COMMENTARY: The Wachowski brothers originally felt...
...that if we're gonna make...
Tell the story, we should finish it. We should tell the next two chapters.
And this ends... This story ends at the end of Revolutions.
Can the guys go on? Sure, they can do whatever they want...
...but this story ends at Revolutions.
And they felt like, "We're bringing everybody back together again.
And we're going to build these sets...
...and make these clothes and get these actors together.
We might as well just tell the whole story."
The big bang at the head of Revolutions, I believe...
...was about the sort of beginning of consciousness in machines...
...and the fabric of the millions of particles...
...that flew past after the big bang were fractal in form...
...which we decided would be a good representation of, you know...
...the single-cell organism floating in the sea at the beginning of life on Earth.
When the two scripts came in, Reloaded and Revolutions, it became clear...
...that it was one movie that was cut in half.
And, I mean, the way it was made was that people would always say:
"You shot them back-to-back." It wasn't back-to-back...
...because on a given day you'd be shooting a scene from Reloaded.
And then the next hour you'd be shooting Revolutions...
...then back to Reloaded, then Revolutions. The whole picture was made as one movie.
From the beginning, we wanna show them as close together that we can make them...
...because the movie ends, Reloaded, in...
Beyond the cliffhanger, it ends right in the middle of a scene.
The audience would be desperate to see the story. Our fans would say:
"We wanna see the rest of the movie right away."
And we thought, "Wouldn't it be great to show them both in the same summer?"
We couldn't get the visual effects done.
The visual effects in Revolutions are far more complicated than Reloaded.
And they just needed as much time as possible, so we pushed the thing to the fall.
But still, it is one movie that you'll see in two halves.
I think people loved the first Matrix so much and you know...
...it's hard to go to the movies and really be turned on like...
...visually, emotionally, spiritually, you know...
...auditorially. Every way, I mean, the movies just do that for you.
And, you know, that's why we all love making them.
Because we know that that is the truth of them.
I had such a great experience working with them the first time.
And part of that experience was just the trust in their storytelling.
I was moved by the writing of it.
I know that I was moved by the relationship between Trinity and Neo.
I know that I was really moved...
...by the potential for what everybody in Zion goes through.
And then I felt that if they were successful...
...in really illuminating how the real people...
The people who live in the real world. ...are dealing with the threat...
...coming from the machine world.
That that could be something really emotionally powerful.
We actually get to see the real confrontation.
The, like, "This is it. This is gonna be the take on.
One of us is gonna win and one of us is gonna lose."
And that's at least what you believe going into it and you get to see that.
People really fighting for their lives at this point.
LINK: Hey. Hey! You got a call. - What?
Operator.
It's Seraph.
I bring word from the Oracle. You must come at once.
Good morning.
COMMENTARY: What is a train station?
A location between two other locations.
It functions as a... It's a realm of the programs.
Programs that are moving in the Matrix...
...used the train... Mobil Avenue Train Station as a crossover.
I guess from being part of the machine world structure to the Matrix.
Programs escape into the Matrix, where they are liberated.
Which I find lovely.
NEO: Why not? - He won't let you.
- Who won't? - The Trainman. I don't like him.
But my papa says we have to do what the Trainman says...
...or else he will leave us here forever and ever.
COMMENTARY: It was very sad, like, when we found out that Gloria had passed away.
And then for Larry and Andy, it became very difficult how to explain...
...to have essentially the one Oracle in Reloaded...
...and then have a completely different person in Revolutions.
TRINITY: Who are you? - I'm the Oracle.
I was there was an easy way to get through this, but there ain't.
COMMENTARY: When she died...
...it was immediately apparent to anybody who read the scripts...
...that that potentially was, structurally, you know...
...a significant blow to the production.
And that, well, for several reasons. One, she is that character.
Her original performance is, like, fantastic in the first movie.
She's indelible in that performance and trying to do that performance...
...any other way without her seems hard to imagine.
They reached out to Mary Alice...
...who played with Gloria Foster in New York for two years...
...in a show called Having our Say...
...where they played sisters who lived to be a hundred and some-odd years old.
And they were brilliant together.
Gloria died in September...
...and Mali Finn called me December 9th, 2001.
She said the brothers wanted to fly me out to Australia...
...within the week to audition.
Everything that has a beginning has an end.
I got the job?
[PEOPLE CHUCKLING]
MAN: Want to do it again? Don't hit me.
- Brother, don't put me through... - Don't hit me.
COMMENTARY: Mary Alice comes in and does an amazing job...
...of presenting a living, breathing Oracle.
She's somebody I worked with on my very first professional gig...
...when I was 10 years old.
ORACLE: I know, Morpheus.
I can see you're filled with doubt, clouded by uncertainty.
COMMENTARY: I played his mother in a play in New York.
I had seen Laurence through the years...
...but this is the first time we had actually worked together. It was wonderful.
I just wish that we had had... I wish Andy and Larry had written the scene...
...just between Morpheus and the Oracle.
ORACLE: He needs all our help.
- Are you from the Matrix? - Yes.
COMMENTARY: One of the elements of the film is that also the programs are seeking...
...to be freed from being deleted as programs for the machine city, I guess.
Which is funny that the humans are supposed to be free in the Matrix...
...but they're really imprisoned.
And programs that were developed by AI programs are now trying to escape...
...because of deletion or other kinds of situations like Merovingian...
...who have gained their own autonomy...
...are now using the Matrix as a free place to exist.
You know, you generally have good and bad...
...right, sometimes in a kind of normal drama.
This one starts with the machines and humans.
And, you know, humans being trapped in the Matrix.
And the depiction of the machines was as a kind of evil.
And then, I think as the ideas kind of develop in the film...
...I feel they kind of take... They start to...
You don't have that anymore.
They kind of give you the perspective of the machines trying to survive.
Of programs trying to survive, of humans trying to survive, right?
And I think that it's kind of... And then it goes into the evolution of entities...
...trying to survive and in the way that they survive.
RAMA: And he does not forgive.
- You know him? - I know only what I need to know.
I know that if you want to take something from our world into your world...
...that does not belong there, you must go to the Frenchman.
Is that what you're doing here?
- Rama, please. - I do not want to be cruel, Kamala.
He may never see another face for the rest of his life.
I'm sorry.
COMMENTARY: In the beginning it was more often Larry during The Matrix...
...who would come up...
...and then Andrew, eventually, during the course of it, would speak...
...and then until they finally, they both participate in direction.
And I remember they just learned how to say:
"That was good. How about this time?"
[LAUGHS]
Just to kind of give you that kind of like, "That was good."
Now, you know as opposed to, you know...
...no other kind of contact except, "Can you do this?" or, "Can you do that?"
You know, a kind of more...
...what they would say a "coddling"... Ha-ha-ha.
...relationship. Ha-ha.
I know they've responded to how I work.
Sometimes they used to just direct me every time, sometimes.
Now they'll let me just do another take.
And with other actors, depending on what they're doing will, you know...
...help them with either an idea to think about while they're doing a line...
...or to give them, you know, metaphors and analogies...
...you know, do it like this, pretend like that, you know.
Which are things that they weren't really, you know...
They've gained a real facility at it.
SERAPH: That's him.
- Get away! Get away from me! - We don't want trouble.
COMMENTARY: I've seen some of the first film...
I hadn't seen all of it. ...because my kids were fascinated by it.
But when I was offered the role, or when I had to come in and go in and test for it...
...I had to quickly get it and have a look at it.
And you realize that there's a style. There's a style of performance.
There's a world in which these people...
...live in, which is completely different to the real world...
...and therefore, you actually have to immerse yourself in it.
I've worked with Bruce Spence, who played the Trainman...
...on a commercial once here in Australia...
...but he's like one of the doyennes of the Australian film industry.
He was, like, in the second Mad Max, yeah, Mad Max 2...
...where he played the Gyro Pilot.
But he's also been in, like, an enormous amount of Australian films...
...Stork, and I think, like, The Last Wave.
He's a very well-known person in Australia and a great character.
They're somewhere between like 144 and 150 sets.
There's more than... Even if you divided it by two and said 70 sets per film...
...that's a lot of sets for a film to have.
Basically, we built the third railway station first, which is two platforms.
And then we built one side of that to be the one-platform station.
And then we re-skinned that to be Mobil Avenue so there's three layers to it.
When we finish as Mobil Avenue we take one layer off...
...put some floating walls in, change the color and there you go...
...you've got a second railway station.
This station's a construct as in the first film...
...when Neo and Trinity go into a construct...
...to get their guns to go into the hotel lobby.
Also where Morpheus and Neo fight...
...in the dojo...
...is a construct, but this construct is a little different...
...in that this is made by the Merovingian.
Whereas the other constructs are made by...
...the crews of the ships to do their training in.
SATI: Papa, the train! - Yes. Find your bag. Quickly.
Can I carry that for you?
All right.
Hurry it up, I'm late!
COMMENTARY: For the central characters, especially Neo...
...for him to get from one world to this other world...
...he has to go through the Trainman.
The Trainman is kind of like, if people are familiar with their mythology...
...he's kind of like the ferryman crossing the river Styx.
Every culture has its sort of genre of storytelling.
Japanese films have their samurai films...
...and ours we have the epic stories of Shakespeare, et cetera.
But if we look at the commonality of all these stories...
...they're all essentially mythological.
They're all the great journeys that human beings need to go through...
...in order to find themselves. In order to explore various elements...
...of their psyche and all those fears.
And it seems to me that this film and the Terminator films...
...the Mad Max films, the Star Wars films, even the Fellowship of the Ring...
...and all those sorts of stories...
...they're all essentially mythological and they're all...
All those previous films that I mentioned are also mythological.
Human beings need these sorts of stories to be told.
SERAPH: We should return to the Oracle. She will know what to do.
No.
COMMENTARY: When people speak about the Wachowski brothers...
...as directors and filmmakers, people often say...
..."Well, you know, they've got it all mapped out.
They know exactly what they want."
Everybody likes to think of filmmakers or anybody as preconceiving everything.
