's
everything you didn't know about the Matrix.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
Who Which housekis?

Speaker 2 (07:07):
Lily and Lana were born in Chicago, where high school
classmates remember them as Dungeons and Dragons players who were
into theater and their Magnet School's TV program.

Speaker 1 (07:17):
Which is just such a spot on origin story, quick
spotlight on the funniest thing I've ever done, as far
as my girlfriend was concerned, at least, we were walking
by a big facility with a sign out front that
said Magnet School, and as soon as I spotted it,
I said, oh no, and I threw myself against the
sign as if I was being drawn by a magnet.
Shout out to my comedy stylings proceed.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
Don't ever interrupt me again with something I thought. After
graduating high school, Lana went to Bard College, New York State,
and Lily attended, I'm just watching you delete one of
your sides as I read that. After graduating high school.
Lanna went to Bard College, New York State, and attended

(08:00):
Emerson in Boston, but they each dropped out before graduating.
And I understand, Jordan, that you applied to both of
those schools or got in.

Speaker 1 (08:07):
I did, Yes, I have no amusing anecdotes about that. Anyway.

Speaker 2 (08:13):
The Wochowskis went on to run a house painting and
construction business in Chicago, which sounds like the setup to
a wonderful sitcom that I would currently watch or a
mob cover. Well, yeah, that's true. They also wrote for
Marvel's Razor Line, which is a short lived imprint based
on concepts created by horror icon Clive Barker that I
just learned about for this episode, which is why I

(08:33):
would considering I'm a Clive Barker fan. Their character was
the hilarious named Dex Mungo, the Ecto Kid, who was
the son of a human woman and a male ghost
and I don't know how that was ever explained, who
via his parentage, can see into the world of the
dead and you can easily see the seeds of the
matrix in this comic because the ectokid, Dex gains the

(08:57):
ability to travel freely in the dimension of the dead
by leaving his physical world behind, much like Neo.

Speaker 1 (09:04):
Or just astral projecting as a concept. Also, after the comic.

Speaker 2 (09:08):
Wrapped, Steve scrope Chi I think is how you pronounced
that it was one of the co creators, and he
would draw the six hundred page, fully fleshed out storyboard
slash comic book that essentially got the movie greenlit.

Speaker 1 (09:21):
So that's all cool. What's the crucial point for our listeners,
dex Mungo not to be confused with Mungo Jerry who's
still alive, who is still alive. Yeah, that's wonderful of
in the summertime fame.

Speaker 2 (09:32):
Tune in next time for more Mungo Jerry upstates thing
is Mungo something in Britain that I don't know, the
gross thing.

Speaker 1 (09:40):
It sounds like a slur, but it's to my knowledge.

Speaker 2 (09:43):
No, no, anyway, But in a way, the Matrix owes
its genesis to a completely different medium and the godfather
of Cheapo American cinema won mister Roger Corman.

Speaker 1 (09:54):
Who's also still alive.

Speaker 2 (09:55):
Roger Corman is also still alive.

Speaker 1 (09:57):
Shout out to people who are still alive.

Speaker 2 (09:59):
Yeah, it's hard these days, the Wachowski's read a copy
of Corman's book how I made one hundred movies in
Hollywood and never lost a dime, and they were suitably
inspired to write a script called Carnivore about wealthy people
being eaten by cannibals, which would have fit in great
in the past couple years of Hollywood.

Speaker 1 (10:18):
I don't know why they didn't make that.

Speaker 2 (10:20):
This has sadly been never brought to the screen, although
George Romero supposedly at one point expressed interest in it.
But the Carnivore script did one thing, which was catch
the eye of Warner Brothers, who bought a script from
the Waschowskis called Assassins in nineteen ninety five and crucially
options for two more. Lily Wachowski told BuzzFeed in twenty fifteen,
the first cash payment that we got on Assassins was

(10:42):
from Mel Gibson. He had read the script and he
was like, where did this come from. We were like, look,
we have to make a decision because we had an
offer from DDLC, which is Dino de Laurentis's company. Then
our agent told Mel's company that you know, look, these
two are super poor. They're calling from a gas station
phone right now. So Mel Gibson wrote us a check
for like one thousand dollars each to wait twenty four

(11:04):
hours or something like that. We were like one thousand dollars, Yes,
we're rich, and then Mel was like no. Gibson opted
to make a Braveheart instead, which is probably a good decision.
Director Richard Donner of Superman and Gooney's Fame eventually snapped
up the script for Assassins, with several big names like
Dino Dolorentis and Joel Silver producing, and I wound up

(11:28):
starring Sylvester Stallone and Antonio benderis perhaps needless to say
for anyone with any understanding of how Hollywood works. Though
this was not an ideal environment for two first time screenwriters.
Richard Donner ordered the Wachowski script almost completely rewritten by
Brian Hegelund, who among other things, wrote La Confidential and
Mystic River. So not a bad call, honestly, but the

(11:51):
Wachowski has hated it enough to try and get their
names taken off the script, and they failed. Over the WGA,
I'm pretty sure they were referring to it for a
long time as our abortion, which is not great but
they did say that the experience convinced them that they
would never survive in the world of Hollywood as writers alone.

(12:12):
They had to direct. So the Wachowskis had completed a
draft of The Matrix. I mean they've been working on
this thing on and off since the early nineties when
they were comic book writers. But they had a draft
ready to show as early as nineteen eighty five, and
they showed it to Joel Silver, producer extraordinaire. Joel Silver.
What else has he done? Like everything? He shouldn't have

(12:32):
to explain this.

Speaker 1 (12:33):
He was in the Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I think
he was a producer for it, and he had a
bit part in it too.

Speaker 2 (12:37):
Yeah, lost boys, I think a lot of the Batman stuff,
who maybe best known for making billions of dollars with
stuff like forty eight Hours, Streets of Fire, the Lethal
Weapon franchise, the Diehard franchise, the first two films of
the Predator series, and the entirety of the Matrix franchise,

(12:58):
as well as I am just now reading creating the
Rules along with two other guys for what would become
the sport Ultimate Frisbee.

Speaker 1 (13:07):
You're kidding me?

Speaker 2 (13:09):
I am not kidding you. That is the lead graph
on his Wikipedia page, which I have just now learned. Anyway,
the minute I started reading the script for The Matrix,
I wanted to see it. But then then Wachowski said,
and we went to direct it, that was going to
be tough. Silver told Wired in two thousand and three,
So he decided to throw them into the director's chair
for another one of the scripts that got optioned, but

(13:31):
a much lower stakes one, a Noirrish thriller called Bound,
starring Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershawan and Joey Paneliano. The
film did well with critics, and the LGBTQ romance at
the center of its plot gained a cult following that
persists to this day, something that supposedly Denot DiLaurentis, of
all people, lobbied to change. Lona Wichowski, however, shot down

(13:52):
the popular telling of Bound as audition piece for The
Matrix years later, telling BuzzFeed, Joel made that up. Probably
one of the few people in Hollywood rich enough to
say that about Joel Silver.

Speaker 1 (14:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:07):
Filmed over thirty eight days on a six million dollar budget,
Bound failed to become a runaway hit, but gardened enough
critical praise, especially for Tilly and Gersham's performances, that the
Wachowskis were in a good position to get the green
light for The Matrix. A funny coincidence that helped at
the successive Bound was that Warner Brothers had just watched
its own erotic revenge thriller, an expensive remake of the

(14:29):
fifties French film Die Bailique Flop. Lorenz the fabulously named
Lorenzo di bona Ventura, who is then a development executive
at Warner Brothers, told Wired that the company's co chairman
Terry Simmel saw Bound and exclaimed, God damn it, this
thing probably cost a fraction of our picture, and it's
so much more.

Speaker 1 (14:48):
Interesting, Laurenzi de Bonaventura. Didn't he develop the rules for
a pickleball? I just want to give that time the
land and there we go, hold for applause, stretch, vamp vamp.

(15:13):
Even so, the Wachowskis were fighting an uphill battle for
The Matrix, an action movie that featured multiple philosophical threads,
a combination of religious imagery from both the East and
the West, all set in a dystopian future and dotted
with cyberpunk jargon. All this taken together did not make
for the most executive pleasing script on all. Wachowski told BuzzFeed.

(15:34):
Every single person in town rejected it. Their manager, Lawrence Mattis,
recalled to The New Yorker when I first read the Matrix,
I called them all excited because they'd written a script
about Descartes, the philosopher Rene Descartes. But then everyone read
the script and passed. Nobody got it. To this day,
I think Warner Brothers bought it half out of the
relationship with them and half because they thought something was there.

(15:57):
The Wachowskis clinched it by hiring Jeff Darrow, who created
the well known comic book Hard Boiled, and the aforementioned
Steve Scrochy, their old buddy from their Marvel comic days,
who made a three hundred page scene by scene comic
book based on their script, which I imagine is basically like
an elaborate storyboard. They laid this out for Warner Brothers

(16:20):
CoA chairman Terry Simmel and Bob Daily producer Joel Silver
told The New York Times this was virtually identical to
the movie. But even so, this presentation was quote an
unusual show. The aforementioned, incredibly named Lorenza de Bonaventura told
Wired one of the Wachowski's was explaining the story and
the other was making sound effect noises, which is a

(16:41):
horrible I love that all during the presentation. Imagine that
being your role when you're in a high level meeting
at Warner Brothers. All right, all right, make the pew
pew sounds. All right? Oh yeah, all right, when we
do the bullet scene, when we do this stuff. Yeah,
to like practicing that at home before going in. I'm

(17:04):
sure they did. They're just the most delightful nerds. I
love that so much. Asked if the company was going
to make money on the Matrix, de Bonaventure remembered, I
thought for half a second and said, we're not going
to lose any money, which is a beautiful way to
skirt the issue again. The Wachowski has caught the studio

(17:27):
at a good or bad time, depending on how you
look at it. The Matrix budget was put around sixty
million dollars, which at the time back in nineteen ninety
what had that been seven to eight was a big investment,
probably closer to one hundred thousand dollars today, but it
was far less than what the company had spent on
their flop Batman and Robin, which you are a huge

(17:48):
Batman had is widely considered to be the nator of
the franchise and basically the reason the studio started from
the ground up with the Christopher Nolan.

Speaker 2 (17:57):
Films and still has its weird defend online Unfortunately. Man,
the craziest thing about Twitter rip or whatever is just that, like,
no matter what piece of movie is out there, you
will find people ready to go to bat for it.
In your mentions, you're not one of them, right to
go to bad for Batman, ever, Robben, No, that's what
I thought. I think I've told this story many many times,

(18:17):
but that was one of the movies that first educated
me to the concept that movies.

Speaker 1 (18:22):
Could be bad.

Speaker 2 (18:23):
I previously thought that movies had to be good because
they got made.

Speaker 1 (18:27):
I you know what that and that makes a lot
of sense. And I bet you there's still a lot
of people out there thinking it was went through enough
very smart people and cost enough money that surely, yeah,
enough effort went into it to make it a certain level.
But no, you're absolutely right, Executive Divona Ventira said sequels
were faltering and a lot of genres were dying, action
comedy movies, buddy cop movies. We knew we needed to

(18:50):
do something different, so the Matrix was greenlit on the
condition that it would shoot in Australia, where sixty million
dollars would go a lot further. This is a good time,
has any to get into what the script, which apparently
went through somewhere between eleven and fourteen rewrites, entailed. Lily
Wachowski told The New York Times the script was a
synthesis of ideas that sort of came together at a

(19:12):
moment when we were interested in a lot of things,
making mythology relevant in a modern context, relate in quantum physics,
to Zen Buddhism, and investigating your own life. We started
out thinking of this as a comic book. We filled
notebook after notebook with ideas. Essentially, that's where the script
came from. First bong rip idea, second bong rip idea,

(19:34):
many bong rip ideas. Yeah, I say that with love.

Speaker 2 (19:38):
I mean it is actually really fascinating to trace all
the stuff that goes into the Matrix and just see
how dense they pulled together this genius mood board from
like so many different places, and you can, you know,
when you break art, any kind of work of art
down into its kind of constituent elements. Like there's a

(19:59):
there's a book of interviews with Tom Waits that I
used to have that uh he talks about like the
five or ten records that like define his his stick
and I was like, hmm, yeah, that's it. That's one,
totally it. And it is just amazing how much stuff.
I mean, even if you just think of the Wachowski's
as like incredible magpies and who are able to sort

(20:21):
of synthesize a bunch of stuff into their own vision,
that's still an incredible feat.

Speaker 1 (20:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:26):
And it also it's what our buddy Billy Joel said
when people were talking about, you know, dissecting the structures
and lyrics of piano man. You know, maybe it's best
not to dissect things while it's still alive. I like that.
I like that a lot. But both the Wachowski said
read The Odyssey multiple times, along with groundbreaking cyberpunk works

(20:48):
by guys like William Gibson and Philip K.

Speaker 2 (20:50):
Dick dude, the fun I just have to do this
as an aside. The funniest thing I haven't been able
to substantiate this because, like, I'm not a huge William
Gibson fan, but I have read his big one, The
Tape Escapes Me. Actually, this is embarrassing.

Speaker 1 (21:10):
Do you like Philip K. Dick?