There's something in our culture that asks an artist...
...or anybody in charge to: "They have to have known beforehand.
What do they know...? They must have known this in their heads beforehand."
You don't know it. Oftentimes we'll come to a scene and it's not storyboarded.
It's always, you know, either Andrew or Larry with the camera.
Oftentimes it's Larry with the finder and Andrew at the monitor.
And they find the scene.
You don't know until the day you show up.
That's why people constantly come up to Larry and Andy saying:
"What's gonna happen in this shot?" And they say, "Give me the viewfinder...
...and give me the actors, and I'll tell you what's gonna happen in the shot."
It's not like all the time that they've... They know every shot.
They know exactly. But they know... They have a sense of what they wanna do.
They're just waiting sometimes to see it.
There is no such thing as preconception. There is no such thing as previsualization.
Those are only tools that get you to what you're actually doing...
...which is making a movie.
When I was talking to Larry and Andy one day, doing something...
I think we were doing the coat check fight.
And I asked if I could appear with just this suit on.
And Larry was saying, "Well, in the Matrix, it's like the jacket.
We like the jacket because it's sort of like armor."
So when he described it to me, explained it to me, I was able to go:
"Great." That makes sense. You go into the Matrix.
You're entering into this world where you need to have your defenses up.
Something else takes over.
It starts when I put the clothes on, actually.
It just... And I guess I've been playing her for long enough...
...that, just, something happens.
I mean, I just... I change so drastically.
I look and I go, "Who is that?
[COMMENTATOR LAUGHS]
Who is that girl? That ain't me."
They wanted everybody to have the feeling that they're, like, bat people.
That they could just walk up the walls, on the ceilings.
They didn't want to turn the set upside down. They want to do it real-time.
You could see gravity, gun shells coming out. Debris falling.
Everything was falling in the proper direction.
So I basically gave that set over to Glenn Boswell and those guys.
And they put together these small overhead tracks.
The track that we're actually using which is just up in the ceiling here...
...is actually a yachting track.
And the cars that we use on this particular track are designed to run freely...
...with ball bearings so we can pull them...
...and move them quite quickly along the track.
And we can configure them with pulleys for our flying systems...
...or with single dropper lines so that we can be fixed.
All the guys up in the air were all stunt players.
And I'm not gonna say all the stunt people are great actors.
What can I tell you? They all dug it.
This particular thing was a lot of movement.
A lot of running, wearing masks.
There was running and firing. Things were like that. It was perfect.
There was no reason to put an actor in there.
[TECHNO MUSIC PLAYING]
It was similar to the club scene in the first film, whereas like the...
I think the club scene in the first film was more... You sort of suited a place...
...that Trinity might like, you know, meet up with Neo in the first film.
Whereas, I think...
...the Club Hel scene in this film is, like, very much an extension...
...of the Merovingian's perverseness, I suppose.
You know, it was a fetish club scene.
So, you know, we had a lot of people in latex.
It was more hard-core if you like, a lot of people with, like, tattoos...
...and piercings and a bit S & M.
We have some extremely funny characters in there.
MEROVINGIAN: Hey! Hey!
COMMENTARY: We wanted to have a high-end fetish feeling.
But we wanted to also carry through the idea of...
You know, if you think of a Bosch painting of hell...
...there are certain elements of the people painted in those paintings...
...where they have animal-like heads...
...or feet or, you know, there's kind of a melding of the human and inhuman.
We wanted to give that feeling so it wasn't just like a general club...
...but it wasn't too much in the fantasy realm.
SERAPH: All three of us? - Oh, yes, yes.
Of course.
[MEROVINGIAN CHUCKLING]
COMMENTARY: It was a difficult scene to shoot that, actually.
We had, like, three days to shoot it. We have to get Trinity and Morpheus...
...and the Merovingian and Persephone was there.
And I think it was, like, the first time you meet the Trainman...
...or sort of become apparent...
...of how the Trainman fits into the whole jigsaw puzzle.
And, yeah, it was a good scene.
MEROVINGIAN: Disappointing, but not unexpected.
I do hope, however, she has the good manners to learn her lesson...
...and to remember that there is no action without consequence.
And if you take something from me, you will pay the price.
You know why we are here?
[MEROVINGIAN CHUCKLES]
COMMENTARY: Both of them, we wanted to have the feeling of fairy tale characters.
So I looked back into kind of iconoclastic images...
...for evil, bad, bad people.
And also, kind of, we wanted a... Obviously, it's the Hel Club...
...but we wanted the feeling... A fantasy, hard-core fantasy feeling.
So to have them as the king and queen of hell.
MEROVINGIAN: Always straight to business, huh, Morpheus?
Okay. I have something you want.
To make a deal...
...you must have something I want, yes?
COMMENTARY: I've always wanted to come and check the sets, check the restaurants...
...check the nightclub, the chateau, to see how much of a king he was.
How grand he was.
For instance, this set. Once it was filled with all the people in it...
...help...
I mean, the whole thing helps the actor tremendously.
The notion of the underworld...
...and at the same time the flashiness of the places...
...that he decides to surround himself with...
...says a lot about who he is.
MEROVINGIAN: Bring me the eyes of the Oracle...
...and I will give you back your savior.
It seems a perfectly fair and reasonable deal to me.
Yes? No?
I don't have time for this shit.
COMMENTARY: One of the things that I love so much about Trinity is...
...just her complete and total commitment to the love that she has for Neo...
...and the belief that she has in Neo and she's not gonna be told...
...that, you know, she can't do something.
She's not gonna wait around to see what happens.
She's very proactive, as we know. A-ha-ha.
So she goes in there and finds a way.
TRINITY: You wanna make a deal? How about this?
You give me Neo, or we all die, right here, right now.
COMMENTARY: The circumstances of the film and the dire situation...
...that the world of the Matrix is in...
...forces her to show up and be even more of a warrior this time around.
The difference being that she's in love and she has a partner...
...and that has to change someone.
And I think it softens her in a way...
...and strengthens her as well.
TRINITY: What's it gonna be, Merv?
Okay. You got yourself in here...
...you can get yourself out.
[TRAIN APPROACHING]
COMMENTARY: People associate the Matrix essentially like, you know...
What we were saying before, like with kung fu...
...you know, action and a certain degree of violence, and, you know, the...
But yeah, it's a love story. It's a good love story, actually.
It sort of propels the film along.
I love the relationship that they have.
It's like...
...you know, I only wish it could go farther.
I think it's pretty special.
She's so different than the first movie...
...but I'm so different than I was in the first movie, so that's bound to happen.
I guess we're cast so well...
...that you can see Neo's journey and you can see it on Keanu.
You can see Laurence's journey, you'd see it on Laurence.
Okay, Hugo, no. We're never gonna see that...
...because Hugo is such a darn beautiful, gorgeous, lovely, kind, human being.
You know, I can't imagine anyone else playing the roles that we play.
ORACLE: That's it. That's the secret.
- You've got to use your hands. - Why?
Cookies need love like everything does.
Neo!
I was hoping to have these done before you got here. Oh, well.
Sati, honey, I think it's time for a tasting.
Take the bowl to Seraph and find out if they're ready.
Okay.
- I'm glad you got out. - Me too.
COMMENTARY: I was already aware of his work, you know, in the movies.
And, of course, whenever you work with a movie star...
...you feel a little, you know...
I think, you know, you can't help but feel a little nervous, you know.
But he's als... You know, but he's an actor.
So working with him was, you know, like working with the other actors.
ORACLE: You sure did surprise me, Neo, and you still do.
You gave me a few surprises too.
I hope I helped.
COMMENTARY: They have a real formalization of language...
...which is based in intellect and emotion.
And it's a kind of...
Which comes across in behavior as well.
Ahem. It's very concentrated.
And very specific...
...and just compressed...
...where there is no extraneous flourishes or additions.
It's really like pure idea, pure gesture, pure thought, specific.
And it's in a real kind of writing tradition of like...
...you start with an idea, a proposition, you know.
And then it starts to build...
...through the addition of ideas and thought, you know.
And to lead you to the ultimate place...
...of what I wanna say.
You need to know this first, this is where I came from, this is what's happened...
...this is what's gonna happen.
And all of their scenes kind of do that.
They come up with a dilemma or an idea or a place, even an introduction.
They kind of really lead you because they want you to understand.
They want to communicate. There's no kind of hiding or anything like that.
ORACLE: The power of the One extends beyond this world.
It reaches from here all the way back to where it came from.
- Where? - The source.
COMMENTARY: I was, you know, not a big science fiction fan.
But there was something about the movie that I found very spiritual...
...and I didn't really think a lot about it.
But that I was able to go with the story.
ORACLE: Please. You and I may not be able to see beyond our own choices...
...but that man can't see past any choice.
- Why not? - He doesn't understand them. He can't.
To him, they are variables in an equation.
One at a time, each variable must be solved, then countered.
That's his purpose. To balance the equation.
What's your purpose?
To unbalance it.
COMMENTARY: First of all, I had to get used to two directors.
I've never had two directors.
And I had to get used to their way of communicating...
...you know, to me as an actor.
And I just sort of let myself be open...
...to their suggestions and their notes.
They're writers, they wrote it.
And I think in working with writers who direct...
...there is another element there because I think they hear it.
They hear it because they wrote it.
So when they wrote it...
You know, ahem, a lot of directors do this, they'll mouth...
When you watch a director watch a monitor...
...they'll mouth the lines of the actors who do it, you know...
And there's a thing of like, they wanna hear it, they wanna see it.
ORACLE: ...the end coming.
I see the darkness spreading.
I see death.
And you are all that stands in his way.
Smith.
Very soon, he is going to have...
COMMENTARY: Acting is a lot of being able to believe...
...and accept, you know, the circumstances that you're given...
...the language that you're given.
Whatever the character's about, you have to be able to accept.
You have to be able to lend your instrument to that.
ORACLE: This war is going to end.
Tonight, the future of both worlds will be in your hands...
...or in his.
[GRUNTS, GASPS]
How are you feeling? Are you all right?
I need time.
- That figures. MAGGIE: Captain Roland.
- What's up, Maggie? - Bane is. He's conscious.
Good. Maybe he's got some answers.
ORACLE: Mm!
I love that smell.
COMMENTARY: The Oracle takes on a much more important role in this.
You get to see the Oracle for who she is, I suppose...
...which is another program with her own agenda.
So we did shoot a lot. There are a lot of important scenes...
...between, like, her and Neo and, you know...
...reestablishing that relationship and what that meant.
But there was also a lot of important stuff between...
...Sati and Seraph and also Smith...
...who, eventually, you know, becomes one with the Oracle.
[THUDDING]
SATI [WHISPERS]: I'm scared, Seraph.
Come.
[DOOR CLOSES]
[GRUNTS]
[DOOR OPENING]
[FOOTSTEPS]
He's following us.
Well, well, it's been a long time.
COMMENTARY: It's a really interesting question we talked about.
The whole thing was to do with individuality...
...and the Smiths are meant to be all the same.
And yet, do you dissipate the energy of Smith...
...for a viewing audience if there isn't one central Smith?
Does the viewer really want there to be one central, extremely bad Smith...
...that they can kind of focus on, or what works better?
What works better from an audience point of view?
And we talked about that quite a lot.
[DOOR OPENS]
Originally in the script there were a couple of scenes which were pretty interesting...
...because they revealed that the Smiths weren't necessarily working in concert.
That there were times where they were fighting with each other.
For instance, one Smith would start speaking...
...and another Smith would start finishing his sentence...
...and the third would actually finish it then the first Smith would say:
"Why don't you let me finish just for once?"
So that actual scene had to go.
I think for reasons of money.
Every time you get more that one Smith on the screen...
...it costs an enormous amount of money to do head replacements.
And there were a couple of other scenes like that which went for that reason.
So this whole question of whether all the Smith are exactly the same...
...or whether there are differences amongst them, that was pretty interesting.
SMITH: "Cookies need love like everything does."
[SMITHS LAUGHING]
You are a bastard.
You would know, Mom.
Do what you're here to do.
Yes, ma'am.
COMMENTARY: As the Smiths take over various people in the film...
...there are Smiths who take over more powerful characters like the Oracle...
...who then take on the Oracle's powers.
So the Oracle Smith became the most powerful Smith.
The Oracle Smith became more powerful...
...than the original Smith.
And then later on when Smith takes over Neo...
...that Smith, for a very, very brief period of time, becomes the all-powerful.
[SMITH LAUGHING]
I really wish I could help, but I just... I don't remember any of it.
COMMENTARY: First time I played a scene and Smith emerged from me...
It was just a rehearsal before we actually shot the scene.
And at that stage I wasn't sure how many people on the crew...
...were aware of the Bane-Smith relationship.
And as soon as Smith's voice came out of me...
...there was this... The chuckles around the room.
People just sort of broke into spontaneous laughter and I thought, "What?
They think I'm actually playing a joke and doing an impersonation."
But I suddenly figured, "Oh, it's the first time...
...they might be introduced to the fact as to who this guy is...
...and who's taken him over." So it was interesting.
Yeah, yeah. And then it was a matter of, with each take...
...playing it a little bit more Smith or a little bit less Smith.
Just finding out the moments to coming through and emerging...
...or just hiding, creating subterfuge.
This film is very different from Reloaded...
...because it is rooted heavily in the real world...
...as opposed to the Matrix, and that world...
...has a very distinct dystopian, dark...
...you know, dirty quality to it.
Texturally it is, you know, decaying and rotting...
...and really, you know...
...it's supposed to represent the aftermath...
...of an apocalyptic time.
In Zion, you still have some warm colors because it's very warm at the bottom...
...where it's near the core of the Earth and so sort of that magma kind of feel to it.
Then as you get into the tunnels, those have different qualities too.
They're all blue-shifted.
It's very dark but there's also different levels of mist...
...and dripping things on the walls like it's warmer down near Zion.
So you're gonna get more of a warm, wet feeling...
...and then as you get closer to the surface, that's a colder feeling up there...
...because the sky's been black and there's no sun there.
And so most of the warmth has left the surface of the Earth.
Revolutions is a dark science fiction, heavy creature movie, in my opinion.
And that was our major challenge was to pull that off...
...and to try to, at the very least...
...take it to an original place...
...that hasn't been covered before.
COLT: Careful, sir.
The squids are sneaky bastards.
COMMENTARY: You know, here, amongst all of these grids or crosses of concrete...
...you would be kind of scared as well.
This is a threatening place. You're outside the ship.
You've got no protection except the lightning gun, probably.
And here you are with any chance...
...that Sentinels might come pouring down on you at any moment.
[METAL GRINDING]
What was that?
NIOBE: You can put that shit away, boys. All she needs is a jump.
COMMENTARY: Niobe is at the very beginning stages.
And coming out of that... I mean, me, myself...
...train of thought. She does have a lot of that...
...even though she would sacrifice everything for Zion.
But she's gonna do it her way.
She's just a hard woman. She's a hard woman.
But yeah, slowly but surely...
...she kind of... She begins to kind of emerge from that rock.
MORPHEUS: What did she tell you? - The same thing she always does.
Exactly what I needed to hear.
LOCK: In 12 hours, the machines will breach the dock walls.
Every simulation we've run, we've seen that once the machines are inside the city...
...the odds of our survival decrease dramatically.
Thus, our primary objective must be...
...to destroy or disable the diggers inside the dock.
COMMENTARY: The ability for people who can go into the Matrix...
...the jack that they have...
...I think puts them even more in the front line...
...because they have to do battle, really, mentally.
And I think that, quite frankly, Jason Lock resents the fact...
...that he is unable to engage on that level in the Matrix.
WEST: Precisely what size force are you planning to commit...
...to the primary dock objective?
COMMENTARY: I think that he really wants to believe and all of the other stuff...
...but that he cannot.
There's that character, the doubting Thomas...
...with the Apostle after Christ has been resurrected.
And he's the guy that says:
"Let me touch his stigmata, I gotta see if this is for real."
And there are people, from time to time, who are like that.
But once those people are convinced, I think that you will find the most zealous...
...and the most faithful among all of the believers.
And I think that Lock is that kind of guy.
Aaliyah, her work wasn't scheduled for a while.
We were in preproduction in Australia...
...and we found out that her plane had been involved in an accident.
During the time period before I was cast...
[COMMENTATOR CLEARS THROAT]
...and after she had died...
...I wondered, would I be called?
Because the first go-round had got down to she and I, I think...
...and so the thought was in my head...
...and I had already started feeling strange...
...and, you know, just kind of out of sorts about it, if the call did come.
And when it did...
...you know, I was excited but at the same time...
...it was bittersweet.
ZEE: What would you do?
Make shells.
What the shit is going on over here?
COMMENTARY: I always find it interesting...
...meeting other actors, you know, just to watch the way they work...
...and how they think, and how they're processing what they're doing...
...until they come to terms with their character.
Clayton...
...I think is gonna go a long way. I mean, he is...
I mean, he looks good...
...but he's got a solidness in him...
...in the way he approaches his work, I think that can go a long way.
KID: Give me a chance, sir. I won't let you down.
You do, and you'll find me and the machines have got something in common.
COMMENTARY: This is the Logos.
This is where Ghost and Sparks and I get down.
This is where we get down and dirty. Heh.
And we are the smallest ship, the fastest ship, the best ship in the fleet.
You know, they were all of a similar ilk, all the ships.
They all use the same battery-powered...
...hovercraft electromagnetic pads...
...for them to be able to move down the sewers.
They all use the same basic idea of the modem to take you into the Matrix...
...and they use the same communication skills and power.
We'll change chair colors.
We'll change some colors of the bezels on the screens.
The visual graphics guys will change some of the graphics.
We'll build some extra walls and we have to be careful...
...we don't build... Have to build a set of sets from scratch...
...if you like, for the number of scenes we're gonna do in these three sets...
...hence we rejig this.
We do that with a lot of sets, not just these.
The production becomes very art department-driven at some point...
...because you have to shoot out a lot of sets in a short amount of time.
So Allan's job is to try to give you a very user-friendly set...
...that you can, like, shoot scenes up from both films and then move on...
...and we'll go to, like, another stage to shoot another set.
And this set will be sort of like being torn down as we are walking out the door...
...or checking the gates so we can keep perpetuating sets and, you know...
...keep the schedule.
NIOBE: I said I can do it.
So what? You'll be the only one that can. There's no way we can follow you.
Hi.
I know time is always against us. I'm sorry that I took so long.
- But I wanted to be sure. - Sure of what?
- I know what I have to do. - What?
There's no easy way to say this, so I'll just say it.
- I have to take one of the ships. - What?
To go where?
To the machine city.
COMMENTARY: There is something about Keanu that is of this world...
...but not of this world.
Keanu is one of those people...
...who, in some respects, you only get to witness their presence.
You only get to watch.
He is, again...
...deeply, deeply sensitive and keenly intelligent.
And it's been just a real joy...
...to sort of walk through this whole crazy experience with him.
ROLAND: And this ship will go to hell long before I let you take it anywhere.
- He can take mine. - You can't do that.
COMMENTARY: During the end of the third movie...
...it's her beginning to surrender to the concept...
...that there is something beyond the intellect...
...beyond logic, beyond her.
Niobe believes in his abilities.
I don't think she believes necessarily that he's the one...
...until the very end of Matrix 3.
And he's just proven to her over and over again.
I don't know how many times it takes but...
I think she just thinks he's a good soldier and he gets the job done.
And for that alone, she will support him.
Because she respects that, you know what I mean, she respects that...
...and she will stand by anyone...
...who's willing to do the things that Neo does...
...and make the sacrifices that he chooses to make.
BANE: What's that for? - To help you relax.
COMMENTARY: Smith's taken over...
...the Matrix world in one respect by cloning himself.
And he's having a good time in there.
But he's by himself in the real world.
And I think the thing was that with a computer system or machine system...
...the world is very controlled.