Speaker 2 (21:11):
Are you a dickhead neuromancer? I do like Philip K.
Dick because I mean I like Philip K. Dick because
he gobbled speed like pezzes. He was writing all of
his stuff, and so every one of his books is
like this semi genius nugget of an idea that is
just filtered through so many layers of like methamphetamine addult paranoia. Yeah,

(21:32):
William William Gibson, I have not read further than Neuromancer,
which is sort of like his you know, all bullet points,
like big book that's very influenced and basically coined the term,
you know, cyberpunk and all this stuff. But the funniest
thing that I know about him comes from a Tumblr
post that I have not been able to sustantiate, which
was basically that when Gibson was dodging the draft and

(21:54):
went to Canada in the late sixties, he was just
bumming around Canada with the Nason hippie scenes there, and
he managed a headshop apparently, and then when he went
to write all of his novels and stuff, he took
their the slang that he got there and basically built

(22:16):
that into this worldview. So this person is like, yeah,
my parents were hippies in Canada around that time, and
so I have aunts in their sixties who sound like
they're talking out of like shadow Run or neuroroom at Mancer,
he says. Or in a different way, all of your
favorite hacker icons in cyberpunk literature talked like my old aunts.

Speaker 1 (22:39):
That's yeah. Well, in terms of their cinematic influences, the
Wachowskis grew up watching a canonical cross section of twentieth
century film icons like Stanley Kubrick, John Houston, Billy Wilder,
which that's a surprising one to me, Ridley Scott, George Lucas.

Speaker 2 (22:56):
I mean, when anyone says Billy Wilder, don't they just
mean we've seen suns at Boulevard a lot.

Speaker 1 (23:01):
I guess to me, I always think of like some
like it Hot in the Apartment and some of the
more like major era comedy stuff. I think he did
double indemnity too, I think, which is a great from
air so I get you know what you're right withdrawn
snide aside withdrawn. And they also were big fans of
Jean Lucadar's nineteen sixty five French sci fi noir Alphaville,
and of course, oh everyone loves Fritz Lang's Metropolis. That

(23:23):
was a big influence on David Bowie too. No Metropolis
is great, along with anime classics like Ghost in the Shell,
which is about cybernetically enhanced humans who are, among other things,
able to extend their consciousness into a technological network. And
then they also were into Hong Kong action flicks by
people you admire, guys like John Wu. But central to

(23:45):
their matrix script was Plato's Allegory of the Cave, which
stars a group of people chained in a cave watching
the shadows projected on the cave wall by a fire
lit behind them. They perceived the shadows as reality, do
not know their true form. And there are also religious
elements too, as we touched on earlier, drawing from Hinduism, Buddhism, Narcissism, Judaism,

(24:09):
and Christianity, all of this has become fertile ground for
decades of analysis. To give just one example, Slovenian philosopher
slavalv Jijak has written about the Matrix trilogy entitled his
book on the Response to nine to eleven Welcome to
the Desert of the Real, which is a quotation from
the movie, which is in turn an allusion to a

(24:30):
line from Jean Boudriard's Simulacra and Simulation.

Speaker 2 (24:34):
So with all that secured, production moved on to the
casting stage. It has become alternate casting canon. I guess
that or lore that Will Smith turned down the role
of Neo to make Wild Wild West because what was
supposedly concerned about the film's ambitious special effects, though Smith
has later said that he wasn't quote mature enough as
an actor at the time and that he would have

(24:56):
messed it up, which is objectively correct. Nick Cage also
turned down the Park because of supposed family obligations. Would
have been right after he'd made Face Off.

Speaker 1 (25:10):
I think, yeah, so yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:12):
I mean, he'd just worked with John wom Maybe he
didn't want to do another I Have a Gun in
each Hand movie?

Speaker 1 (25:18):
What did he do? I think next he did bringing
out the Dead or City of Angels. Uh okay, City
of Angels all out. You gotta watch the wim Wenders
one that has Nick Cave in it. Yeah. Oh no.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
He had just done Leaving Las Vegas, Oh, one of
the most depressing movies of all time. In ninety five,
ninety six, he did The Rock ninety seventy, did con
Air ninety Also in ninety seven he did Face Off,
and then he did City of Angels in nineteen ninety eight.
So I guess it if I'm putting the timeline wrong.
Ninety seven, Yeah, I think he had just gotten enough

(25:55):
of action movies.

Speaker 1 (25:56):
God, that's so funny. Would he have been neo? I
would have oh yeah, yeah, yeah, oh god, I could
you know, I mean I could almost see it. Yeah.
He has that sort of.

Speaker 2 (26:11):
Stoic knife quality to some of his performances, like Raising
in Arizona, where you could see him be this sort
of tabula rossa.

Speaker 1 (26:20):
For all the stuff. But exactly he's too old by that.
He can't have a neo with the receding airline.

Speaker 2 (26:28):
It's also become a lore, verified by composer Don Davis,
that Johnny Depp was the studio's first choice for Neo
and if they didn't want him. I think he said
that all the studios at the time couldn't get Johnny Depp,
so they'd go to Brad Pitt or Val Kilmer. They
told the Wachowski's that if Brad Pitt would do the picture,
they'd green light it right then. So Val Kilmer and

(26:48):
Brad Pitt said no. So it sort of came down
to Johnny Depp and Keanu Reeves.

Speaker 1 (26:53):
I just want to say that, I just want to
say that Keanu Reeves is ten months younger than Nicholas
cage Man.

Speaker 2 (27:00):
Jean's hair, jeans and hair, really really wild stuff. Leonard
Dicapro was also signed on at one point, but he
got spooked away by the extensive visual effects that the
film is going to require, which, after having just undergone
a prolonged stay in a watery hell called Titanic shepherded
by James Cameron, I think is quite understandable. I cannot

(27:24):
stop thinking about how much this movie would have sucked.

Speaker 1 (27:27):
With any of those other people.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
Johnny Depp would have made some kind of weird choice,
like he would have been like, oh, he's gonna have
a congo.

Speaker 1 (27:36):
Lees would have made weird choices, Nick, you would have
made weird choices. Leonardo Di Caprio would have made weird choice. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:44):
Funnily enough, I had never heard this before. They offered
it to Sandra Bullock. Debona venturin Joel Silver had both
worked with her on the also Sylvester Stallone starring Demolition Man,
which is a great movie, and they basically said that
they would change the character of Neo to a girl.
Deemonaventura told to Rap this in twenty nineteen. He said,

(28:06):
it was pretty simple. We sent her the script to
see if she was interested in it, and if she
was interested, we would try to make the change. It
just wasn't something for her at the time, so it
didn't really go anywhere. Bullock told The Today Show in
two thousand and nine, though, that she was considered for
the role of Trinity as well, and she regretted not
taking it. So either she's misremembering it or they were
so desperate to get Sandra Bullock on board they basically

(28:27):
handed her the script and was like, you can play anyone,
which is amazing because I would like to have seen
her play Morpheus. This brings us to Sweet Angel Baby
Keanu reeves. It is the funniest thing to me in
the world that Keanu is like the only unproblematic person

(28:47):
that we have of his stature at this point. I think,
like before Matt Matthew Perry died and he became bad
to say anything bad about him, His autobiography came out
like there was like a throwaway line in it about
how he felt the friends cast were like unfairly compensated
or something, or something griping and used Kanu reads as

(29:10):
an example of like not talented actors or something like that,
and the entire twitter just turned against him.

Speaker 1 (29:17):
It was like, you keep Keanu's name out of your mouth. Well,
I think it became a recurring punchline in the memoir
if I recall. I don't think it was a throwaway line.
I think it was just a recurring joke of a book.
I could be wrong. I've actually read it, but I
believe it was a multiple reference kind of deal, or
he just became shorthand.

Speaker 2 (29:35):
For Keanu would never stoop so low, I have to assume. Yeah,
I think there's like a backlash brewing against the like
canonization of him, but I am not here for a
part of it. I think I love the guy. I mean,
he he makes such fascinating choices from a person of

(29:57):
his stature, and he has his thing dialed in so
precisely like people, you know, people like people. I maybe
just a few critics I read, but people like have
read have like gone back and revisioned Paul Walker as
a good actor, which is stupid. But like Keanu really
I think learned how to dial in his kind of

(30:20):
blankness and like affect into what's become gravity in his
older age. There's this amazing line in one of the
John Wicks where someone is like asks him, like why
he's like praying to his wife or or something and
or talking to his dead wife and spoiler alert for
a franchise that hinges entirely around that one plot point

(30:42):
and is like ten years old, and and they're like,
are you would you think that she can hear you?
And he says no, and they're like why do you
do it then? And he just says maybe I'm wrong,
and like invests such like I just got chills thinking
about it.

Speaker 1 (30:58):
Like there's such like world weary.

Speaker 2 (31:00):
I mean, he's truly become like Clint Eastwood in a
non problematic way.

Speaker 1 (31:04):
Wow, yeah, but he'd had it. He had a rough nineties.

Speaker 2 (31:08):
He had all three of these films came out in
nineteen ninety one, Bill and Ted Point Break and My
Private Idaho.

Speaker 1 (31:16):
Bill has Bogus Journey, the sequel.

Speaker 2 (31:18):
Phony short not they're not the original. Yeah, but all
three of those films in nineteenety one. That's exhausting. And
then uh, Speed eventually came out, and then he proceeded
to Oh and then he did Bram Stokers Dracula, which
obviously the poor guy is terrible and he's desperately at
odds with that accent, but you know, uh, he then
just kept pingponging around to these weird choices, like he

(31:39):
did a Walk in the Clouds and Feeling Minnesota, which
are both romances. And then he did Johnny Mnemonic in
nineteen ninety five, which is like on the sort of
where are They Now VHS shelf alongside Hackers and lawnmower
Man in that it was one of these group of
mid nineties movies that we're kind of trying to tackle,
how we were going to understand the Internet and virtual

(31:59):
reality and all this stuff. I believe the plot one
of the plot points of Johnny mnemonic is that they
have to put his consciousness into a dolphin, or maybe
the other way around.

Speaker 1 (32:11):
No, it's co starring Dolph Lundgren that I think. Maybe
that's good.

Speaker 2 (32:19):
That film, though at least, did achieve one thing. It
helped inspire the Witch House.

Speaker 1 (32:22):
Kis.

Speaker 2 (32:23):
County's most recent film at the time had been The
schlocky Devil's Advocate, in which he is literally that and
Al Pacino plays the devil and it's a It's exactly
as fun as that sounds, but it didn't exactly place
him at the top of Warner Brothers call list. Kuany
they did tell Wired though, of the Matrix. When I
first read the script, it made my blood happy, which

(32:45):
is such a wonderfully weird and like touching thing for
an artist to say about anything, like yeah, yeah, man,
that movie makes my blood happy, especially if you read
it in his cadence, like yeah, I first that script,
It made my blood happy, made my blood happy, made

(33:06):
my blood happy. At one of their first meetings, the
Wachowskis told Reeves they'd need him to undergo four months
of training prior to filming, and in his words, he
got a big grin on my face and said yes,
we'll get to that training regiment later. The studio was
looking for a relative unknown to play Trinity and the
woman who would eventually go into player, Carrie Anne Moss,

(33:26):
was at first, like everyone else, daunted by the physical
demands of the script and doubtful of the Wachowski's abilities
to wrangle such a blockbuster with so many moving parts. Still,
after spending an hour with them going through the storyboards,
she was mollified. This is the funniest thing to me.
I guess because she was unknown, she hadn't done some
bit parts in Canada and stuff. Her screen test for

(33:48):
this movie was like days and hours hours and days
of doing some of this physical stuff. She told Wired
I couldn't walk for days after it. And I think
because of her stature, she was the only person that
this was subjected to, Like all of I'd talked about
this later when all of the other stars came in
and we're like, wow, we had no idea this was

(34:09):
going to be this hard. Carrie I Moss was like
I did, But you know, she told Entertainment Weekly, I
had no career before this.

Speaker 1 (34:19):
None That said.

Speaker 2 (34:20):
The audition scene did come back to bite her because
I guess The nightclub scene was what she auditioned with,
and she told the Guardian they had me in a
stiletto and I could barely do the scene stiletto shoe.
Suddenly we were there on the day of shooting and
I was unsteady. It was this whole thing in the
nightclub when I'm whispering in Keanu's ear, and I'm supposed
to be really grounded and strong, and yet I could

(34:41):
barely stand straight. So they took those off and gave
me a boot with a nice solid heel. This is
also really would to me. Janet Jackson was supposedly attached
to the role of Trinity and she had to back
out because she couldn't make it work with her touring commitments,
and this bothered her so much that she referenced the
matrix in the intro and outro interludes on her tenth

(35:03):
studio album, Discipline.

Speaker 1 (35:05):
I could almost see her killing that. Well.

Speaker 2 (35:09):
It's funny to me that it's funny to me that
they went they wanted like this relationship to be interracial,
because the other people that they were going to cast
were Rosie Perez, Samahayak and Jada Pinkett Smith.

Speaker 1 (35:19):
Oh wow.

Speaker 2 (35:20):
So there was some kind of a dimension to that
that they were interested in purposefully exploring. I think all
of those people are wrong, except for maybe Jana Jackson,
though I don't think i've seen her act. She could
certainly have learned kung fu though. I mean, the woman
is crowded dancer and was in the best shape of
her life at that point, coming off of like Velvet
Rope and all of her other nineties bangers. But yeah,

(35:41):
they all auditioned for it. It's kind of interesting to
me that the Witch elseki Is wanted an interracial romance
to be at the center of this, But given some
of their other stuff, not the trans stuff, I just
mean some of the way that they talk about stuff
because they're Chicago white people, could have been handled a

(36:01):
little insensitively, so I'm glad that they didn't.

Speaker 1 (36:06):
Well, Janet Jackson would have just been coming off Poetic Justice,
the John Singleton movie, which was kind of her best
acting role. I think for somebody who's not seen everything
she's been in, I remember that being pretty good. I
mean it was like after that she did Naughty Professor
to the Clumps. So there's not really a lot to
choose from, but Uh huh, that's really interesting. This all

(36:28):
brings us to casting Morpheus, which ultimately came down to
Lawrence Fishburne, who the Wachowskis were four from the very start.
Warner Brothers. On the other hand, one of thou Kilmer.

Speaker 2 (36:40):
Oh no, it's funny too, because of how toxic he
was considered.

Speaker 1 (36:47):
Right around the time because Island of Doctor Moreau.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
Came out, which was supposed to be this big that's
really fascinating and kind of horror sci fi because it
was supposed to be this big swing. The director of that, oh,
Richard Stanley. He'd made this kind of cult sci fi
hit called Hardware, and as just what we're talking about
with Chaskey's As it happens, the next thing that he
was given was this, or maybe not the next thing,
but one of the things that he was given out

(37:11):
of the success of that film was this Island of
Doctor Moreau remake, which was supposed to be this huge thing.
It was they had Brando's Doctor Moreau and between Richard Stanley,
Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando's egos, there was no room
left on the Island for that movie.

Speaker 1 (37:27):
Uh, And it became one of the most.

Speaker 2 (37:30):
Talked about catastrophic flops of the era, and he was
essentially like blacklisted from making movies for a while.

Speaker 1 (37:38):
Richard Stanley was. But that movie did inspire Mini Me,
the character of Mini Me and us. Yes, it did,
that is true. It did. Anything that inspired Mini Me
has got to be problematic.

Speaker 2 (37:50):
There's a great Valkilmer anecdote in here. Later, though I
forgot where I put it.

Speaker 1 (37:53):
Maybe I didn't. I thought I remember there being another
Volkilm or anecdote in here. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (37:57):
Sorry, it was like the next sentence out of your mouth,
and I just started ram about Island of Doctor Moreau.

Speaker 1 (38:03):
The team, I promise.

Speaker 2 (38:06):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (38:07):
Yes, they had a meeting with al Kilmer, which went
about as well as one might expect given all that
we just said about vel Kilmer. Uh. The executive Lorenzo
di Ventura told Wired we have a meeting with him
at the bel Air Hotel where he perceies the pitch
why Morpheus should be the lead of the movie. I
knew within two minutes of the meeting that we were dead.

(38:29):
Also considered we're Arnold Schwarzenegger, which I can I can see,
but with just it's because of Batman and Robin that
was Joe Joel Silver had him because of that and
was like yeah, and Michael Douglas, what the hell is that?

Speaker 2 (38:44):
Douglas might have been able to summon some kind of
like scrappy, gravelly voiced charm out of it, but he's
so little. I just cannot find him imposing.

Speaker 1 (38:55):
There's nothing mysterious about him. That's true. I've seen his
butt in what Why basic instinct. Oh yeah, unless he
was going for like cold lizard like fury of Gordon Gecko, which.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
Yeah, I mean, there could have been a kind of
quiet scorn to his performance of Morpheus.

Speaker 1 (39:18):
But again, that's what I'm talking about.

Speaker 2 (39:20):
Any one of these other people and chemistry, the whole
thing totally, you'd be like can We'd be talking about it, like, yeah,
you know that Matrix movie is really good, but Arnold, Yeah,
as you meditate on that, we'll be right back with
more too much information after these messages. Wow.

Speaker 1 (39:48):
The story of how the Wachowski's got Laurence Fishburn in
their mind from Orpheus is very strange. They met him
in Las Vegas in the summer of nineteen ninety seven
at the boxing match in which Mike Tyson the ear
of a vander Holyfield. That's probably my favorite factoid of
this entire episode.

Speaker 2 (40:07):
That's amazing, especially when you consider how weird they were
to him.

Speaker 1 (40:11):
Yeah. Yeah, Lana Wachowski would later tell Fishburn, I had
a dream about a man who wore mirrored sunglasses and
spoken riddles, and when I met you and heard your voice,
I knew you were that guy. What an insane thing
to say to a person. Fishburn, for his part, was
undaunted by the what you describe as naughty script. K

(40:33):
n O T. T. Y would like to explain naughty script.
Dense den script, Yes, dense den script, he told Vulture
in twenty twenty. After being presented with the script, I
never had any questions about whether or not it works
structurally thematically or anything on the page. There were no
red flags on the page for me at all. And
then when I met Lana and Lily they said they

(40:54):
wanted to make a live action anime. I was like,
yes please. I thought the character was a mix of
Darth Vader, Yoda, Obi Wan Muhammad Ali and Bruce Lee
and arrived at Morphia's stentorian voice by combining Rod Serling
of the Twilight Zone. Wow, I never even thought of that.
Leonard me moy Spot from Star Trek and James Earl

(41:15):
Jones Darth Vader. Wow, yeah, right on, total exactly what
that is. Yep. The Wachowskis also told him to base
the performance on the character with the same name and
Neil Gaiman's famous comic book series San Man. Little on
the nose, but sure. The Australian actor Hugo Weaving, who
was probably best known in America at that point for

(41:37):
his role in the drag queen cult classic comedy Priscilla,
Queen of the Desert, flew to Los Angeles to meet
the Wachowskis after hearing about the role from his agent,
spurred by how much he liked the movie Bound. The
pair meanwhile loved Hugo Weaving from both the Priscilla movie
and also his nineteen ninety one romantic comedy Proof, in
which he co stars alongside a young Russell Crowe.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
Funny to me, how many how few Australian movies escape containment?
Like people become these huge stars there and then they
come to the US and were like, what.

Speaker 1 (42:08):
Did you do? I don't get it? Like everyone he
was briefed on the extensive training that he would need
to undergo for the production, along with the storyboards and
all three Hugo in the Wachowski's agreed that while being an
ultra menacing, omnipotent baddie, Agent Smith would have a touch
of humor to him, part of developing more human like emotions.

(42:30):
As the film continues, Weaving asked at one point if
Agent Smith could have a song and dance number, which
that would have been chilling. I like that a lot.

Speaker 2 (42:41):
He's so good in this movie, and it's so funny
to me that then they took him.

Speaker 1 (42:45):
I mean, he had a big era, right because he was.

Speaker 2 (42:48):
In all the Lord of the Rings movies. He was
in Viver Vendetta, and then like and I think now
he just plays in Australia because he doesn't like flying
as much or being away from his family. But he
is so good in this kind of sterile but deeply
felt menace is so perfect.

Speaker 1 (43:06):
That monologue he gives to Morpheus about.

Speaker 2 (43:08):
This this place, I feel myself becoming tainted by the
stink of it.

Speaker 1 (43:15):
Like it's so good. I love it.

Speaker 2 (43:18):
They took a swing on his random dude in Australia
looks like an accountant and got one of the most
iconic villains of the sciety five cannon out of it.

Speaker 1 (43:25):
You know, well, you're right, he's a blank slate. He
could couldn't have been anybody that anybody in America knew.

Speaker 2 (43:31):
That's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, if they brought it, who
would have been a John Actually, John mac killed this?
Are you kidding me?

Speaker 1 (43:39):
John would have eight.

Speaker 2 (43:42):
Who could have they brought in? Who would have ruined it?
Who is big at the well? Al Pacino?

Speaker 1 (43:49):
That Trinity's got a great ass. I love how his
entire entire work. That was the one line I was
thinking of. And you also work, I mean Jack Nicholson. Yeah, yeah,
I could almost see if the thing is neo, I

(44:10):
am inevitability.

Speaker 2 (44:11):
Mister Anderson, Actually, mister Anderson is so perfectly uh placed
in the in the voice of Jack Nicholson, that I
have to be yah, I must begrudgingly give it to him,
just because of how funny that would be to hear
him say that all the time.

Speaker 1 (44:26):
I could almost see how they would maybe even consider
Jack Nicholson for that, just because he does kind of
he kind of looks like an accountant. Yeah, yeah, it
was as good as it gets era. Yeah, but it
ultimately went to the incredible Hugo Weaving, who would of
course go on to star as the hero of the
Wachowski's adaptation of V for Vendetta, which was their first

(44:48):
post Matrix work. Oh, I guess with all the sequels, Yeah,
it was what.

Speaker 2 (44:51):
Well, I've the second and third ones were shot together,
which I didn't realize, like insane to me that anyone
lived through that ordeal of just shooting these two bloated
I mean, the second one is famously the one where
they built a highway to stage a car chase. Yeah,
and they upped the number. I read this because I

(45:11):
was reading about the obviously about the effects. But in
the first Matrix film there's like four hundred and twelve
computer assisted shots, and in the second one there are
over ten thousand.

Speaker 1 (45:21):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (45:22):
Yeah, I actually have a big soft spot for the
VFA Vandeta movie. I think it obviously with those stupid
masks have attained a second life all over the internet.
But I think, yeah, man, it's hard to take something
that is similarly so insane and dense, which is everything
that Alan Moore gets his hands on or has created
and turned it into like what I think is a

(45:44):
pretty okay adaptation with a lot of genuinely anti government
sentiment and still make a movie that kicks ass and
it does. Yeah. Anyway, well, Joey Payton, sorry, set me up,
Set me up, Set me up.

Speaker 1 (45:59):
Ohio. Now come to my favorite part of the program,
a segment that we don't get to anywhere near enough
on TMI tell us about Joey Pants. Welcome to the
joy Pants Corn the Joey Pants time.

Speaker 2 (46:11):
This factoid about him was going around on Twitter as
I was researching this, which is hilarious. You know that
the wig he wore in The Sopranos he wanted to
look like Christopher Nolan. No, it's supposed it's the exact
same hair part that Christopher Nolan has and the kind
of like straw colored blonde. The Witch Huskies knew Joey
Pants from Bound, which is so funny, and they wrote,

(46:35):
I love he seems like such a kind of sweet
guy who's just kind of like maybe a little baffled
at his own place in Hollywood. But like they wrote
the character in the film specifically for him, which is hilarious.
And he thinks that they also cast him because he
didn't wouldn't get anything that was going on.

Speaker 1 (46:52):
Ah.

Speaker 2 (46:52):
He said, they might have had a twinkle in their
eye to give me this job because they saw me
as blissfully ignorant.

Speaker 1 (46:58):
He didn't read the script, which.

Speaker 2 (47:00):
Is the funniest thing. And this is a long setup
that all comes from this independent article, the interview that
he gave in twenty twenty one, so bear with us.
He was having a meeting with the Wachowskis when they
told him that Warner Brothers wanted to cut the steak scene,
which is his character's most memorable part in the film.
It's this great monologue that lays out why he turns

(47:22):
on Morpheus. He wants to be he's discovered that real
life is hell, and he wants to get plugged back
into the matrix. So they told him, hey, the steak scene,
like Warners, wants us to cut that, and Keanu is
fighting them on it, and Joey Pants, having not read
the script, assumed that this was another of Keanu's scenes,
and he said, well, tell him to get the over it.
He's in ninety nine percent of the movie. And they

(47:44):
just started laughing at him because he had just shown
his ass that he had not read the script, and
he continued to show his ass in front of his
cast mates. They were at a party at Carrie Ane
Moss's house, and, in Joey Pants's words, we're all just
bullshit around. I'm trying to be interesting. So I say
to Keanu, hey man, I'm glad they kept this steak scene.
We're gonna have some fun with that. It goes so
quiet you can hear a pin drop, except for the Wachowskis,

(48:06):
who are on the floor laughing with tears coming out
of their eyes. Finally they're able to catch their breath
long enough for Lana to say he didn't read the
fucking script, and bless him. He developed the simplest workaround
for the intense physical demands that were placed on the cast.
He told Wired, they wanted me to be in the
best shape of my life. He was in his mid

(48:26):
forties at the time. No drinking, eating steam, vegetables, working
out a gym. I'm a character actor. This trainer they
hired said to me, you can do three thousand sit
ups a day, but that ain't going nowhere, presumably his midsection.
So I talked to my buddy, a plastic surgeon, and
I decided I'm going to get an eight thousand.

Speaker 1 (48:42):
Dollars liposuction procedure.

Speaker 2 (48:44):
Panelino subsequently sent the bill for the surgery to the studio,
claiming that the liposuction counted as research and development.

Speaker 1 (48:50):
He was never reimbursed. It's his development in a way,
in a sense.

Speaker 2 (48:55):
Developed him. The cast was handed a reading list by
the Wachowskis befo Or. Filming started the aforementioned simulacra and
simulation by Jean Putriade of the French. This was required
reading for most of the principal cast and crew, and
they also sent Kanu Reeves, Kevin Kelly Is out of Control,
The New Biology of Machines, and Dylan Evans's ideas on

(49:18):
evolutionary psychology. And I didn't put this in here, but
there's a quote from Joel Silver that were like somewhere
that's like, man, people think Keanu is dumb, but he's
one of the smartest people I've ever met. He'll send
me books that he's reading that I have no idea
what's going on in them, which Joel Silver, but still.

Speaker 1 (49:35):
Maybe maybe Keanu is like to read this, tell me
what's going on? In it.

Speaker 2 (49:40):
Don't you you back off, you careful counselor bless their hearts,
The Wachowskis went straight to the source for the guy
that they knew could help them stage convincingly Hong Kong
style fights. Yuen Wo Ping, who is a legend in
the industry who'd helped launch the career of Jack Chan
in the late seventies, basically responsible for the some of

(50:04):
the most riveting fight scenes that only complete nerds would
have seen at this point in the late eighties and
nineties by importing stuff from Hong Kong. The Wachowski's especially
liked his choreography work on nineteen ninety four's Fist of
Legend starring Jet Lee and wanted him to work on
their film, but he had already turned down several offers
from Hollywood. Basically, he just thought his English wasn't good
enough to work here, he told The South China Morning

(50:26):
Post in twenty nineteen. What happened then was that one
of the producers of The Matrix contacted Shaw Brothers to
find me. This is the famous Hong Kong production studio.
They seem to want me to go to Hollywood really badly,
but I still didn't want to go. The Shaw Brothers
studio told me that the producer was offering me a
free ticket to Los Angeles, and all I had to
do was turn up there and have a chat and
then I should go, as it would be the polite
thing to do. But like everyone else, he was charmed

(50:49):
by the Wachowski's energy and he took the job. The
principal cast members Carrie an Moss, Kana Reeves, Lawrence Fishburne,
and Hugo Weaving spent four months training with the Annual
p and his stunt team before filming even started, five
days a week, hours a day, six days maybe actually,
because he says later that Sundays there day off.