And all of a sudden, a computer program is inside a human being...
...and all those circuit breakers are gone.
So he's experiencing the world from a totally different perspective.
But I think he actually enjoys the fact that no one actually knows it's him.
And he can sort of worm his way around, unbeknownst to anyone.
BANE: It might not be very safe for you either.
COMMENTARY: I think it's a great part for an actor to actually come in...
...and play yourself possessed by somebody else.
Ian is incredibly fun and warm...
...and sort of giving about the whole thing.
There's something I have to say.
Something you need to understand.
COMMENTARY: I always thought that the love that Neo and Trinity have...
...which takes place in the Neb and more so in Zion...
...is so important, obviously, to the story.
But the love is just... It was so beautiful to me...
...and it had to be because the alternative is so bleak and so dark.
The world that they are fighting in is so dismal and so horrific...
...that within the room of their love...
...it had to be really pure and beautiful...
...and what, you know, drives...
...the fighting, in a way.
Because in the first Matrix, Trinity is being driven by her purpose and her beliefs...
...and she still is being driven by those things.
But, you know, couple that with love and the possibility of, you know...
...being in love and having this life.
ROLAND: Finished loading ammunition? - Just about.
Let's move it. We are out of time.
You're not leaving them anything?
He said he didn't need it.
I ain't saying goodbye. I'm saying good luck.
Thank you.
COMMENTARY: There's a real love and appreciation.
There's a real genuine affection that we have for one another.
I have to say that he's completely dedicated to Neo.
I mean, he's dedicated his life to Neo.
He's given, you know, more than...
I don't know how he's managed...
...to sort of put himself on hold to let this character live in the way that he has.
MAUSER: We're ready, sir. - About damn time.
We're already late, captain, so let's hit it and hit it hard.
[SIGHS]
Bye, baby.
Take good care of them.
COMMENTARY: What's cool about the flight dynamics...
...is this interesting electromagnetic attraction-repulsion type system.
And basically when the ship gets close to surfaces...
...it repels an opposite magnetic charge...
...and we're going to augment that with a nice little blanket...
...a cushion of electrostatic energy...
...to light up the tunnel as it does that.
First-class blibidy-blab.
Is there any justification for anything?
BANE: I should've known he'd send his bitch first.
Bane.
COMMENTARY: I watched the first film over and over again.
Every scene that Hugo was in.
Watched his moves, his mannerisms...
...the timbre in his voice, his tempo.
He had very particular rhythms for that character...
...and I just watched those scenes over and over again and studied them very closely...
...and found myself, eventually, I think, channeling Hugo.
I've watched his work when I was an acting student.
And seeing him do various performances on film...
...on stage. And I've always admired his work...
...which kind of made it easy to study his work.
When I was watching the first Matrix, it also helped knowing his work so well...
...when I had to do the character that he'd created.
AK: We got an emergency.
- What is it, AK? - It's Maggie, sir.
She's dead, murdered. I think it was Bane.
Goddamn it.
I knew it. I knew he was out of his goddamn mind.
He fired that EMP.
Goddamn it, I should have beaten it out of him.
We searched the whole ship, captain. He ain't here.
- I know where he is. - The Logos.
- We gotta go back. - Too late.
- What if they need our help? - It's too dangerous.
- Why? - Because if he's killed them...
...he'll control another EMP.
At this point, they're on their own. Just like us.
Mr. Anderson.
I see you are as predictable in this world as you are in the other.
- What? - He's out of his mind.
It might appear that way. But Mr. Anderson and I know...
...that appearances can be deceiving.
COMMENTARY: That machine, or computer program, has everything organized.
And the sequence of events, very, very well-developed.
But when he becomes human, that filter isn't there.
That system of control isn't there.
It's like this white noise of humanity that he's enveloped in.
And he actually has to stop himself going a bit crazy because of that.
BANE: Back away from the gun and turn around.
Let her go.
[GROANS]
Somehow familiar, isn't it?
COMMENTARY: The scene in the first film where he's interrogating Morpheus...
...and he talks about how he hates the world that he's in.
And he hates the creatures he's existing with, i.e., humans.
And all of a sudden he's become one.
And he's got to experience it, flesh and blood in the real world.
And he's...
...managed to make a lot of observations...
...about the human form, the human condition.
And basically, yeah, delivers that soliloquy which says:
"Yep, I kind of figured as much about you humans...
...and now that I've experienced it for myself...
[CHUCKLES] ...my thoughts are the same."
"The lesser being," as he thinks.
BANE: I want what you want.
Yes. That's it, Mr. Anderson.
Look past the flesh.
Look through the soft gelatin of these dull cow eyes and see your enemy.
- No. - Oh, yes, Mr. Anderson.
- It can't be. - There's nowhere I can't go.
There is nowhere I won't find you.
- It's impossible. - Not impossible.
Inevitable.
Goodbye, Mr. Anderson.
This is it. It's gotta be.
COMMENTARY: No wires.
No special powers that the Matrix might provide.
It's dirty. Fighting dirty.
Using anything available. All in there.
Bits and pieces, sharp objects, hot things and yeah...
Hard steel.
The action of III...
...is almost...
...traditional Western movie action.
We wanted to do an old-fashioned John Wayne fistfight.
So how do we do it differently? How do we make it surprising...
...and tie it in to the Matrix? We blew up, shot up the cables...
...and had sparks going off so it's strobe lights all over the place...
...you know, the operator can't see the actual action.
I think that Larry and Andy like to make things...
...hard because it pleases them...
...to see other people struggle for the answers...
...and it pleases them to watch a movie and know that it was hard for everybody.
When they see rain sequences they go:
They must have been really miserable for those filmmakers. Ha-ha-ha.
There's a scene in there where his eyes have been burnt...
...by a sparking cable...
...and that's involved him having an eye prosthetic on...
...which, you know, essentially, like, covers his eyes...
...which is...
...tricky but it's also... You can see the humorous side of it as well.
But, like, sometimes you have problems with those things.
We had a problem with it the other day where it was...
It wasn't so great for his eyes and so, luckily enough...
...after they have the initial... His eyes were all burned, you know...
...Larry and Andy decided that it would be too gruesome...
...to go through the final, you know, epitaph of the film with him...
...with his horribly scarred eyes, so now he has a bandage...
...which makes it a bit easier for us and for him.
[CLANKING]
NEO: Trinity! - Neo.
Neo.
Oh, no. Your eyes.
I'll be okay.
It's all right, Trin.
But I think you're gonna have to drive.
COMMENTARY: This is a particular thing with my character.
He's got a large World War II-style radio...
...that he lugs around from place to place...
...and this particularly uncomfortable headset...
...that he talks into to relay the messages to the troops...
...and I think if anything was to stand out most to me about doing this film...
...was, I think, the relationship that I've built up between myself and the radio.
We're quite close and I find that I got... I think about the radio.
I remember when I read the script about the APUs...
...they explained to me they are these kind of like, you know...
...robotic mechanized fighting machines which, you know...
...I kind of felt, wasn't there a thing, a loader in Jim Cameron's Aliens...
...that there was kind of like this and they said:
"Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like that but it a much different kind of device."
It's an exoskeleton, almost, it allows the operator...
...to sit inside a giant machine...
...that can actually walk and move and shoot guns and spin around.
Originally it was going to be 8 or 9 feet tall...
...and I ended up drawing it.
Making it this you know, what it's supposed to be, like, 16 feet tall...
...because I kept thinking that, you know:
"If they're gonna have this thing carrying guns around...
...it's basically like a tank.
It should look pretty formidable."
It's 14 feet high. It weighs two and a half tons to 3 tons.
And you move it and it's not articulated, it's not a robot in the sense that it moves.
But it can be repositioned. It can be posed for various shots.
Most of the time we'll see it, it'll always be a visual effect.
I think she feels very protective of Zion...
...as everybody who lives there does.
And, you know, she lost two brothers.
And, you know, loved her family...
...and she loves Link and Link is about all she's got left.
And if their home is destroyed, then they're destroyed.
And I think that, you know, she just loves him so much...
...that she wants to make sure that they can have a life together.
AK: Holy Christ, would you look at that.
Quiet.
- How far to the opening? - 1.4 kilometers.
- We're still generating too hot a field. - Ghost, kill all auxiliary systems.
- Give me full manual. Drop down four pads. - It'll bottom out.
COMMENTARY: These things had to look like they're built out of other ships...
...and rebuilt and restructured.
And the Mjolnir, I looked at a lot of, like, Panzer tanks...
...and I looked at... It's sort of based on an Aztec hammer.
And I put these scales on it...
...these big metal plates that they put on the sides of Panzers and stuff.
I thought that was neat. On top of it, if you break them off, you could...
It gives extra detail because there are these plates...
...that you could break chunks off, like it broke, skidded against something.
Those are the kind of things that I know that they like.
The texture and detail and stuff that, you know, like when it crashes...
...into the dock, that stuff gets ripped off...
...and gets, you know... It gives them things to play with.
LINK: I'm coming, baby.
COMMENTARY: For her, it's all about strength, conquer...
...go get them, do what you gotta do...
...don't cry about it. Just do it.
And I remember reading in the script:
"Her muscles start to bulge out as she turns the wheel...
...as she steers the ship."
So I said, "I don't really have a lot of muscle, I need to..."
So then I started doing hardcore weight training with the martial arts.
The siege is a climactic confrontation...
...between man and machine.
There's a whole history, according to the brothers, that is repeating...
...through time and thusly has confused...
...all people who are conscious at the time...
...as to what year it actually is.
They think it's a particular year but in fact it could be five times...
...the length of time since the first war occurred.
So the siege is potentially a reenactment of an event that's happened...
...many times before and the means by which the Sentinels...
...eventually are able to permeate the dock are diggers.
Larry did a little sketch of what he thought it should look like...
...and that's what I worked from. They're sort of digging machines...
...and I called up mining companies to get information on mining equipment...
...because there was a type of belt and tooth and stuff, the way it worked.
I worked on the idea that it was teeth so I had some of them worn off.
They look like bicuspids and molars.
MIFUNE: Knuckle up!
COMMENTARY: Each sentinel has 15 tentacles and 10 underarms...
...and 10 arms or claws and then, like, 32 sewing needles and six animatable eyes.
The rules that we had to play with in this sequence are all real-world physics.
So the challenge of it is, is that we have no real reference...
...for any of this stuff because these machines don't exist.
The siege takes place in the dock and there are several stages...
...of the siege. There's the part where Mifune goes...
...and rallies the troops, and it has one look and then the Sentinels come in...
...and the group of Sentinels do massive destruction to the dock...
...and knock out all the lights.
There's another look, which is much more medieval...
...lit entirely by firelight from the bunkers and things blowing up.
And there's a third type of lighting which occurs after Morpheus and Niobe land...
...and hit the MP which knocks out all the electricity whatsoever...
...and so even the levels, sublevels below have no light.
No interior light, and they have to rely on generators. They quickly string up bulbs...
...and we have a "bad generator" sort of look. Mm-mm-mm.
With the siege, you know, to cover our heroes Zee and Charra...
...getting from one point to another...
...we've had to provide some kind of physical sets.
So there's been the interior docks, which are basically interior tubes.
They're like concrete and steel tubing that our heroines can run through.
They can come down ladders in various spaces.
They can go off to the left and go off to the right.
Basically giving them a geography for them to be able to get from...
...one part of the dock if you like, to another part of the dock as an interior.
And at various points, they are able to exit the interiors and go into exterior sets.
We're jumping to these tunnels and we're landing and, you know...
...it was really a little more strenuous than I thought it would be.
I just love how crazy that siege scene is.
It's just so much action going on.
It was like being in...
...the ultimate PlayStation game, you know?
You are actually in the game.
It was every young boy's...
...and older guy's fantasy.
SOLDIER: Reload!
COMMENTARY: I think all of us started out attacking this with the idea...
...that we wanna shoot as much as we can. That's the first order of business.
You wanna get as much in camera as you can.
What we try to do is set up an area...
...in which you could shoot a scene and more or less own the scene.
And then for a couple of shots you could turn around...
...shoot back, shoot it into the green screen.
Which would be, obviously, a visual effect.
But we're trying at least to give the visual effects a bit of a break...
...to be able to shoot the dialogue scene and own the background, if you like.
Things that we weren't quite sure about were big destruction moments.
Okay, like, any of the battle, the siege battle.
All the heavy destruction elements in there. That's kind of what dictated...
...how the miniature solution came into the equation was...
...we can always just build miniatures for these select areas of the dock.
We decided to blend a lot of different methodologies.
So we used miniatures, we have computer graphics Sentinels...
...computer graphics APUs, there are live-action APUs with some set pieces.
We had, like, piles and piles of dead Sentinel carcasses...
...which were a collaboration between VFX and art...
...and the design of that. So it was a real mishmash...
...of real art-directed physical objects...
...digital creatures, miniatures, all that.
LOCK: I want that goddamn machine taken down!
[SOLDIERS SCREAMING]
COMMENTARY: It's crazy. I didn't expect... I didn't expect...
I knew it was an action film but I didn't really expect...
...that there would be quite so much action, activity, you know.
And it's sort of challenging, challenging physically.
There's one particular scene which I found just really...
...it was a real struggle physically. I kind of went home...
...and had, literally, bruises everywhere and chafes...
...and apparently quite a lot of people had, you know, sore bits and pieces.
CHARRA: Dig this.
Oh, shit!
COMMENTARY: In the battle...
...we're pitting something like 99 of these armored personnel units...
...against about 15,000 Sentinels at any one time. We did some tests...
...where we filled the dock in CG with just different amounts of Sentinels.
At one point, we had 26,000 Sentinels in there...
...and it was pretty much like pea soup...
...you couldn't even move anything. So we shrank those numbers down...
...just so there would be some maneuvering room.
The implication is that there's actually a lot more. You sort of sense that...
...but still, that's a pretty phenomenal number of creatures to keep track of...
...animate, render, light, make look like every one of them is doing the right thing.
NIOBE: Shit, she's got a fat ass.
COMMENTARY: Sentinels have been probably the most complicated...
...character I have ever rigged up...
...because of tentacles. I have to be able to wrap around objects.
I have to be able to wave around, like, the rope and have to be able to grab items...
...and hang on to it and throw it around.
Because of the way they move, because of the squid-like nature...
...and the flowing nature of the tentacles and the fact that they fly...
...people thought that they were underwater.
And so we're trying to make this creature fly and look fluid and at the same time...
...make it clear that no, he's not underwater.
I guess there's, like, over 500 controllers.
But the animators never have to use them all at once.
MAUSER: Captain, you see that? - They're after the radio. Stop them!
COMMENTARY: All the hovercraft are very much electrically driven.
They have some sort of fantastic battery system.
Zion's driven on steam power, I think.
You can see that in the kind of design.
There's that kind of engineering quality.
It's that 1920s industrial look.
You can see it in all the ships. It's a fun mix of high technology...
...and this really, like, low-end industrial kind of stuff.
My theory is that the machines purpose-built Zion for the human being.
You have to have balance within the system.
So that you could have a Matrix. You could have your power plant.
You can have the Matrix to maintain...
...those people. But you have to, within that...
...there has to be a sense of freedom, or rebellion.
So you have to have a Zion.
CHARRA: Grab my belt.
COMMENTARY: It's a really incredible shot where I think we take...
...you know, I'm holding Charra, I'm holding Rachel, and she takes a shot...
...to a digger...
...and we run back through the pipes...
...and right as I'm jumping through the hatch...
...she gets clamped, just annihilated.
Her leg gets totally annihilated with a Sentinel claw.
She has a really unfortunate interaction with a Sentinel.
It's been a bit of a struggle just because of...
There's all this pyrotechnic stuff going off.
I've got this thing strapped to me that explodes...
...and we get one thing right and then we don't get the next thing.
OPERATOR: I got incoming! - We got a dock full of incoming!
- Yes, sir. But this is different, sir. - What?
I think it's one of ours, sir.
LOCK: That's impossible. - Holographics are trying to confirm.
Contact them. I want access codes.
We're trying, sir. There's no response.
It's a trick. That's not one of ours, it can't be.
That's a mechanical line. No one can pilot mechanical.
COMMENTARY: The boys were very specific, you know.
They were, like, "This is a big old heavy ship so you gotta look like...
...you're really turning this thing and you're trying to turn it fast and..."
[MAKES WHOOSHING SOUND]
That was a lot of work. You had to do it for several days.
I mean, every time I go to work with the boys on third unit with the APUs...
...and that kind of thing, they keep describing him as...
...the John Wayne of the APU. The Clint Eastwood of the APU.
He can do anything with it, you know.
Makes it look like it's an extension of him.
That's why I liken him to a samurai, with that sword thing.
It's just like a hand that he does.
LOCK: It'd take out more than that. It'll wipe out our defense system.
We blow an EMP inside, we lose the dock.
Sir, we already lost the dock.
Open the gate.
Gate Three is not responding! We've taken critical damage, sir!
We've lost control! We can't open it!
She had a very small role in Reloaded.
But she really comes in to her own in Revolutions.
I mean, she has a lot to do in Revolutions.
And she is incredible. She is an incredible character.
She plays the part really well. She's so strong.
She's an unbelievable pilot on the ship that's she's piloting.
I mean, she is really a great addition to the group, to the cast.
And I'm really glad she was there. The boys met her on the first movie.
They really liked her and they wrote Niobe for her.
Laurence, he's just superb. I mean, he's with you every second.
Every second, every minute.
And Laurence really, throughout the whole movie, would help me kind of understand...
...where we were going, what we were doing, you know.
How the flow goes, you know.
NIOBE: Are we too late?
COMMENTARY: Violence and the shaking we couldn't achieve on wire...
...so we thought, "Let's give this a try."
We got some silly volunteer, one of my stunt guys, "Let's tie him to it.
See what happens." So we tied him to the end of it...
...and actually gave a really good look.
[SCREAMING]
LOCK: How many APUs are operational? - Thirteen, sir.
Get me the one closest to Gate Three.
COMMENTARY: Showed me shooting sideways, backward, doing the opposite arm.
Every cowboy that's worth his salt can shoot both ways at once...
...and get the enemy at the same time.
Wow, Mifune can do that with an APU, you know?
Ten tons of metal, he can make it shoot all over the place.
I had great fun playing in that. But that mo-cap stuff...
...it was difficult.
Because you had to work within a very strict framework.
Yeah, to get through it...
...and see the end product was worth it, really.
MAN: Go!
COMMENTARY: The siege is scheduled over a long period of time.
And that's because the end of it, which is essentially the story...
...between Mifune and the Kid...
You know, the Kid starts at the bunker with the wheelbarrow...
...and he has to, you know, run sort of three or 400 meters down to Mifune...
...who's down on the dock from the ammunition bunker.
So, you know, that has to be broken up into stages because obviously...
...you can't build three or 400 meter or yard sets.
You do one section which is the bunker and then you do, like, another section...
...which is the bridging piece between, you know, as he's running along the dock...
...and the Sentinels are trying to attack him, and he's being taken by an escort.
Then there's the other part where Mifune's in the war machine, in the APU...
...and he's fighting and then there's the other part...
...where now Mifune's dead or is dying and the APU's on its side...
...and then there's the other part of that where the Kid finally gets the APU...
...to the dock, and, you know, the APU falls on its side...
...and he shoots the gate open so the Mjolnir can come crashing through.
So they're all, like, different sets that have to be dressed differently...
...so you need to, like, you know, shoot some piece...
...and then they'll turn essentially the same piece of set around...
...so it looks completely different...
...or they'll stand the APU up and all that, so you know.
Over a number of weeks you have to keep revisiting that set to get all the pieces.
[MIFUNE YELLING]
COMMENTARY: Shooting that was...
...I don't think a death scene is ever easy. And I've done a few.
Just the thought of, as an actor...
...that you're dying, you know. You're life is...