Speaker 1 (51:09):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:10):
This wasn't just for fight choreography. They also had to
learn the wire work, Hong Kong style wire work, which
is really intrinsic to the way that the characters move,
and it was so necessary to the way that the
Wachaskis visualized this because they were trying to make a
comic book and their closest visual que in pictures was anime,

(51:30):
so they wanted to have their characters kind of float
and fly around in a way that comic book characters
would Uh. Still this took a toll. Hugo Weaving told
Wired after the first day, I was so shattered and
so shocked. I realized I was so unfit.

Speaker 1 (51:45):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (51:46):
He damaged his femur. At one point he had to
have surgery because of some like polyop on his leg. Uh.
And then so he came He came back on crutches basically,
And Keanu had also had surgery recently. At one point
in the nineties, he had to undergo a two level
fusion of his spine in his neck area cervical spine

(52:09):
because he had a hernated disk. So, as anyone knows,
that's not a light deal. He told Wired, I was
falling over in the shower in the morning because you
lose your sense of balance. One of the film's producers
said that he was told by a doctor this operation
was needed or else he could wind up a quadriplegic.

(52:29):
So consequently, Keanu showed up in Burbank for training wearing
a neck brace, and he was forbidden from kicking before
he sufficiently recovered. And he talks about how his character
actually doesn't do a ton of kicks in the movie,
which I don't think is really true. He does a
lot that I can remember, but I don't know. I'm

(52:49):
not going to contradict him. I will have to say
a lot for nerds, real nerds for this movie, and
I speak as one of you. If you haven't, you
should check out the documentary The Matrix Revisited, which is
like two hours long.

Speaker 1 (53:00):
It's on YouTube, and there.

Speaker 2 (53:02):
Are these really heartrending scenes of Keanu and a neck
brace training and what I can see is recognizable choreography
from this movie and like going into these moves and
then like collapsing in pain or like wincing and walking
away because he dub his.

Speaker 1 (53:16):
Neck, and I was just like you, sweet boy.

Speaker 2 (53:21):
Jenmo Ping said he initially thought that two months of
training would be enough to get the cast up to speed,
and then when he saw what he was dealing with
for the first time, he got dizzy and started to
think that four months wouldn't even be enough. It's really
fascinating how he designed and this is part of his
genius than what he's done in all of his films.
He designs the choreography to reflect the character traits of
the people doing the fighting. Neo, is this you know, determined, scrappy, characters,

(53:45):
and he's got an aggressive, fast punching offense. They highlighted
carry Ann Moss's effemininity by having her do a lot
of these really graceful kind of high kicks, you know,
the famous two ones that she does as this sort
of high kick to knock somebody out who's behind her,
and the quote unquote scorpion kick that she does at
one point. Agent Smith is this omnipotent badass, so he

(54:08):
just kind of bulldozes his way through scenes with these
big boxing style heavyweight punches. Morpheus has this kind of
mentor like sense of authority and purpose. Oh yeah, I
don't know if you want to keep this because it's.

Speaker 1 (54:22):
Sort of weird.

Speaker 2 (54:23):
But Jenmo being said of Laurence Fishbourne that he was
born talented at bouncing and jumping, which is a weirdly
racial thing to say, So I don't know if you
want to put that in. Carrie Anne Mos did a
lot of her own stunts. She did that crazy building
jump that she did in the movie.

Speaker 1 (54:45):
Damn.

Speaker 2 (54:45):
I remember talking about that she does in the opening
to the movie. I should say I also remember talking
when I was reading about the making of the Matrix Reetloaded.
Everyone said that she became the best stunt driver among them.

Speaker 1 (54:56):
That's fascinating.

Speaker 2 (54:58):
The film's executive producer, Barry Osborne said, most American stuntwork
uses rams or pneumatics to project a person through the
air at a certain speed with Hong Kong style. So
that's like a pressurized ramp that you would see for
a lot. It's how you get the big hero shot
of somebody sprinting away from an explosion and getting like
launched through the air. Basically, step on a ramp that's
powered by compressed air and then you get launched onto

(55:19):
like a soft landing, or you'll be thrown in a
direction via a ram like similarly like a soft ram.

Speaker 1 (55:27):
That sounds insane to me.

Speaker 2 (55:29):
It is, yeah, I mean, and they and to be
fair like, Hollywood also did wire stuff like I mean
famously famously permanently injuring Ellen Burston's spine on the set
of The Exorcist, right when the cable guys yanked her
back too hard. But the stunts are Osborne says that
with wirework, the stunts are far more controlled and very stylized.

(55:52):
It's almost like puppeteering using a real person. It takes
tremendous skill and finesse, and so, having brought over his
wirework team from Hong Kong, Yen Wopeeing described it basically
a three step process for getting the American cast up
to that we had to train the cast to work
with the wires, to balance with them, and then to

(56:12):
hoist them up in the air and land. He says,
the most difficult part of that process is landing without
losing your balance. I mean, basically, for anyone who doesn't
know what I'm talking about, they literally just are pulling
people up and down and controlling their landings via wires
that are removed and strapped under the wardrobe. The costume
designer later on says that she designed all of their

(56:33):
wardrobes to be able to fit all this complex gear
under them.

Speaker 1 (56:38):
Those fin outfits, though, I mean, I guess thinking of
Trinity's like, everything's like very fitted.

Speaker 2 (56:44):
Yeah. In that opening scene, they also had a fiberglass
plate inserted under it, because the human body is not
really designed to hold itself in that rigid straight pose
that she does as long as it needed to while
flying through the air. So they basically have propped up
and or molded into shape by a rigid fiberglass plate

(57:04):
under her wardrobe, and then the cables are stretched to
that so she can hold the Superman pose.

Speaker 1 (57:10):
It's just wild.

Speaker 2 (57:12):
Reeves's stunt double on this film is a guy named
Chad Steleski, who went on to helm the John Wick movies.
He told sci Fi that sci Fi dot Com that
wirework may look fun, but it's painful. You're in a
tiny little harness and it's wrecking your hips and squeezing
your other parts. So the level of endurance you have
to go through every day for months, it's phenomenal. Very
few people do what the Wachowskis were demanding of their cast.

(57:35):
And again, one of my favorite bits of this is
that universally, to a man, everyone talks about how Gung
Ho Keanu was about all of this. Jenwo Ping says
that he was the person who's most obsessed with getting
his form correct. He would ask to train on Sundays,
which was their day off. He also and I wasn't
I did debated including this because I saw it kind

(57:57):
of put up in like janky list goals without being
verified elsewhere. But somebody was claiming that he did that
ledge walk scene by himself, Oh God, which is insane.
Also insane that at the end of filming he further
starved himself to lose fifteen pounds and then shaved his
head and eyebrows to do the goo waking up scene
at the end.

Speaker 1 (58:19):
God love him.

Speaker 2 (58:20):
The film's Australian stunt coordinator, guy named Glenn Boswell, told
sci Fi the Chinese team didn't all speak English.

Speaker 1 (58:27):
That was a bit of an issue.

Speaker 2 (58:29):
There were certain things they wanted to do that we
couldn't do based on government guidelines. We had to try
and explain that to them. Some of it was simple
things like when they used a wire, they tied a
knot in the wire to connect it to the actor.

Speaker 1 (58:40):
That's illegal.

Speaker 2 (58:41):
Certain wires cannot sustain a person, or there are certain
ways you have to use a pulley. The stunt department
ended up rigging.

Speaker 1 (58:47):
Most of the wirework.

Speaker 2 (58:48):
The wirework that the Chinese would do is more about
suspending actors during a fight, and the wirework that the
stunt department would do is anything that involved flying, leaping,
or having heavy impacts. I'm reminded of when Jackie Chan
brought Zone stunting over to do Rush Hour and he
kept wanting to do things that they legally could not
do in the States, like jump across buildings, and he
would be like, I don't understand why that's possible, and

(59:10):
they're like, well, we have laws here.

Speaker 1 (59:13):
Owen Patterson was the Australian set designer who created much
of the look of The Matrix. He was essentially tasked
with creating two sets at once, one for the real
world and Morpheus's ship, the Nebucadezer and the other dystopian environs.
They were also dealing with the fact that the world
of The Matrix in the real world would be completely differently.
The Matrix has a green tint like an old word

(59:36):
processor text, with an uncanny cleanness and orderly to it,
and the real world is done almost completely in blue
and grays, which was obviously aged and distressed all the
props who were like filthy and disgusting. Patterson, the set
designer total fan site. In the last stage is of
pre production, we built several sets and sat down on
a studio space with a sample of each of the

(59:57):
colors we were going to use throughout the film, and
because of the sense of needs of the fight scenes
and stunts, they simply built most of the sets they needed,
including rooftops, the dojo, and the office building.

Speaker 2 (01:00:06):
They built a subway set around an existing station. But
because they had to do all this crazy camera work
and wirework, they were also like, well, we need to
be able to move walls and floors and all this stuff.
So it's just they would just build these enormous bespoke
custom sets.

Speaker 1 (01:00:20):
God, that stuff so interesting to me, especially especially nuts
when they like half film on location and then have
to completely replicate it to do exactly what you just said,
move walls. That's just insane to me. I think I
put this later on.

Speaker 2 (01:00:33):
But the office set where they do the rescue and
the lobby fight and everything, that was so big that
it just was installed and built in an actual block
of office buildings, and outside of it for the shots
where they have to do the helicopter jump and stuff,
it was a three story what they call a cyclorama,
which is just like a movable background that you use

(01:00:54):
in movies. So that thing was literally they had this
office building set and then they had a background for
it so that they could shoot out of the office
that was as large as another building.

Speaker 1 (01:01:07):
What was the movie? Was it? It might have been
them up at Christmas Carol where there was just an
entire floor beneath the set. Oh it's not in the
Roger Rabbit. Yeah, it's that rabbit. Yeah. That's so insane
to me. Yep.

Speaker 2 (01:01:21):
And now they would just do it all the cgi
it would look like gray garbage.

Speaker 1 (01:01:25):
Yep. Yes, it would the worst thing to me.

Speaker 2 (01:01:27):
The most unforgivable thing about the Matrix revolutions. The fourth
one is that they are just obsessed with Whichever one
of them did it, I think it was Lily was
just obsessed with making like this personal statement about how
the original Matrix had been kind of co opted and
taken out of her hands and people Anyways, It's it's
kind of interesting conceptually, but one of the ways that

(01:01:48):
they lampshade it constantly is by having scenes from the
old movie constantly like portrayed or rendered in the film.
And it's just so sad to see something that was
shot on film, yeah, with actual sets and a real
wardrobe contrasted against this gray shot on digital flat look

(01:02:09):
that everything has now. Because it just even these filmmakers
like they've been so quote unquote I guess reduced that
Netflix wouldn't give them enough money to make it look
remotely similar to the other movies. Ugh obligatory, Old Man
yels Yeah yeah, Old Man yeos at Cloud Moment.

Speaker 1 (01:02:27):
Well. Cinematographer Bill Pope s at an interview the sets
for The Matrix were immense, the biggest I personally have
ever seen, and as you mentioned earlier, the set for
the office building was so large that it was incorporated
into an actual block of offices in Sydney. Because the
Wachowskis were shooting for realism, they really had to build
a lot of the future tech invented for the film,

(01:02:49):
like the pods and all the tech that keeps people
trapped in them, manually triggered air power plugs that go
into the spine, the needle that pops out of the
back of the head. All that stuff was built from
scratch and designed to function as it would and you know,
quote unquote real life. Even the weird toolgun that Moss
uses to extract the tracking device from Neo was a

(01:03:10):
real object that not only had to have a functional
handle to manipulate, but also had to be able to
suction a prop into its chamber and eject it with
a video screen. None of that was composited and what
was shown on the video screen was actually broadcast to
the prop from offset. So that's so much effort, so

(01:03:30):
many moving parts. It's just insane.

Speaker 2 (01:03:32):
And I mean they did that the way that you
would do like a lot of stuff, like where it's
moving through his guts or whatever. That's like a fake
stomach and then someone is moving the bug prop through it.
But just the idea of being like, yeah, you have
to create something that has you know, both suction and
pneumatic air and it also has to have a screen.

Speaker 1 (01:03:51):
Go just nuts, man. And on the flip side, I
was talking with somebody today about the lightsaber in a
New Hope and how I guess the original ones, like
because you know, obviously this the sword part itself was
added in the post. The grip was just like a

(01:04:12):
vintage I think it was like a camera flash or something.
And you can see like in some of the shots,
especially on like the you know the pre cleaned up editions, No, no,
the post cleaned up editions that it's it's the really
high res version. You can still like see the logo
for the camera flash on it or something. That's awesome. Yeah,
So it's like there's two ways to approach props in

(01:04:34):
the pre cgih, I guess went the Machowskis chose violence.
That is insane to me. Additional fun fact, one of
the rooftop sets the actors run across was from Alex
Priyuce's Dark City, which you say is funny given how

(01:04:55):
much of the films get compared. Tell us more about that.
I don't know anything about this. Oh, that's a great movie.

Speaker 2 (01:05:00):
Alex Proyus did the original Crow, which was timely once
again with this rebooted piece of ass that is coming out.
The look at that film is so embarrassing. But Proyus
did the original Crow, and Dark City is this really
far out kind of concept that happens to suspiciously mirror

(01:05:21):
that of the Matrix. It's this gorgeous neo Noir German
expressionist Gothic city that is inhabited by these creepy it's
controlled by these creepy I mean they basically all look
like different versions of Nosferatu, who put these omnipotent beans

(01:05:43):
who kind of force everyone to go to sleep and
move the city around in their dreams and like rearrange
the city scape according to people's memory and one protagonist
who's like waking up to that reality. It's a really
beautiful film and it's the funniest thing that I know
about it is that Rodre Ebert loved alex Porus and
would like four star every single one of this movies,

(01:06:05):
even like the Knocked Good ones. But yeah, Dark City
Whips check it out.

Speaker 1 (01:06:09):
Cool. Costume designer Kim Barrett worked on all three films
on the Matrix trilogy, and she's responsible for the iconic
long coats. Those came from her envisioning their characters as superheroes.
Matchowski's wanted a cape esque feature to swirl around as
they flew about, and they were all designed functionally to
work with the stunt rigs. For example, Trinity's already form

(01:06:33):
fitting costume at times had to fit over oh you
mentioned this earlier, had to fit over a rigid fiberglass
plate to keep her body rigid while flying through the air.
Barrett said, we had to put in a plate that's
molded to her body shape underneath, then harness them up
and put their costume over the top. So there's a
lot of lacing and tying up. And I really like
this Hugo weaving got off the easiest terms of all

(01:06:55):
the costumes. They dressed him up in a sixty style
Secret Service suit, which I think is really cool suit,
very mad men. Yeah, although anything white that he was
wearing in the Matrix world was sent through a green
wash to help with the whole coloring tint of that world.

Speaker 2 (01:07:11):
It's funny because she also talks about they would do
wind tests with all of the coats, so they had
like leather ones, which obviously don't like flap in the wind,
So they were just like holding coats in front of
fans and seeing how that they would flutter the most cinematically.

Speaker 1 (01:07:27):
That's so funny. I always just assumed it was leather. Yeah, no,
what would it have been like? PVC must have been
read the next sentence. Oh oh, let's see, here we go,
Oh oh, here we go. Costumes were designed with the
limited budgeted mind. Barrett wanted Trinity to quote seem like
an oil slick. I love that, so she dressed her

(01:07:48):
in mostly PVC, while Neo's coat was a wool blend
that costs three dollars a yard. Barrett also designed all
of the characters' boots. Since there are so many close
ups of people's feet. They couldn't source anything that had
a logo on it.

Speaker 2 (01:08:03):
It's crazy to me that Keanu does all that stuff
in these huge industrial goth boot Yes.

Speaker 1 (01:08:07):
Yeah, I don't you know.

Speaker 2 (01:08:09):
I actually don't know. I don't think I've ever found
this out whether or not he did the he does
that kick at the end where he he kicks Agent
Smith and then holds his leg up and rotates his
hip joint and then brings it ninety degrees around. I
have no idea if they did that with wires or not.

(01:08:31):
But if they didn't, he must have been a tremendously
strong man. Yeah, because that is so hard, even barefoot,
and he does it in these enormous Doc Martin's ass
buckle boots.

Speaker 1 (01:08:44):
That's so weird. He's gonna be sixty this year.

Speaker 2 (01:08:48):
Yeah, yeah, I want, I really want him to start
getting his uh his like Elder Gravitas, rolls like age
into like his Bill Murray drama Phase.

Speaker 1 (01:09:00):
Cousin. Designer Kim Barrett also commissioned the film's custom eye
wear from indie designer Richard Walker, whose line Blind Design
was then sold with an ees was then sold at
high end retailers like Barney's in New York. Actors had
to sit through the arduous body casting process, since each
pair of these glasses was handmade to their bone structures,

(01:09:22):
and they only had two or three pairs per actor.
A difficult consideration effector in when much of your film
is things flying in people's faces. Wow, Yeah, that that
seems like something you maybe would want to spring for
a little.

Speaker 2 (01:09:38):
More, especially the little tiny armless ones that has that
just go over the bridge of your nose like that's wild.

Speaker 1 (01:09:46):
For camera work, the Wachowski's re teamed with their cinematographer
Bill Pope, we mentioned earlier, who'd worked with them on Bound,
and Funnily enough, the Wachowskis knew him from his work
on Army of Darkness, the third installment of the Evil
Dead franchise. In an interview with the American Society of Cinematographers,
Pope explained, we didn't necessarily want the matrix world to
resemble our present world. We didn't want any cheery blue skies.

(01:10:10):
In Australia, the sky is a brilliant blue virtually all
the time, but we wanted bald white skies. All of
our translate backings for stage work were altered to have
white skies, and on actual exterior shots in which we
see a lot of sky, we digitally enhanced the skies
to make them white. Additionally, since we wanted the matrix
reality to be really unappealing, we asked ourselves what is

(01:10:32):
the most unappealing color? I think we all agreed on green,
So for those scenes we sometimes used green filters and
I'd add a bit of green to the color timing.

Speaker 2 (01:10:41):
This must have been one of the last movies to
do that, because isn't O Brother, where art thou the
first film that was like digitally color corrected.

Speaker 1 (01:10:52):
I didn't know that. Wow, I think this would have
been the that would have been like the year after this. Yeah,
two thousand. Well, because I remember when we were doing
the episode of Freaks and Geeks, they were talking about
how they would color die just with gray. Everything looked discussing.

Speaker 3 (01:11:10):
We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right
back with more too much information in just a moment, Let's.

Speaker 1 (01:11:28):
Just go to the sound design corner. Why not? Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:11:32):
One of them is from the film's audio guys Dane Davis,
which is just I love sound I love fully fully
movie sound design work. I'm always tickled to hear how
they get specific sound effects and to get adequate fight sounds.
He would whip like car antennas past microphones to get
the fist wooshing sound. And at one point he also

(01:11:53):
just had two guys, two jiu jitsu practitioners inside a
recording booth for four days. It was just like, yeah,
just fight each other.

Speaker 1 (01:12:04):
We'll get the best bit somewhere. Yeah, just keep going. Yeah, no,
go ahead, Yeah, I'm in the booth. Yeah rolling.

Speaker 2 (01:12:13):
It was like a four by six or four x
eight something too, which is even funnier that they were
literally just wrestling in like a postage sized stamp like
vocal booth isolation. Poop, Oh my god, the sound of
the Sentinel robots dying. He fired two inch lead cannonballs
through a line of washing machines and trash bins filled

(01:12:34):
with metal junk.

Speaker 1 (01:12:35):
That's incredible. Wow. Oh I did a question for you.
I was just that we that lightsaber facto. I came
up earlier today because I was trying to remember how
did they get what? What was it? Was it the
sound of doors opening on the Death Star or was
something funny? Oh? It was just like paper being ripped

(01:12:55):
or something. Yeah, oh yeah, I don't this.

Speaker 2 (01:12:59):
The fully design is Star Wars as his own whole
world because it was so much of it was super
cheap for that, especially for that first one. But now
I can't place the exact thing that you're talking about.
The other Davis connected to the film's sound was composer
Don Davis. They are not He and the sound guy
are not related. The Wachowskis were big fans of Rage

(01:13:19):
against the Machine, which is a little on the nose
and Ministry, the pioneering industrial band whose groundbreaking drum programming
would inspire everyone from zz Top, which is an actual,
real and true thing.

Speaker 1 (01:13:34):
To the Strokes.

Speaker 2 (01:13:36):
They loved the work that he had done on Bound,
particularly one sound effect, which was the sound of a
manipulated digitally like the sound of a pile driver machine,
an actual irl pile driver machine that he mixed into
the sound effects and score. He said, they were very
happy with my approach to compose the score in a
very minimalist and postmodern way. I think the minimalist thing

(01:13:58):
really comes in there because I hear a lot of
Philip Glass in the in the strings. It does this
one recurring motif. That's actually quite funny, where it's just
doing like a drum exercise, like I don't know if
you've ever hung out with a bunch of drummers, but
I have, and they do this thing on the It's
just basic drum rudiments where you take like a cord
and no pulse and you just do the different rhythmic

(01:14:20):
subdivisions over it. So you do quarter, quarter, eighth, that that, that,
that triple, its sixteens, and that's just what the score does.
At a certain point. It's like what, Uh so I
just think that's neat. And he uses that pile driver
thing again. Uh he does it when Neo walks through

(01:14:43):
the metal detector at the building and each one of
his steps make this huge, like metallic, echoey clanging noise,
really fascinating stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:14:50):
Before it move on. I I I found I was
looking for it. It was actually the doors opening on
Star Trek, the doors of the Enterprise. The sound of
the made from a piece of paper being slid from
an envelope.

Speaker 2 (01:15:03):
It's like the one sample that they had right like
they reused it every single time.

Speaker 1 (01:15:07):
Yep. Yeah, that's great stuff. I love that.

Speaker 2 (01:15:11):
The big problem with the score was that the Wachowskis
apparently wanted a choir and for some of the stuff,
and Don Davis was like, well, the film was He
explained to the Hollywood Reporter the film was shot in Sydney.
While the five or six SAG actors got waivers to
shoot over overseas, Warner Brothers was unwilling to engage the
Screen Actors Guild for Los Angeles singers who work under

(01:15:33):
a SAG contract, So I actually had to contract former
members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and we recorded the
vocal elements of the score in Salt Lake City. So
there you have it, folks. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir is
on the sound check to the Matrix. Probably interesting to
no one but me, but he also talks about the

(01:15:55):
process of scoring this. He would basically come up with
themes and stuff on a synthesize, are played to the
Wazowskis as they showed him cuts and scenes, and then
orchestrate it, which meant that basically he was able to
match the orchestration precisely to the cuts of the film
so that they didn't have any tempt music in this,

(01:16:15):
which is a big thing in test screenings and stuff
where before the soundtrack is completed, people will just throw
in like generic sounding classical or generic sounding film music,
probably AI generated at this point, but they had the
benefit of actually having this soundtrack go live to every
single preview, cut and screening that they sent. Also fun facts,
Don Davis is a big fan of anagrams.

Speaker 1 (01:16:39):
Who isn't really it's true, but a lot of.

Speaker 2 (01:16:41):
The titles in the in the Matrix score or like
like one of them. The Dojo music is credited to
the Bow Whisk Orchestra, which is an anagram of Wachowski Brothers.

Speaker 1 (01:16:55):
As they were.

Speaker 2 (01:16:57):
Yes, please don't cancel us so little money. Meanwhile, the
selections for the film just maybe the most nineteen ninety
nine soundtrack possible. Deaftones, Ridge Against the Machine, Marilyn Manson
perhaps most indelibly, Rob Zombies Aseni and Earworm Dragula, and
then a lot of electronic artists Massive Attack is in there,

(01:17:20):
propeller Head. My favorite cut from the movie, which is
Rob Dugan's Club to Death Parentheses Kure Amino Mix Parentheses
closed that's most often known as the Woman in the
Red Dress song. If you downloaded this from LimeWire, like
I did back in the day. It was probably called
The Woman in.

Speaker 1 (01:17:38):
The Red Dress.

Speaker 2 (01:17:40):
That has some really cool classical string samples. Edward Elgar's
Enigma Variations is the intro quote samples Gustav Holtz Jupiter
the Bringer of Jolilithy from his Planet Famous Planets suite.
And lastly, that song uses the Honey Dripper's iconic Impeach
the President break, which is another one of the most

(01:18:01):
sampled hip hop trip hop electronic drum breaks of all time. Sorry,
I'm a big nerd well, I mean part of the
the thing I love about the sample, about the electronic
access to this is that like it really dovetails well
with the movies theme of like the organic versus the yes,
you know, because it is all of this recontextualization of

(01:18:22):
acoustic music chopped and re sampled and synthesized.

Speaker 1 (01:18:26):
So clever stuff wild wild stuff wild. Yes. Oh, that
hasn't come back for a while. No, because I've been
trained not to do it.

Speaker 2 (01:18:41):
Probably the speaking as as as what I always call
movie magic, the biggest movie magic moments in the film
are come from bullet time.

Speaker 1 (01:18:53):
Yeah. No, that was that was That was a sound
of evamorration.

Speaker 2 (01:19:00):
It's just so silly to call it the bullet time,
but it was in the shooting script the Wachowski's. It's
their term for how they would visualize how the characters
are able to move at these superhuman speeds to dodge bullets,
and in the shooting script they describe it thusly, we
enter the liquid space of bullet time. The air sizzles

(01:19:20):
with wads of lead like angry flies as Neo twists
bends ducks just between them. Neo bent impossibly back, one
hand on the ground is a spiraling gray ball. Shears
open his shoulder, and that's it. They had no idea
how they were going to pull this off, Lana told Wired.
People would say, well, how are you going to do that?
And we were like, we're working on it. Most distilled,

(01:19:43):
done to its most basic essence. Bullet time is basically
wanting a camera to move it its normal speed while
capturing slow motion imagery, and they initially took the most
direct route to this by attaching a slow motion camera
to like a really fast moving dolly or sled.

Speaker 1 (01:20:03):
That was quickly discarded for practical reasons.