...your life force is leaving.
So, you know, what sort of made it funny...
...was every time I looked at the brothers...
...and I kind of said, "Oh, what do you think, Larry?"
[INHALES DEEPLY]
"More blood, more blood."
"Yeah, okay, let me put more blood on there." And Andy coming out:
[INHALES DEEPLY]
[GRUNTING]
"Yeah, more blood, more down here."
By the end, I was like a river of blood.
I was getting it into my mouth and: Plok.
[GUNFIRE IN DISTANCE]
ROLAND: Lock that down! COLT: Kill the feeder!
We won't make it. We gotta blow the EMP now.
Come on, someone, please.
COMMENTARY: What we had to do is devise a method...
...to actually lock up, you know, the positions of those people...
...and have the mass of the machine that's driving them...
...actually felt and seen in their body language.
So, what in a sense we've assembled is a motion base.
That is spatially sort of aligned...
...to a motion control camera which can do fast speeds...
...and both are being driven by files...
...that have been based upon animations that we've been working on for months.
The difficult part of the movie for me as a viewer, more than anything...
...I really love war movies but I always love...
...a particular strain, a particular part of a war movie and that is...
...in the danger. What does the person do...
...under this sort of life-and-death situation?
What decisions do people make?
As long as we can...
...keep it in that personal realm...
...I think it'll be an interesting movie to me.
I can only speak for myself.
Other people might like huge battle scenes...
...in which people die by the thousands...
...but unless I see the one person decide how to die...
...then it's not interesting to me.
ZEE: Do it, kid.
Neo. I believe.
COMMENTARY: A few major things in the whole sequence...
...motivated the use of miniatures.
One was when the Mjolnir comes crashing into the dock...
...to hopefully save the day.
And we looked at the idea of doing and how much we wanted to accomplish with CG.
How much we wanna accomplish physically.
These miniatures were so large we called them "bigatures."
I mean, they're just really large scale. It's 20 feet high by 30 feet wide.
We did this this way because we got all this great interaction of the ship...
...smashing through the door, breaking it apart, pieces flying...
...great scale flame and explosions happening.
There's just this wonderful tactile sense to that.
Based on that anchoring event, we could dress in a lot of additional CG debris...
...and dead Sentinel parts and APU parts and all the extra little things...
...that could add more scale to the miniature.
MORPHEUS: Burn it, Link!
[CHEERING]
COMMENTARY: These are two people who obviously love each other dearly...
...and who were on a similar path.
And somehow things changed for them.
It happens in life. People come together, they love each other.
For any number of reasons...
...it's just not possible for them to stay together. Which is sad...
...but what they have together is a beautiful thing.
So it's a really complex human relationship...
...that I think is, you know, again...
...one of those wonderful things...
...about the way that Larry and Andy have constructed their story and their trilogy...
...that makes it appealing to everyone because it's very human.
ZEE: I knew you'd come. I knew it.
I made a promise.
[SNIFFLING]
You did wear it.
Are you kidding? I'm never gonna take it off.
[BOTH LAUGH]
Three captains, one ship. I'll assume the other ships were lost...
COMMENTARY: Actors live for the opportunities...
...where they get to work with other actors they admire.
And I would have to say Laurence Fishburne is somebody I've admired for a long time...
...so there's... You get daunted a little bit.
But he's such a good actor and that's not when you're doing the scene.
You're just these characters who are going toe to toe and it's well-written enough...
...that when you're working with good actors...
...you usually try to arrive at what the kernel of the scene is about.
It is a full-on war movie between man and machine...
...that is just hopeless.
I mean, it just feels like that there's no way that man can ever survive.
There's no way that machine intelligence can't triumph...
...that if they... Once they find Zion...
...they know...
People in Zion know that there's no way they can defend themselves...
...because it's just staggering scale...
...that this machine world has built for itself...
...and its defenses are just unbelievable and, you know...
...and it's not like you're dealing with any humans against them.
It's a machine mine set to destroy every man...
...woman and child left living free on the Earth.
And it's just an unbelievable sequence.
It's just more than you ever could dream of...
...to see this much of a massive attack.
LOCK: Your move.
So you gave them your ship?
- That is correct, councilor, I did. - Knowing what he planned to do with it?
COMMENTARY: From that conversation that I have with the Oracle...
...and she says there's a moment that will come where you'll have to choose.
You know, and I think in that moment, like I said to you earlier...
...she believes in his abilities, you know what I mean, and it starts...
I think that's the initial...
That's the surface of it and I think she starts to realize:
"Maybe he is the One."
Not totally there yet, ha-ha, you know what I mean?
But it's like that initial... And she looks, she believes in the fact that:
"If anybody can do it, he can.
If I'm gonna bet on anybody, it will be Neo."
MORPHEUS: But I do know that as long as there is a single breath in his body...
...he will not give up.
And neither can we.
COMMENTARY: Comparatively with Steve, Geoff...
...specifically, two fellows who really... They worked on the first Matrix...
...and really established the look along with Bill Pope and Owen Paterson.
As artist, Steve is, like, the quintessential storyboard artist.
And Geoff is the designer, and designing everything from the digger...
...the Sentinels, and do, like, 4-foot illustrations...
...highly-detailed, of the way the objects and characters look.
And my particular niche is more the mood and the lighting...
...so using both of those influences and, you know...
...the directors will describe a scene, that whether it has a digger...
...or the machine armada or Neo and Trinity flying to the machine city...
...and I'll incorporate their efforts, their designs and their influences...
...and really try to put my aesthetic of composition and lighting to that.
TRINITY: How do you know that?
I can feel them.
Over there.
There's our path. Can you see it? Three lines.
Power lines.
COMMENTARY: It's the last unknown.
It's the last thing that he was... Information he had from the Oracle.
It's the only unanswered vision he's had.
Those three lines.
He doesn't even know where they lead to.
I think he has an idea.
But it's the last unanswered...
...question.
OPERATOR: Lieutenant?
Goddamn it.
What do we do now?
LOCK: It is now a matter of time.
COMMENTARY: Originally that was going to be an even bigger set than it was.
It was gonna occupy a kind of a full circle...
...almost like theater-in-the-round.
And then we realized we just didn't have a stage big enough to put it in.
So we kind of cut it back and cut it back until eventually...
...we came up to what was a kind of a quarter of the shape.
So, what we decided to do was to build everything kind of out of the flat edge...
...but they used a very clever technique where they used polystyrene...
...and they laid it onto the floors, and they burnt it all with a heater.
They glued it up, and they painted it.
And you had this fantastic metal set.
Because all of Zion's basically metal. There's no wood.
LOCK: He's the one who believes in miracles.
COMMENTARY: There was some rules of the world that were established...
...ahead of time. The machine city's dark and very blue...
...very conscious of eliminating green from the color palette.
Obviously, the production design artwork from, you know...
...George Hull and Geoff Darrow and stuff was incredible...
...and really helped set the tone.
It's always been kind of referred to as, like, a coral reef...
...or some kind of a foreign kind of a landscape.
It's just teeming with life.
But really wasn't the most daunting stuff at the time, you know?
I was more worried about the environmentals...
...and the Logos, you know, shots of it just cruising across or finding the armada...
...or at that time, there was a key... A giant... A super-huge 20-story tall machine...
...that they were gonna fight with and these armadas.
And the scale of that stuff really, you know, kind of got me scared.
Everyone thinks you have a lot of money for the effects...
...but try working on some movies with 2000 visual-effects shots...
...and you realize you have less money than you had in the first Matrix per shot.
So you suddenly got this massive amortization scheme afoot...
...to try to make shots cheaper and cheaper and cheaper...
...by the time you've done enough...
...because you've created a pipe for doing that.
The spiritual factor in Revolutions is heightened...
...and I think that's what's most interesting about it, it's because suddenly...
...you're in the real world and still miracles are occurring...
...and you can't explain.
You know, it's just, like, another level to try to understand.
And Revolutions has its own, you know, completely different version of it.
NEO: There's too many!
COMMENTARY: With visual effects you get background plates...
...photographic plates you incorporate elements into.
I think that we had something less than a third of the shots...
...that we did had either a foreground plate of actors in a cockpit...
...or a background plate with Neo walking down the tunnel into the machine city.
So, man, the amount of digital stuff we had to create was just outrageous.
TRINITY: I need help here! - I can't beat them.
- What do we do? - Go up, over them.
- What? - The sky! It's the only way.
Then up we go.
COMMENTARY: After all the kind of, like, gloom...
...of the Matrix and everyone underground...
...and then it's like this sort of really nice sort of two-second beat...
...of this incredible light on her face and she sees the sun for the first time.
TRINITY: Beautiful.
COMMENTARY: The way we always envisaged finishing out the film...
...was to finish with the last flight of the Logos.
So there's, like, kind of a nice arc whereas, like, as the actors drop away...
...you end up, like, with, you know, essentially the two main characters...
...which is the Trinity and Neo characters...
...who, you know, the love story is essentially about.
So it's a nice kind of character arc, you know...
...for the actors to kind of, like, finish on big emotional stuff like that.
NEO: Again. Slowly.
COMMENTARY: Neo really gets sensitized...
...and almost... It's not quite compassion in that Eastern sense, I don't think.
But he sees... He responds to the struggle of life.
He doesn't want to subjugate and conquer.
He doesn't want to eradicate programs.
He's sensitized to all of these entities' right to life.
And that what brings him to the final place...
...before the ultimate battle between Smith and Neo in Revolutions...
...where he asks for peace.
And I think... And he's... And there's no demarcation.
It's just peace for everyone.
NEO: We made it.
You said we would.
It's unbelievable, Trin.
Light everywhere.
Like the whole thing was built of light.
I wish you could see what I see.
You've already shown me so much.
COMMENTARY: They take us...
...to the possibility of losing everything...
...and the possibility of gaining everything.
And, you know...
...it's in that journey of that...
...that Matrix 2 and 3 happen, in between that.
In that struggle and in that fighting for that.
And ultimately everything is lost...
...and everything is gained...
...and in a short period of time, because it's very dire circumstances...