Speaker 2 (01:20:06):
Mass Illusions was an SFX company that was later renamed Manax,
but they had just won an Oscar for creating the
afterlife that Robin Williams travers is in What Dreams May Come.
But they actually the Wachelsea's actually met with them as
early as nineteen ninety six when their script was still
being worked on, and the Mannix's person who ended up

(01:20:27):
working on the Matrix, guy named John Gata. He told
Empire I would credit Otomo Katsuhiro, who co wrote and
directed Akira, which definitely blew me away, along with Michelle Gondry.
Michelle Gondry's music videos were experimenting with a type of
technique called view morphing that you can see and I

(01:20:48):
forget which one. So the scene takes place that it
was in the shooting crip takes place on a rooftop,
But the way that they executed the bulletinme portions of
that was that Reeves was on a sound stage all
green walls. He was wired up and one hundred and
twenty still cameras were kind of set up around him

(01:21:08):
in a spiral descending spiral, and as the wires pulled
him backwards and kind of hold him up, the cameras
take still shots in a succession around him, while a
pair of regular motion picture film cameras also capture his movements.
So you add the live action stuff to the stills,

(01:21:30):
and then you put that in a computer and composite
it all together. And that scene, the backwards bend, took
two years and cost seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
What also they shot, I mean they essentially also shot
all that stuff twice and in the Countess case on

(01:21:51):
the storytops the roof of a thirty five story building,
Glenn Boswell told sci Fi. I found a portable trust
staging system where you can break it down into pieces
to fit it into an elevator. To get it to
the rooftop, I just had to rig Keanu and get
them to lean back in it so that they could
shoot in a way where they didn't see it in
the camera. After the bullet time was done on the roof,

(01:22:12):
we had to do it at the studio and recreate
and match what we did on the roof. So this
was all draining for everyone, obviously. Chad Scleski talks about
aside from regular shooting, we spent every weekend on a
sound stage where we do the specific moves that the
Wachowskis felt We're going to be highlighted with bullet time.
We did tests and rehearsals. The effects people would photograph

(01:22:32):
me and the other doubles doing what they were going
to have Kanu and the other actors do, and then
they'd go back to the drawing board that would dial
that took months to dial in.

Speaker 1 (01:22:41):
I mean I almost needed to do the math on this.
That shot. How long is that in the movie?

Speaker 2 (01:22:47):
Not long, Not very long at all, Okay, I just
wanted to highlight that. Yeah, those rehearsals were not just
for the stunt team. Basically, they scanned the footage from
these dry runs in and then the computer spit out
a tracking system for the cameras to trigger and capture

(01:23:10):
their movements, to trigger and guide their movements. I should
say this is I'm imagining it's similar to what they
did on Dead Ringers, which is where Jeremy Irons plays
a set of twins, and they basically created early computer
system that would move the camera in precisely the same ways,
take after take, so that he could do both scenes
or both parts.

Speaker 1 (01:23:30):
I think we talked about that for The Parents Trap
actually too.

Speaker 2 (01:23:32):
Yes, yes, but so after scanning the first footage into
the computer and having the computer map the camera movements,
they had to scan the stills back into the computer
along with the motion picture footage, and then the computer
would generate by itself in between images to kind of

(01:23:55):
string all that disparate stuff together, just how animators would
do it, Just really sane stuff. I cannot believe that
they And you know, man, it's such a fascinating thing
in film history because it is one of the first genuinely,
most genuinely innovative things I have seen that kind of
came out of nowhere. They invented a visual language for this,

(01:24:15):
Like so emotion existed, but people hadn't been trying to
move cameras independently of slow motion. I mean, like when
you think of like existing film special effects that had
been up to this time, like really groundbreaking. It's all
kind of iterations on existing technology. The only thing I
can compare it to is the stuff James Cameron was
doing in like the Abyss when he developed when he

(01:24:36):
pushed them to develop, like the morphing effects. Just nuts
and these two people this was their first big budget movie. Yeah,
we will invent a new visual language and build it
from scratch.

Speaker 1 (01:24:49):
I mean you almost need to wonder if so much
of that came from the fact that they just didn't
know what was and what wasn't possible. Oh sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then it was like, well, okay, we've got this budget,
get me somebody who could figure out how to do
this go yeah, and then it became somebody else's headache
and they were just like tapping their watch. That's so incredibing. Yeah,

(01:25:09):
not to always bring it back to this, but my
legally obligated Beetle moment. I mean it's the same with
the Beatles, with a lot of the stuff that they
were asking their producer, George Martin to do because they
just didn't know that it wasn't something they was supposed
to be able to do, you know. I like that. Yeah,
but this rigor wasn't only reserved for bullet time scenes.
Chad Stallski, the stunt coordinator, continued for most stunts you

(01:25:33):
get five takes, maybe ten, but to show that Keanu
and the actors were doing their own moves, that Wuchowsi's
didn't want a lot of cuts. It wasn't weird to
do twenty to thirty takes twenty to thirty takes of
these excruciating, painful moves. Wow, incredible. This was actually something
of a quiet revolution in Hollywood at the time. You write,

(01:25:57):
I gotta give you credit. Oh thanks man. Whereas fight
scenes prior to this were created in the edit room
centering around big hero punches or kicks strung together from
lots of separate shots, movies like The Matrix and Your
Beloved Blade, your prior created a new expectation that action
heroes should convincingly be able to hold down fight scenes

(01:26:18):
for long with just one or two punches at a time.
I always say that.

Speaker 2 (01:26:22):
You can judge how good of a fighter an actor
is by the length of the cuts in any given
fight scene. And it's really embarrassing when you go back
and watch stuff pre Blade in The Matrix, like those
two movies coming out of the One two Punch and
then Crouching Tiger. The following year was just like, oh,
we have to make fight scenes look good now because
everything else is just people throwing these big haymaker punches.

(01:26:43):
I I just watched Roadhouse recently and all like, Sweezy
bless him looks like a camel throwing his kicks, and
that film is actually pretty good about having unbroken strings
of action fight choreography. But yeah, man, like, especially when
you look at some of the Nick Cage stuff I
watch on air recently, and it's just so like watching
him do these fights.

Speaker 1 (01:27:03):
He's supposed to be this like special Ranger bad ass.

Speaker 2 (01:27:05):
It's just like so many quick cuts, so many different angles,
just to disguise the fact that these guys could only
do like one or two things at a time, whereas
these Hong Kong guys are used to being like, Okay,
here's thirty moves to chain together that you have to memorize,
and we will film that until you get it right
and then move on to the next thirty.

Speaker 1 (01:27:23):
This film is due tomorrow. We have a fun fact
about the stuntman, Chaz Taluski.

Speaker 2 (01:27:30):
Oh yeah, I mean this poor guy. Virtually everyone got injured.
I think they had to start disguising the bruises on
Morpheus and Keanu after the dojo fight scene because they
didn't have any padding and they were just like wailing
on each other's arms because so much of it is
like this Chinese style wind chung blocking and punching, and
they just gave each other huge bruises up and down
their forearms.

Speaker 1 (01:27:49):
Everyone got injured on this.

Speaker 2 (01:27:51):
I think Carrie an Moss fractured her ankle doing the
cartwheel off the wall and the lobby scene. It's just
amazing that I can just name different shots in this
movie and everyone would instantly go yeah, that that heart
was tight as hell. Stileski got messed up, though, specifically
in the scene where they were shooting the subway fight
where Agent Smith throws Kean or throws Neo up into

(01:28:15):
the subway and then he ceiling and then he hits
the ground again. That got Chad for his efforts a
dislocated shoulder, damaged knees, and several broken ribs.

Speaker 1 (01:28:25):
Jesus Christ worth it, Yeah, yeah, well, Perhaps unsurprisingly, the
Matrix started to run over time and budget. The Wachowski's
threatened to walk if the studio started trimming scenes, but
they were kind of helped in their feud with the
studio by their film's editor, Zak Steinberg, who'd cut together

(01:28:47):
some of the early scenes in the film which he
sent to the executives to mollify them, and this had
the intended effect. The studio extended the shoot from ninety
days to one hundred and eighteen days, so they added
a month. Four weeks still doesn't seem like a hell
of a lot of time to me.

Speaker 2 (01:29:03):
But Jordan, now it's time for lightning round yees. Facts
that don't fit anywhere else. Yeah, maybe they did, but
I was writing it sequentially and did not reinsert them
where they would have been appropriate.

Speaker 1 (01:29:13):
They literally had to rewrite airspace laws in New South Wales,
Australia to get the helicopter shots in because the full
scale shooting model of the helicopter didn't have blades, so
they had to use a real helicopter in a few
long shots and they were filming in restricted airspace. Could
just add blades to a model helicopter. It seems like

(01:29:34):
the rather than getting the laws changed. That maybe seems like.

Speaker 2 (01:29:38):
I've restrained from a lot of anti Australian sentiment in this,
but it just speaks to the cartoonish nature of that
country that they walked in and we're like, hey, we
need to we got to rewrite some of your airspace
laws in Asia. Yeah, they're like, fine, we'll do it
for a faustus like a Winnie Blues, maybe a Lamb

(01:29:59):
Kebab that's pretty good vacation in Bali.

Speaker 1 (01:30:04):
I love Australians. Yes, Nick Cave is Australian. Ac DC
are Australian. Front of the Pod Phil is Australian and
Phil Phil Yes. For the woman in the red dress scene,
the directors hired several sets of twins to be in
the crowd walking past, implying that since this was a
training video, the programmer would have gotten a little lazy

(01:30:25):
and just started copy pasting people in. I love that.

Speaker 2 (01:30:29):
I didn't talk a ton about the guns in this movie,
because I don't like glorifying guns, but just some fun
notes about how they designed stuff, like that when Mouse
gets spoiler alert killed by the agents, that he pulls
out those huge machine guns and starts firing them. Those
were custom designed for the movie. And the fact that
the agents all carry desert Eagle fifty cows is like

(01:30:53):
a spoof or a joke that just like the Wachowski's
talked one of they when they talk to the film's armor.
They were like, Oh, yeah, we want them to have
like these huge guns, and the fifty cow desert Eagle
is like a clown gun, like it should not exist
in the real world because it's so large and you
can't fire it one handed. People can't handle the recoil

(01:31:14):
for you know, for reference, when the famous Dirty Harry
speak when he talks about the three fifty seven magnum,
So a fifty cow desert eagle is thirteen more than
that in terms of gun measurements. So they gave them
these fifty cow, these enormous guns, and we're just like, yeah,

(01:31:35):
fire in one handed all the time. It'll be cooler,
It'll like, it will just look like the agents are
that powerful that they can fire this tank cannon one handed.

Speaker 1 (01:31:44):
I don't know. I think that's neat, also neat and
equally kind of disturbing in its own way. These springloaded
cell phones used in the film something creepy because they're
spring loaded, so there's like a violence to them when
they pop open. Right, come on, yeah, shoot, I.

Speaker 2 (01:32:05):
Thought it was I thought it was the coolest thing
I'd ever see it. Well, and then to my shock,
you could not get it because they designed it.

Speaker 1 (01:32:13):
Yes, these were no Kia stilettos are eight one one
zeros or eighty one tens. I don't know how you
say that. Uh, And they were referred to cloaqually as
the banana phone, and that spring mechanism was indeed an
addition for the film, so it did not come stock
like that, which was disappointing, huge failure. The young Alex

(01:32:34):
Heigel Uh you touched on this earlier. Counta Reeves and
Hugo Weaving nicknamed each other the neck and the leg
during pre production in reference to their respective complicating injuries.
Weaving had a pull up removed from his leg and
would later crack two ribs and hurt his wrist and
carry on. Moss sprained her ankle shooting the lobby scene.

(01:32:54):
At one point, as you mentioned, the protein sloped that
the crew of the Nebukadez Aerat is rice porridge. Why
is it called Nebukadezer? I mean that's a I know,
that's an Egyptian king. Yeah, it's an old Testament reference.
Oh of course, gotcha? Gotcha. During the scene in the

(01:33:15):
Oracles living room where Neo meets other candidates for oneness,
the nineteen seventy two rabbit horror movie Night of the
Lepis is playing on TV. Rabbit Horror. Is that? Is
that a genre? Is that a subgenre other than binicula
and this movie. I don't think so.

Speaker 2 (01:33:35):
Well, maybe Monty Python, Oh yeah, yeah, yea yeah, it's
like the most famous scary rabbit of all time.

Speaker 1 (01:33:41):
Speaking of TVs, the antique television Morpheus shows to Neo
in the Construct is an Awa amalgamated Wireless Australiasia Radiola
Deep Image Model two O nine C. Wow, I applaud
the granul nice. There are a couple of Biblical illusions

(01:34:04):
strewn throughout the film. Agent Smith's car has the license
plate is by four one six referring to Isaiah fifty
four sixteen, which reads, behold, I have created the smith
that bloweth the coals in the fire, and that time
to stop there Smith, get it. That's good, it's good.
That's good. And the nihbu Godezer's core etching Mark three

(01:34:28):
number eleven model as a possible reference to Mark three eleven,
which reads, and whoever those possessed by evil spirits caught
sight of him, they would fall down in front of him,
shrieking you are the son of God, which they did.
My Catholic priest ancestors are very proud of me right now.
Most of the accubo, no, I don't like needles. Most

(01:34:48):
of the accupucture needles in Neo's body are stuck in
a prosthetic. That's good. That covers Keonu's chest, except for
the needles in his ears, which were inserted by an
onset acupuncturist. Oh, I can have you ever had accupuncture done? Yeah?
All the time. It's great, but it's got needles. Yeah,

(01:35:10):
well is it great? I don't know. That's good for
muscle stuff. I use it for my back and neck situation. Well,
it's hurting my back and neck because I'm getting tense
just thinking about it. Moving on the horrifying scene in
which Neo's mouth melts shut. That was an intentional homage
to the sci fi novel I Have No Mouth and

(01:35:30):
I Most Scream by Harlan Ellison.

Speaker 2 (01:35:33):
Yeah, that's truly one of the greatest titles of all time.
Harlan Ellison is one of those deeply unsung heroes who's
like one of the most quietly influential sci fi authors
of all time. He wrote Deep In with a Glass Hand,
which is an episode of The Outer Limits. Oh that
was wound later found to be so similar to The
Terminator that newer cuts of the original film feature with

(01:35:57):
the credit that says like grateful acknowledgment to the word
of Harlan Ellison or something.