...we're in serious times.
Times of great strife and great struggle...
...and this is the time of action...
...and, you know, for Trinity, it's her purpose.
It's her purpose.
And she executes her purpose.
TRINITY: You brought me back once.
But not this time.
[SOBS]
COMMENTARY: Revolutions was like this wonderful poem.
It was this beautiful, lyrical, romantic poem...
...on love and life and death.
And the whole sort of third act of Revolutions...
...and the way that Trinity and Neo...
...sort of ascend...
...while Morpheus and Niobe are descending...
...and the world seems to be coming to this, you know, catastrophic end...
...it's beautiful.
TRINITY: To say how much I loved you.
How grateful I was for every moment I was with you.
But by the time I knew how to say what I wanted to, it was too late.
COMMENTARY: You know, the Trinity-Neo connection...
...it's just very... It's really emotional.
I mean, they have done an incredible job crafting that relationship.
Through the first movie, and the second movie, and now, ultimately, to this movie.
It really is such a strong part of the picture.
It really connects the characters.
It connects the movie. It brings everything together.
And their relationship is what it's all about.
TRINITY: Kiss me.
[SOBBING]
LOCK: Get that ammunition where it belongs!
You got one chance to get this right.
Get that damn thing mounted!
- Hurry. - Let's go, let's go, let's go!
Neo...
...if you're gonna do something, do it quick.
COMMENTARY: Darrow's done a beautiful drawing of a kind of...
It's almost like being on the inside of a backbone.
If you can imagine that, you know, if you took away the spinal fluid and the cord...
...it kind of takes the sense.
But it's a series of pipes that make it up in interconnecting pieces.
...and has this wonderful combination of crustaceans and jet engines...
...I think it's kind of the best description I've heard of it...
...and it's a kind of very unique, very Darrow-esque...
...Wachowski-esque concept.
Neo vision, which is this new evolution of code.
It's like what Neo sort of develops is this sort of perceptual sense...
...which he actually takes with him out of the Matrix into the real world.
And then to some extent is being able to see...
...the sort of spiritual nature underneath people...
...and in the case of the machines...
...some sort of strange biomechanical view of the machine world.
Neo can see the life force, the energy force of the machines.
Can see the struggle of existence.
With the machine city, he sees, you know:
"You should see it. It's beautiful, light everywhere.
Like the whole thing is built of light."
Some of the names of characters aren't spoken aloud, and yet in the script version...
...there are so many metaphors and analogies...
...that are fun to read about...
...like the Deus Ex Machina, which is the representation of the machine...
...the ultimate power in the machine city.
Everybody kept asking me about that thing, you know.
"What are you gonna draw?
What is it gonna be?" I didn't wanna think about it at all.
I thought: "This is gonna be the hardest thing to draw in this movie."
Because it's the... You know, it's the God machine.
Finally, it came the time I had to draw it.
And they gave me an idea of what they wanted.
They wanted sort of an urchin-y thing, but it had to be something a human recognizes.
Would have to be humanistic so that, you know, Neo can relate to it.
And the audience as well.
Everybody thinks a God with a flowing white beard and all this.
That's what everybody thought I was gonna do.
Something like that, but I thought...
...I'd go in the opposite direction, and it's the face of a baby.
DEUS EX MACHINA: What do you want?
Peace.
What are they doing?
What are you doing?
COMMENTARY: Even Larry and Andy to a certain extent have said...
...that Morpheus has this profound change that occurs.
And I think the third movie is when more and more of his humanity...
...comes to the surface...
...where he's not so much that very sort of formidable figure...
...that we meet in the first movie, who seems to know everything.
Because we learn more about him as we go...
...I think he becomes more human by the third movie.
And for me, that's not so much an arc.
It's not so much a change.
Because I've always tried to infuse his humanity...
...and make his humanity very present from the beginning.
So it's kind of a outside-in thing.
It's much harder for me to see than for everybody else.
NIOBE: Neo.
He fights for us.
[THUNDER CRASHING]
COMMENTARY: General way that you make rain is they have these kind of rain heads...
...that they actually force water through to make rain.
But everybody thought that the drops...
...that normally come out of those are too small.
Because, you know, we had some things where we had to slow the scenes...
We had to slow down the film...
...and the drops being so small, they weren't kind of giving the weight to the rain.
So we had to create new devices that would force...
...the water through bigger holes...
...so that the drops would be bigger. So we could see them better.
And so that they could be lit differently.
So we had to essentially create our own rain for the movie, but it's very effective.
SMITH: Mr. Anderson, welcome back.
COMMENTARY: We have two rows of dummies designed to...
Modeled to look exactly like Hugo.
They are operated by one real guy at the back...
...who has a mask, but he is controlling the movement of the heads.
We initially had a set that was longer...
...than the studio, and we slowly worked it down...
...into what we could A, afford, and B, build in the time.
As you can see, there's kind of an edge at the end which will be illuminated blue...
...most of the time, and that'll extend the infinity shots...
...all the way down the length of the street and then up as well.
I always tend to show up and watch.
That was a tough one to show up for because they couldn't get much done.
It was the highest example of like:
Da-da-da. "Cut. Okay, set up."
And the setup would take a long time.
From my end of the Super Burly Brawl...
...it was one of the many technical problems they had to figure out.
You got the rain, you got the lightning, you got incredibly high speeds.
And it had to be broken down shot by shot by shot.
And we ended up building one block...
...of the city street, lit for...
...300-frames-a-second shooting.
This was a pole that the two gentlemen face each other.
And they could turn this way.
The pole would allow them to turn this way.
And then they could turn the whole base, so you had three axes.
You probably spend a good minute in it.
And then the choreography just starts to fall apart.
We were calling it the PMS. rig, but it means "please make it stop."
[COMMENTATOR CHUCKLES]
We're in the Matrix building...
...which I affectionately know as the sky barn...
...because it looks a bit like a barn in its style.
What it was based around was the building Eon...
...where our offices were in Venice, in fact.
It has these big, beautiful old beams, came up.
Originally, it didn't have the extensions, which you can see up there...
...which are the illuminated side walls.
We've added those so that it was easy to do a fight.
Because it's a fight set, like so many of them.
So it's geared around a lot of wire work.
As you can see behind me, there's a lot of breakaways...
...and they've all been...
The painters have done a beautiful job of painting it. It all looks like really old brick...
...and that kind of American style.
And it has a lot of interesting kind of features for what it is.
So we tried to create...
...an interesting sort of environment for Larry and Andy to work in.
It's one of the last buildings we see in the Matrix.
[THUNDER CRASHING]
Personally, I know that Woo-ping was amenable to me...
...making some kind of in-the-moment floor choices.
And not really with me disagreeing...
...with choreography, but just me having for my own style.
Maybe here I could... I know that this is the choreography...
...but in my style, I'm feeling...
I could ask the question, "What about this?"
And Woo-ping would often say, "Yeah, sure, go ahead."
In the tradition of good apocalyptic animes...
...both characters have, you know...
...the force to cause, you know...
...destruction by way of the wake of their blows.
When we look at the trajectory of the visual effects in The Matrix...
...you know, we just hinted on these things in the first movie.
And then we touched on them a little more in Reloaded. But this is it.
These is where all of the work we've done...
...all the technology that we've created comes together.
We go quite high. We go about 2500 feet...
...above the skyline and get a good view of the total city...
...which is kind of a fantasy city, components of San Francisco, Sydney...
...New York, Chicago, and a lot of other things.
My favorite parts of it are the end.
When Neo and Smith...
...come to blows. And not just blows, but they really meet.
The whole Neo-Smith interchange all the way through...
...is the key to The Matrix to me.
[SMITH YELLING]
I'm pummeling down and lo and behold we crash upon the phone booth.
Or very close to the phone booth...
...that we exited the first movie.
And just create a huge depression in the ground.
Actually, this is a urethane foam.
One of the main problems we've had with a lot of sets from now on...
...is that there's not enough studio space...
...and we don't have time to turn the sets around.
So, what we had to do was actually build this somewhere else...
...and bring it in on bits of like... And then cut it all apart again.
Bring it in and put it back together with stitching.
So all these were put onto a frame...
...molded all together, which is bits of rock...
...molded straight off... Directly off rock...
...and then we pull molds out of that...
...piece them all together like a patchwork, foam them all up, and voilà.
SMITH: Why, Mr. Anderson?
COMMENTARY: I actually really loved working with Keanu...
...because I really like him enormously as a human being.
I think he's such a lovely man.
He beats himself up on set, and he has very high expectations...
...of what the standard of work should be.
But he never pressures me, and he never pressures other actors.
Well, he certainly doesn't pressure me into doing something...
...so I'm always very open to work with him.
And it was really delightful to work with him again.
And he's a great listener, and that's what he had to do.
So, no, it was lovely working with him again.
SMITH: Trying desperately to justify an existence...
...that is without meaning or purpose!
COMMENTARY: Exemplifies much of what Larry and Andy Wachowski are after...
...which is the stress on both the will to believe...
...preserve love and compassion...
...in the midst of a machine-driven, market-driven world...
...and also to recognize that it's not a matter of opinion and external authority...
...you make yourself through the choices that you make.
It's very Nietzsche, and it's very Jamesian in that regard.
SMITH: Why, Mr. Anderson, why? Why do you persist?
[THUNDER CRASHING]
Because I choose to.
COMMENTARY: The punch is the definitive blow delivered by Neo.
We're looking to really amp up the drama of a fist...
...so we're basically gonna cover it virtually with computer graphic...
...you know, fist seen with somewhat of a vertigo camera lensing...
...to create a real sense of enormous mass.
[THUNDER CRASHING]
The interesting thing about Smith...
...is that he moves from being like a perfect functionary...
...program to...
To evolving...
...through human emotions kind of seeping into him.
And then being seemingly obliterated...
...being compelled...
...to return, and once he's then evolved to the next stage...
...there's this ability to replicate himself...
...which is also part of the need to overcome...
...Neo, and that is his overriding purpose.
But then once you got this idea of replication...
...what then happens to those replicants?
Don't they therefore become individual in some way?
And so you're asking really large questions about individuality...
...and community within the one character.
And I think that's really amazing.
SMITH: I stand here, right here, and I'm supposed to say something.
I say:
"Everything that has a beginning has an end, Neo."
What? What did I just say?
No, no. This isn't right. This can't be right.
COMMENTARY: First mirror effect was about, you know...
...Neo's...
...loss of connection to a physical reality.
And then it really then became...
...about the drug taking over, which in reality was him...
...being disconnected from his, you know...
...electro-impulse-oriented dream.
But the black mirror effect was about...
...the incarnation of evil that Smith was...
...and how he would overwrite the code...
...of another avatar inside the Matrix...
...another individual inside the Matrix.
SMITH: Is it over?
[BREATHING HEAVILY]
[GRUNTING]
[SCREAMING]
COMMENTARY: Neo's quest since the beginning was from his lines, "What truth?"
And the journey through the three films...
...I believe that Neo...
...discovers...
...all of his truths...
...and realizes he has a line in the piece...
...to Smith, "It was inevitable."
I think that the journey of Neo as hero...
...is personal consciousness and truth.
He doesn't ask "what truth" anymore...
...because he knows.
And he knows that he has to die...
...and it's terrible.
It's terrible for him, you know.
But as Larry says, "It's also beautiful."
It sort of ties-in nicely, like in the first Matrix...
...we ended with him...
...in sort of similar circumstances, him by himself again.
You know, him being born...
...and, you know, shaved from head to toe...
...with prosthetics all over him, and goo and...
It'll be a bit more pleasant for him this time...
...even though he's blind and scarred and, you know, looking like a mess.
At least he doesn't look like a newborn baby this time with jacks all over him.
LOCK: It doesn't make sense.
He did it.
COMMENTARY: Most of the heroes in epic poems end up having to die...
...in order for something else to live. There's simply no life without death...
...there's no movement or progress without sacrifice.
And I think this is true from the early epic poets...
...all the way through Christian narratives...
...all the way through other religious narratives from India...
...from the indigenous peoples of Gilgamesh, and it goes on and on.
Life prevailed.
Life prevailed...
...and it prevailed because it chose to.
We're here simply...
I don't wanna say, because I don't wanna take away from what it is.
It doesn't matter what I think about it anyway.
The only thing that matters is that everybody...
...is provoked to think. And the debate about it...
...isn't as important as the feeling that it manifests.
I can't deny that it's very hopeful in the end...
...because it does really speak to...
...the fact that we, as human beings, do have...
...some say in how we live our lives...
...and that we do... In the final analysis, the choice is ours.
We must make the choice. We don't always make the right choice...
...but I believe that the way that they've told the story...
...through Neo's journey says that they're hopeful people.
NIOBE: Neo, wherever you are...
...thank you.
COMMENTARY: We did the garbage scull that transports Neo...
Which is actually... It's a dinosaur.
I managed to get a dinosaur in the movie.
It looks just like a sort of a triceratops kind of a thing.
I can sort of get them to talk theme with me sometimes...
...and Owen can and maybe James.
But probably nobody else...
...even the actors have a hard time getting them to tell them...
...really what the ideas are underlying it.
Maybe it's constitutional on their part.
To me, it's part...
...of their viewpoint of human beings, that they have this...
...really admirable view of people...
...that everybody is as smart as they are...
...which is one of the reasons why The Matrix is such an unusual movie.
While we were making it, I've said this before...
...I thought that no one would see this movie.
I thought that we were making this movie for ourselves.
But the Wachowskis, somewhere in them, always think...
...that people are gonna get it. They always think of people as smart.
Not an opinion I share...
[LAUGHS]
...unfortunately for me.
But they really believe this, and I think they treat the crew the same way.
They will micromanage a shot because they assume that you know the meaning of it.
Once they tell you exactly what the shot is...
...they assume that you're gonna find out what the meaning is of a scene.
We gain a peace with it. My sacrifice gains a peace...
...from the machines that have enslaved us...
...or, you know, attacked Zion or created the Matrix.
I do, and to a certain extent, gain something there.
Neo gains a peace.
For me, the stories of the movies are so beautiful...
...and profound and deep. All about, you know...
...trusting and having belief and having faith...
...and fighting for that which you believe in...
...and light outweighing darkness...
...and, you know, that in the darkness if there's light, it will always prevail.
Those are things that I choose to believe...
...and so to be in a movie that chooses to believe that...
...is really special.
SERAPH: Did you always know?
Oh, no. No, I didn't.
But I believed.
I believed.
COMMENTARY: It is a strong love story. It is a strong philosophical movie.
It is a war movie. It is a giant action movie.
It is kung fu. It is science fiction.
It has so many things going for it.
And it's just, you know, incredible how it all...
...ties up so nicely at the end of Revolutions.
It was such...
...a involved, intense...
...wonderful experience, and to come home after that was...
I mean, it was its own kind of, in a silly way...
I mean, it was really just...
"What to do?"
I was so tired and yet so restless...
...and so attached and missing everyone...
...and coming... The whole experience.
And everybody that I've spent any time with on these films...
...will be a part of who I am...
...for the rest of my life, because this movie...
These movies will follow me for the rest of my days.
As I said to you before, I will forever be known as Morpheus...
...whether I, you know, am successful...
...at making sure that he's no bigger than I am...
...you know, there will never be a time...
...where I'm walking down the street or driving down the road...
...and somebody sees me and goes, "Morpheus."
Before they go, "Laurence."
And that's just the way it is.
It's been a transforming experience.
It's been so much learning, and it's been hard...
...wonderful...
I've learned so much about myself...
...about life and work.
And it's wonderful to be so committed...
...to something that you believe in...
...like I believe in this film, and the way that...
...everyone involved from every facet of making this film.
Everyone that showed up, completely and totally...
...and it's been really special.
The story is about preserving life.
The story is about what do you believe...
...and just kind of...
I mean, that is no matter whether you're a Muslim, Christian...
...you're a Buddhist, Hindu, black, white, Asian...
...purple, green, that those are universal subjects.
And subjects that every human being on this planet...
...struggles with on a daily basis...
...and that's why people connect to this movie.
It's exemplary of our own postmodern times...
...because the issues of feeling as if we're in the Matrix...
...feeling as if we're in a deterministic world...
...cause-effect dictating who and what we are...
...trying to come up with some sense of an identity...
...a sense of will beyond simply that which is given to us.
Be it the market, especially given commodification...
...marketization, corporatization of the world.
And on the other hand, this need that we all tend to have which is, we are unique...
...distinctive individuals who want to be able to leave a mark on the world...
...and fall in love. With Trinity, it's...
So I think in so many ways, it is a kind of journey.
It's an epic, but it's an epic in postmodern terms...
...postmodern circumstances...
...postmodern conditions, and yet it's timeless...
...because all great epics transcend any historical period.
And I think in the end The Matrix will also transcend its historical period.
It will be around for a long, long time.
Even having participated in this movie...
...and studied and talked about the concepts...
...you know, it's still more for me to find.
It's like a treasure that's never, like, really brought to the surface.
You keep digging and finding more and more and more.
And I don't even know that we'll even get it...
...until much, much later on in life.
When I was younger, I pretty much...
...thought that if it was a really big film...
...it must be the product of manipulative commercial powerhouses...
...that are really just creating a product with mass appeal, but oddly enough...
...there are cases where filmmakers...
...have come from nowhere with their own identity...
...not being in subservitude to giant commercial interests.
And they get, you know, these lucky chances. Like the brothers...
...got a chance of a lifetime to have total freedom.
They were resourced as well as anyone could hope...
...but there is not a frame in that movie...
...that is not determined by them...
...from the beginning to the end. There is no content...
...that they've made in these three pictures...
...that have any adjustment or alteration...
...based on somebody's idea of what's marketable.
You know, everything, I think, flows from Larry and Andy's mind...
...and to be able to take...
...that along with everyone else, on this kind of journey...
...from being a written word to a drawing on a piece of paper...
...to an image, to something...
...that's physically built or imaginarily built in a computer...
...is a wonderful thing.
I think, like, the thing there being two of them...
...I don't think these films would have been achievable with just one person.
And, you know, it's a great way to work.
It's a great way... Like the ebb and flow...
...of how their energy works as well, you know, like...
I think, you know, like, if you're tired, and you just direct it by yourself...
...sometimes you make some, like, errors of judgment...
...which, you know, is much more rare when you've got someone...
...who, like, intrinsically knows the way you're thinking.
You know, even though those guys aren't twins, and they're, like, separated...
...they really have, like, a symbiotic relationship...
...where they kind of... Never kind of, like...
...out of sync with each other, which is pretty incredible, I'd have to say.
I don't know, I don't think I can sum it up really.
It's gonna be years before I can sum it up. It's just...
It closes the chapter in picture-making for me.
It was a monumental undertaking.
It was an incredible journey, and, you know, I'll miss it.
I'll miss it. I mean, it was...
...hard and frustrating and aggravating and thrilling and exciting and...
I mean, the success has... We've been euphoric over the success...
...but I'll miss it. I'll miss it...
...because it's a part of my life that was devoted to this saga.
And the saga ends, and it doesn't go on.
This is the end of the story.
It's just something that I really feel...
...that I'm really happy that I went through.
And I'm happy that it's over, but I'm sad to see it go.
I'll miss it. This has been one of the greatest...
You know, by far the greatest work experience I've ever had...
...and by far one of the greatest life experiences that I've ever had.
This will be remembered as a very, very special time.
A very special project in everybody's life.
I mean, it comes down to, you know, Larry and Andrew...
...what they wrote, and what they want to realize.
Everyone knows that they're being asked to do their best.
And they're being asked to do their best for something that, for the people involved...
...find very engaging.
I do, and with this opportunity...
...that we've been given to try and create this work...
...how can you not be excited...
...by getting a chance to hopefully do the best work...
...on this project that you...
...might ever get the chance to do in your creative life?
[ENGLISH SDH]