Speaker 1 (01:36:01):
Ooh, I love that you could just rattle the stuff off.
I can only do that with like the Titanic and
the Beatles. Well, I have no Mathelm. I'm of scream is.

Speaker 2 (01:36:11):
That is one of the more famous ones, although hilariously enough,
Harlan Ellison wrote himself Terminator was not stolen from Demon
with a glass hand.

Speaker 1 (01:36:20):
It was a rip off of my other Outer Limit
script Soldier and finally our last lightning round. Fun fact.
The cascading green code used to render the Matrix in
the real world was a custom typeface designed by Simon
Whiteley that included Japanese characters, Arabic numerals, and Western Latin letters.
In a twenty seventeen interview at CNET, he attributed the

(01:36:43):
design to his wife, who's from Japan, saying I like
to tell everybody that the Matrix code is made out
of Japanese sushi recipes. I think I've read that before,
and I thought he was serious, but I'm guessing he's kidding.
Who's to say, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:36:59):
Filming on the Matrix ended and post production began in
October of nineteen ninety eight. Wachowski stayed in Australia until
November and continued editing the film until shortly before its release.
Warner Brothers was nervous after the aforementioned and similar Dark
City kind of flopped at the box office, and so
they decided to bet.

Speaker 1 (01:37:15):
Big on ads.

Speaker 2 (01:37:16):
It took out a nineteen ninety nine Super Bowl ad
for the movie, but interestingly, they were kind of hands
off at this point. The editor Zach Stainberg told Wired
that they had a great test meeting and then our
test screening, and they were in a meeting with the
Warners co chairs Bob Daily and Terry Simel, and Terry said,
we love this movie. Their only note to us was

(01:37:36):
to take five to ten minutes out. We ended up
taking five and a half minutes out and they never
even looked at that final cut.

Speaker 1 (01:37:43):
Hilarious. They didn't have worried.

Speaker 2 (01:37:45):
The Matrix opened to theaters in the United States on
March thirty first, nineteen ninety nine, to widespread acclaim and
went on to gross four hundred and sixty million dollars
on its sixty three million budget, becoming the highest grossing
Warner Brothers film. Of nineteen ninety nine and the fourth
highest grossing film of that year. It's funny because they
were a little scared of putting it up against Phantom Menace,
which came out in May of that year. Oh and

(01:38:08):
then The Mummy also came out right around that time.
It was like a big kind of sneak hit, sneak blockbuster.
What a great couple of months for blockbusters. Man, Yeah,
funnily enough. Also being a David cronenbergner, and I have
to note this, David Cronenberg's Exist Ends with a Z
was released shortly after The Matrix and starred Jennifer Jason
Lee as a celebrity video game designer whose creation drops

(01:38:30):
players into a fake but believable world, which is the
exact setup for Keanu Reeves's character in the fourth Matrix film.
They make him a game designer whose creation is widely
celebrated as immersive, starting to wonder if they just keep
tabs on everything and.

Speaker 1 (01:38:50):
Steal it na taking that back.

Speaker 2 (01:38:55):
Just under a month after The Matrix came out, though,
the Columbine massacre pulled the movie into a darker area
of the discourse. The resemblance between the film's fetishization of
firearms and the wardrobes resemblance to the trench coats worn
by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The overall fetishization of
gunplay in the movie did little help, but in the end,

(01:39:16):
Matrix just kind of steamrolled past all of that, like
the brief blip when video games and violent movies were
such a hot talking point. I remember this, and it
was quickly eclipsed by like Marilyn Manson. Don't you remember,
like eminem I remember that music being so much of
a bigger.

Speaker 1 (01:39:36):
Deal than movies. Oh big time.

Speaker 2 (01:39:38):
Yeah, what a stupid country. The Matrix received nominations at
the seventy second Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects, Best
Film Editing, Best Sound, and Best Sound Editing, and it
won all four categories. I think it's one of the
only cases in which a film won all of the
categories in which it was nominated and also wasn't nominated

(01:39:59):
for any of the Big one four. A while in
two thousand and nine, the Matrix was ranked thirty ninth
on Empire Magazine's Reader, Actor and Critic voted list of
the five hundred greatest movies of all Time, voted as
the fourth best science fiction film in the twenty eleven
list Best of Film based on a poll conducted by
ABC and People Magazine. And it must be said that

(01:40:20):
in twenty twelve, The Matrix was selected for preservation in
the United States National Film Registry by the Library of
Congress for being quote culturally, historically and esthetically significant.

Speaker 1 (01:40:33):
Twenty twelve or thirteen years. What took him so long?
I know it should have been canonized upon its release. Well, obviously,
the runaway success of the film changed everyone's life, or
at least the life everyone involved in it. Kyanta Reeve
became a full on action star slash you say, the
maybe most dangerous man in Hollywood that he was always

(01:40:54):
meant to be. Why was he the most dangerous man
in Hollywood?

Speaker 2 (01:40:58):
Well, because after learning all this kung fust uh for
the John Wick movies, he also learned like CQC, which
is like the military close quarter combat stuff that has
elements of like krav maga and you know, Brazilian jiu jitsu.

Speaker 1 (01:41:12):
So he learned all that stuff for John Wick.

Speaker 2 (01:41:13):
And then he also just added firearms training to his
Like don't you remember when they were mate when they
talked about the Making of John Wick how he became
like an expert marksman with like everything from pistols to
shotguns to like long rifles because he had to do
it all in the movie and was so committed to
it that he became like a legitimately dangerous gun user.
I just love the fact that he's like the most

(01:41:34):
chill dude of all time, and he's like, I've also
mastered several arts of killing, So that's Kean and then swords,
and then swords too, because he did he did a
very maligned flop of a Samurai movie that rid all
in its original Japanese for some reason, because among his

(01:41:54):
heritages is Japanese, I think, but he wanted to do
the whole movie in Japanese, and so presumably he's also
really good with the sword.

Speaker 1 (01:42:02):
Has he done like non action like, does he done
like any rom coms or anything? Or or is he
purely an action guy these days? The Lake House in
nineteen ninety nine, I think he did. He was in Thumbsucker,
which I remember seeing in theaters for some reason. Replacements
was his next big one after it. Oh Man with

(01:42:23):
Gene Hackman, Right, that's correct? Hell yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:42:28):
Anyway, Oh and Constantine God Constantine Whips. Also in two
thousand and five he did Scanner Darkly, which is probably
the probably the best, into my mind, Philip K. Dick
adaptation that's ever gone out on screen, and another movie
that makes tremendous use of his dialed in kind of

(01:42:49):
blank affect. Yeah, everyone go check out Scanner dark That rules.

Speaker 1 (01:42:52):
I remember seeing that in theaters too. Yeah, big Keanu
Reeves high school movie experience. I ever thought about that.
I'm so glad for you. Yeah, so that's Keanu Reeves.
Luachowskis became a Listers Upon the release of The Matrix.
Carrie On Moss stopped being able to wear sunglasses outside
because she was recognized instantly in them, which is the

(01:43:14):
opposite of every other celebrity who wears Love's I love that.

Speaker 2 (01:43:20):
I mean until she grew her hair out, she probably
she just had a tremendously recognizable face and head. When
you add sunglasses to it, people just started breaking their
next looking at her in the public.

Speaker 1 (01:43:31):
I guess between The Matrix and Rush Hour the previous year,
nineteen ninety eight, Hollywood quickly took notice of how much
money there was to be made via Hong Kong, and
one of the most direct beneficiaries of this was the
runaway success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which made us
stars out of longtime Hong Kong legends like Chow Young
Fat and Michelle Yo, and gave us audiences his first

(01:43:53):
big exposure to the historical epic genre. The film belongs
to called Wouja. You didn't think I was going to
pronounce that, right? You nailed that, dude. I've heard you
said enough times. You teach me, you teach me. Bullet
time quickly infiltrated other films and even video games. The
game Max Pain I remember Max Pain literally named one

(01:44:14):
of its central mechanics bullet time, though the game had
been in development more or less at the same time
as the matrix, so it wasn't a complete steal. Do
you remember the XFL Oh my god, yeah wow.

Speaker 2 (01:44:26):
The XFL used a rudimentary form of bullet time for
its replays. They used the same still camera rotating. They
had cameras. I think one of their big quote unquote
innovations that actually affected the NFL was that they allowed
cameras lower and over the field so that you could
get a closer look at stuff. And I distinctly remember
watching one of those XFL games and seeing the bullet

(01:44:48):
time rotating camera thing.

Speaker 1 (01:44:50):
That's really funny, A dude, episode of the XFL. What
will happened with that? Oh yeah, dude, it's so fascinating.

Speaker 2 (01:44:57):
I think a bunch of those guys went to the
NFL and a bunch of them became professional wrestlers. And
Vincent is a human is a monster?

Speaker 1 (01:45:03):
Yeah? Oh yeah. The Matrix also blew up the whole
sort of techno adjacent hacker culture. As you say, suddenly,
people wearing PVC to do drugs in Berlin warehouse parties
were seen as cool as hell. We don't have enough
time to get remotely into the expanded universe of the Matrix,
which involves comic books, video games, the Animatrix, which made

(01:45:24):
the ties to Japanese animation explicit by having various prominent
animators render in universe stories into an anthology. And that's
not even touching on the three sequels.

Speaker 2 (01:45:35):
Which I will not no no, no no Reloaded has
some killer fight scenes, revolutions is that was a guy outside?
But I share his sentiment.

Speaker 1 (01:45:52):
Let's say, listeners. Heigl has been quiet for about twenty
five seconds now that I edited down staring off into
middle distance. As early as two thousand, colleges began offering
introductory philosophy courses tied to this movie, and as the
two thousand and five book Philosophers Explore the Matrix puts it.
By the end of nineteen ninety nine, when nearly every

(01:46:13):
undergraduate aged American had seen The Matrix, philosophy professors rejoiced,
here was a deceptive visual reality scenario burned into our
collective cinematic imagination. No more explaining how the evil demon
causes my sensory experience, no more explaining how the scientists
built the experience machine. Now we could just say it's
like in the Matrix. But that's great. Yeah, yeah, between

(01:46:38):
this and Groundhog Day, really yeah, hitting the philosophy, yeah,
good for us. Wow, it's almost as if we're going
through stuff and trying to figure things out.

Speaker 2 (01:46:51):
Next up Jean Paul Sartre's Nausea.

Speaker 1 (01:46:56):
But as with any world conquering success, the naysayers came
out force. Allegations of plagiarism were leveled at the Wachowskis
for lifting bits and pieces of the Matrix from varying sources.
One of the most prominent critics was comic book legend
Grant Morrison, whose work had been tackling many of the
themes of the matrix for years. For instance, in a
nineteen ninety two issue of Doom Patrol written by Morrison,

(01:47:19):
the self explanatory robot man's consciousness becomes stuck in an
artificial reality called the data Matrix.

Speaker 2 (01:47:28):
I'm not generally one to add fuel to the matrix,
to the Wachowskis or plagiarists fire, but when you see
it in Tota, yeah, you're like all right, Like between
this and Dark City and all this other stuff, a
case could be made, especially I didn't show you any
art of the Invisibles where one of the guys looks

(01:47:51):
exactly like Laurence Fishburn.

Speaker 1 (01:47:53):
This robot man, whose consciousness has become infused in the
data Matrix, goes on a journey to realize he is
in a simulation before finding a way to ascend to reality.
Gray Morris and I. He wasn't happy about this. He
was also mad that many of the visual touchstones of
The Invisibles, as you mentioned, probably his most famous work
depicted the same leather clad goth and raver subcultures that

(01:48:15):
The Matrix rated for its style, and there's also a
scene in The Invisibles where Guy has to jump off
a skyscraper as an initiation, much like Neo does. The
entire premise of The Invisibles, a secret group of rebels
roaming multiple planes of reality preaching that the real world's
being controlled by inhuman masters and imploring the audience to
wake up is, as you note, pretty dead on as

(01:48:38):
far as comparisons to The Matrix go. The protagonist of
The Invisibles is supposed to be a reincarnation of the Buddha,
and he's even referred to as the One, So yeah,
it's all pretty damning.

Speaker 2 (01:48:53):
It really was a banner era for white people stealing
from anime. One of the most famous things from this
time is Requiem for Dream and which Darren Aronofsky wanted
to include a shot that was basically a recreation of
a frame from a Japanese animation animated film called Perfect Blue,

(01:49:14):
and he simply bought the rights to the film or
wrote them into the budget or whatever, and just so
you could get away with it. Very funny stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:49:24):
Grant Morrison, the author of The Invisibles and Doom, patrol.
Those comic books that will say most likely inspired the Matrix.
Have spoken about this a few times. In one extensive
interview for the book Anarchy for the Masses, A Disinformation
Guide to the Invisibles, he talked about seeing his ideas
appear in the mainstream. He said, suddenly I felt my

(01:49:47):
territory was invaded. That was stuff nobody had ever been
doing in comic books or in pop culture. The Invisibles
was on the set of The Matrix. People who were
there have told me the Machowski's are comic fans. They
were Vertigo the imprint the published Invisibles fans. In particular,
the Wachowskis apparently have not commented publicly about this aspect
of their work, which speaks volumes.

Speaker 2 (01:50:11):
Yeah, I mean, part of it was just that they
were basically recluses, which for good reason, as we'll get
into later, because the press were awful to them. But yeah,
they just didn't do interviews, a lot of interviews and
basically just lived quietly in Chicago. The funniest thing that
comes up when you talk about alleged cases of plagiarism

(01:50:32):
in the Matrix is the weird legend of Sophia Stuart.
She has a still living writer who, if you believe,
won a judgment against the Wachowskis for stealing part of
her screenplay treatment The Third Eye. In a two thousand
and three lawsuit, Stewart named both the original Terminator and
the Matrix as stolen from her treatment, which was copyrighted
in nineteen eighty three. She supposedly answered a magazine ad

(01:50:56):
in nineteen eighty six that said the Wachowskis were soliciting
science fiction stories made into a comic book. She also
further alleged that her six page treatment had been sent
to Fox as early as nineteen eighty one, although they
didn't get around to rejecting it until nineteen eighty five.
Stuart failed to show up for her court date, and
the lawsuit was dismissed, but the story basically went wide

(01:51:16):
When this is so funny, I'm I'm gonna have a
hard time reading it. The story went wide on the
Internet when an October two thousand and four article by
the Salt Lake Community College Globe titled Mother of the
Matrix Victorious, mistakenly said that Stuart would recover the damages
she sought from the alleged plagiarism, receiving quote one of

(01:51:38):
the biggest payoffs in the history of Hollywood's as the
gross receipts of both films and their sequels total over
two point five billion dollars. The article, as you may expect,
was later found to be riddled with errors, as the
student reporter had mistaken Stuart's successful counter of an early
dismissal motion as her winning the entire case. Like community college.

(01:52:01):
Globe issued a correction and regretted the air, but the
original story had already been picked up by the wider
Internet and could not be stopped. Stewart is hilariously still online.
Her Twitter bio reads, I am the creator owner of
the Matrix and Terminator films, the official owner of both franchises,

(01:52:21):
as per adjudicated in the Utah Federal Courts nine twenty five,
twenty fourteen, and she maintains the site truth about Matrix
dot Com to continue to.

Speaker 1 (01:52:30):
Make her case. You should make that your Twitter bio
truth about Matrix dot Com. Oh, the official owner.

Speaker 2 (01:52:36):
Yes, I'm just I haven't really made this a bit yet,
but I said I was going to start saying I
did an uncredited my credit on everything. While we're talking
about courts, though, we might as well segue into something
that also popped up my research. The matrix defense, which
has become a form of insanity plea used several times
in criminal cases. Defendants justify their actions by saying that

(01:52:59):
they believed at the time of committing their crimes that
they were plugged into the matrix. Perhaps most shockingly, it
has worked. Ton De Lynn Ansley of Hamilton, Ohio was
found not guilty by reason of insanity using this defense
after shooting her land lady in the head. In July
two thousand and two, Vadim Messiges of San Francisco offered
a matrix explanation to police after chopping up his landlady

(01:53:20):
and was declared mentally incompetent to stand trial. And it
was the defense strategy of Joshua Cook's lawyer in his
two thousand and three trial for the murder of his
adoptive parents before he opted to plead guilty.

Speaker 1 (01:53:36):
So that's all a bomber, And it gets worse because
the darker elements of the matrix became even more widespread.
One of the biggest and most tragic legacies of the
matrix stems from the scene where Morpheus offers Neo a
choice to return to his regular life or awaken in

(01:53:57):
the real world, visualizing the decision as red and blue pills.
The term was politicized fairly quickly, with its first use
popping up in the two thousand and six essay The
Red Pill by University of Colorado sociology professor Kathleen J. Tierney,
in which she implored readers to quote take the red
pill and realize that quote post September eleventh, policies and

(01:54:19):
plans have actually made the nation more vulnerable, both the
natural disasters and to future terrorist attacks. And this was Yeah,
she was right to say it. This was in the
context of the bosched response to Hurricane Katrina. A year later,
in two thousand and seven, the blogger Curtis Jarvin used

(01:54:39):
the phrase in a post written under the pseudonym Mensius
Moldbug titled the Case against Democracy ten red Pills This
Stupid Country. The term began to metastasize online in the
early twenty tens, with anti feminists or men's rights activists
referring to their views as quote the red pill, which

(01:55:02):
the subreddit the red Pill founded in twenty twelve. Defines
as quote the recognition and awareness of the way that feminism,
feminists and their white knight enablers affect society. Given that genesis,
it's not difficult to see how the term began to
slant more right, as you say, with a conspiracy forward

(01:55:24):
YouTube account called James Redpills America discussing a quote prefabricated
world controlled by a select few, seemingly all powerful forces
like the banksters, the Rothschilds, and George Soros. A twenty
sixteen documentary titled The Red Pill about the men's rights
movements was released, and Candice Owens created the anti Democrat

(01:55:47):
channel Red Pill Black, with the intent of leading Black
Americans away from the Democratic Party. Bud Wait, there's more. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:55:59):
In the end, the color of the pill doesn't matter
as the As you mentioned in our intro, the suffix
pilled is passed around online referring to all different worldviews.
Black pill for nihilism, green pilled for their belief and
or fear that reptilian aliens are enforcing a new world order.
Most hilariously, back in the nineties, prescription estrogen was in
fact a shade of red. The er point six five

(01:56:21):
milligram premarin tablet was a sort of dark maroon. Currently, though,
the most common form of orally administered prescription estrogen today
is a blue two milligram estradol pill supplied by the
Israeli pharmaceutical company Teva. Make of all that what you will.
That this whole thing, though, is probably the darkest aspect

(01:56:41):
to the Matrix. It's and in one of its gross
kind of unintended side effects of its legacy, without necessarily
meaning to, the Wacawski's created a convenient shorthand to graft
onto an America's extant distrust of authority and or reason.
Writing for Vulture in twenty nineteen, Mark Harris extrapolated on
that better than I could today, the matrix is less

(01:57:01):
of a touchstone than something that's now so deeply threaded
into the way we think and talk that it can
sometimes feel invisible. Its loudest manifestations are also the most malignant,
the clown in hell, mad, profit fulminations of Alex Jones's
Info Wars, Pizzagate, QAnon, and the anti Semitic mutterings about
lizard people, the idea that reality is just a pane
of glass concealing the truth that the only way to

(01:57:22):
reach that is to pick up a rock and throw it.
Later on, he continues, the Matrix did not offer its
disciples the joy of discovering a new reality, but rather
the empowerment of a nullification, of casting off whatever temporal, physical, practical,
or apparent reality doesn't suit you. The film gives everyone
the authority to say this isn't happening.

Speaker 1 (01:57:42):
Hm. Hm, that's all kind of terrifying. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:57:45):
Most maybe the most fitting thing about all of these interpretations,
if you will, is that the quote that sets off
Morpheus's speech in the film What If I Told You?
Is never actually spoken in any of the movies. It's
a total Mandela effect.

Speaker 1 (01:57:59):
Shoh.

Speaker 2 (01:58:01):
The closest thing he actually comes up with at one
point is do you want to know what it is?

Speaker 1 (01:58:07):
Yeah? What If I told You? Not an actual line
in any of the Matrix movies. That's even scarier. All
of this is scary. I don't like. Let's move, it
get worse before it gets better, and then worse again. Well,
here we're going to end on a more positive note,
which is the Matrix legacy as a transgender text. This
was present from day one. One of the most common

(01:58:27):
pieces of law about the film is that the character
of Switch was supposed to be portrayed as having different
genders in the real world and the world of the
Matrix ans her dying line, not like this, which suddenly
has an extra punch to it. Given this reading, counter
Eve sold Entertainment Weekly in an interview for this most
recent movie, there was an early draft of the original

(01:58:49):
Matrix script where the Matrix avatar would be a different
sex than the Zion reality. I think the studio wasn't
ready for that version, he added. This subtext was made
pretty text rule in twenty twelve when Lana Wachowski publicly
came out as a trans woman while doing press for
the film Cloud Atlas, and her sister Lily followed suit
in twenty sixteen. This was all preceded by a lot

(01:59:11):
of nasty gossip about the Wachowski's personal life. The tabloids
had a field day when Dominatrix Ilsa Stritch, whose real
name is Karen Winslow, accompanied Lana to the Matrix reloaded premiere.
This got messier when Jake Miller, Winslow's estranged husband, popped
up in the London tabloids to explain that Lana had
stolen his wife after the two met in Winslow's Dungeon.

(01:59:35):
Miller is a trans man who's better known these days
as Buck Angel. Miller essentially outed Lana, claiming in the
tabloids who paid for a story, that Lana was taking
female hormones to prepare for a gender transition. Since then,
the Wachowskis had become much more vocal about The Matrix's
roots in the trans experience. Lily told the website them

(01:59:56):
the Matrix is a trans allegory in that it was
written by two closets trans women, and so all of
the things that are in it are super duper trans.
With all the decisions we made with that film, there's
just this burbling transness simmering below everything. It's not like
these were conscious decisions, but more like we're finding our
way instinctively. It's these two closeted trans women. When people say, oh,

(02:00:18):
it's a trans allegory, it's like, yeah, it is. But
we weren't like, hey, let's write a trans allegory. That's
not how it started. We were like, hey, let's write
this action film, and then we got our and then
we got our trans all over it, and then we
got our trands all over it. I don't know how
to put the emphasis on that phrase, but the Wachowski's

(02:00:41):
would go on to create Sense eight, a sci fi
series featuring transwomen Nomi Marx. Lana Wachowski told The New
Yorker in twenty twelve how much she was struggling with
her gender identity around the time of the second and
third Matrix films. She said, for years, I couldn't even
say the words transgendered to transsexual. When I began to
admit it to myself, I knew I would eventually have

(02:01:03):
to tell my parents and my brother and my sisters.
This fact would inject such terror into me that I
couldn't sleep for days. And because the British tabloids are
the worst, hands down, Lily was moved to make a
public statement in twenty sixteen when The Daily Mail turned
up at her door pressing the issue. Statement to The

(02:01:24):
Windy cd Times read in part, I just wanted needed
some time to get my head right, to feel comfortable.
But apparently I don't get to decide this, so that's horrible.
Emily Vanderwolf, a critic who's written eloquently about trans Themes
and the Matrix talk to NPR about the cognitive dissonance
of the film's adoption by the alt right and its

(02:01:47):
importance to the trans community. She says, if you're a transperson,
there is sort of this idea that you're living in
a muffling cocoon that's keeping you from seeing the reality
of yourself. And that cocoon, to some degree, is the
idea of fixed gender identity, which is one that society
has built the top. And to be trands you have
to sort of assail that idea, and in the process

(02:02:08):
of doing so you may question other things about reality.
But she also sees the universality of the film as
a feature, not a bug. Quote. It does weirdly speak
to the movie's cultural ubiquity, to this movie's ability to
speak to all sorts of people in a similar way
but to different ends that I think often marks the
most important and greatest movies ever made. Well said, that's

(02:02:29):
very true.

Speaker 2 (02:02:31):
I just want to throw this out. We're two sisseet
white guys. Yeah, we're quoting a lot. Vander Werf and
another piece for Vox identified what I me personally. The
aforementioned Alex Heidez set White Guy is the most terrifying
aspect of the Matrix. The movie, as we mentioned earlier,
was released at a time when Hollywood was just beginning

(02:02:53):
to understand and incorporate the Internet. Sandra Bullock's The Net
was released the same year Keanu put out Johnny toman
I Think Hackers came out around the same time. Vander
Worff writes, the movie's coolest trick is the way it
inverts what you'd expect from a movie released in nineteen
ninety nine by making the Internet the poisonous capitalist space
that keeps people emotionally numb. The Internet becoming a poisonous

(02:03:15):
capitalist faux utopia is perhaps the matrix's most accidentally accurate prediction.
We didn't waited this long to get to this point,
but the film's central premise of machines converting humans into
docile power sources has been well debunked. Robert Hurt, a
Caltech based visualization scientist who has worked on many NASA projects,
including the Splitzer space Telescope, told Esquire it happens to

(02:03:38):
be my least favorite plot device in a sci fi
movie in decades. Humans consume quite a lot of high
energy products like food, and oxygen, and only thing that
they produced that could count as energy would be basically heat.
But if you took all the food just burned it,
you'd get way more heat out of that. You can
chock it up to thermodynamics and entropy. Some systems just
don't process efficiently, and basically you can count on getting

(02:04:00):
less energy out than you put in. But in a
truly cosmically horrifying and hilarious turn of events, that's exactly
what happened. With a different and more mundane slant, the
utopian promise of the internet is a place where you
could become your truest self has dissolved into a series
of walled gardens controlled by the greediest, most soulless human

(02:04:20):
beings possible. Rather than your physical energy, the internet and
social media simply take your time, mental health, and productivity
and turn it into sweet, monetizable data. Every fleece vested
polo alto blue check mark dork Hawking ais of revolutionary
tools a miniature agent smith seeking a way to ring
every scent they can out of the human experience without

(02:04:41):
getting too much of the stink on them. We didn't
need the machines to do this. We just needed venture capitalists.
The ultimate lesson of the matrix and the Internet, at
least for the users who make up the platforms being
choked to death by the technocapitalist set, could really still
just boil down to you can count on getting less
energy out then you put in. That does not, however,

(02:05:03):
hold true for iHeartMedia's fine slate of podcast offerings, which
you can find on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, and now
you get YouTube.

Speaker 1 (02:05:13):
Shows and now on YouTube. That's right, check us out
on YouTube, folks.

Speaker 2 (02:05:17):
Yeah, gonna walk all that back and says to us more.

Speaker 1 (02:05:21):
At our new partnership with People Magazine and People dot com.

Speaker 2 (02:05:26):
Admondly, this is just my take as a musician and writer.
I have a hard time seeing the Internet and social
media as anything but damaging. But if you want the
most positive slant, you can keep taking it back to
what Lana and Lily originally got out of it, which
was an allegory for becoming the person that they always

(02:05:47):
wanted to be all along, and they just happened to
make one of the greatest movies of all time out
of it. I'm Alex Igel. This has been too much information.
Thanks for listening and you're Jordan. That's right, We'll see
you next time, and there is no spoon.

Speaker 1 (02:06:08):
Too much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's
executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtogg. The show's
supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

Speaker 2 (02:06:18):
The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtog
and Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (02:06:22):
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows

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