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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, this show

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Speaker 2: that brings you the secret histories and little alone fascinating

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Speaker 2: facts and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows

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Speaker 2: and more. We are your two ones and zeros of

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Speaker 2: wonderfully zany facts. I'm Alex Heigel, your.

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Speaker 1: Bent spoons of finality. That is that okay, and I

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Speaker 1: have Jordan run talk and we know hung food. That's

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Speaker 1: not true, but you do, don't you.

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Speaker 2: I know taekwondo ah and some more time. But I

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Speaker 2: do not have an unction other than what I've seen

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Speaker 2: in Jackie Champions, which is probably a lot. Yeah, I'm comfortable.

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Speaker 2: I'm comfortable saying I've seen Legend of Drunken Master enough

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Speaker 2: times that I could drunk and box someone and have um. Jordan,

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Speaker 2: I'm just kidding. I've never been in a fight. Don't

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Speaker 2: get scared, advertisers. I desperately need money, Jordan. Today, we

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Speaker 2: are here to talk about one of the most icon

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Speaker 2: films of the past quarter century, a movie that flawlessly

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Speaker 2: blends old school martial arts and action movie fundamentals with

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Speaker 2: a new understanding of how the growing digital world affected

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Speaker 2: us all That is right, my friend. We are talking friends, listeners,

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Speaker 2: romans and so forth. That's right, we are talking about

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Speaker 2: the Matrix perfect film, No Notes episode over. What can

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Speaker 2: you say when this came out, I was primed to

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Speaker 2: think it was the coolest thing ever, and I was right,

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Speaker 2: and I have not been proved otherwise, So I mean, it's.

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Speaker 1: Just it's a really researching.

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Speaker 2: Of this for this episode like made me realize how

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Speaker 2: finally balanced on a knife edge of production, this whole

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Speaker 2: thing was, Like it could have done so badly any

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Speaker 2: of their casting, alternate castings, like if the technology had

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Speaker 2: looked a little bit bittier, if the people hadn't been

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Speaker 2: able to submit to four months of training to learn

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Speaker 2: kung fu, like it all could have sucked so hard.

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Speaker 2: And instead we got a masterpiece. And we got a

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Speaker 2: masterpiece that is so timeless and yet timely because it

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Speaker 2: came out in nineteen ninety nine, like we had stud

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Speaker 2: modems like modems are in this movie. But the national

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Speaker 2: interest slash panic over y two K was building, and

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Speaker 2: you know, people were already starting to theorize about how

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Speaker 2: the Internet was going to change all of our lives

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Speaker 2: cock cough for the worst. Jordan I'm guessing though, that

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Speaker 2: black leather gunfights and large kicks were not exactly your

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Speaker 2: wheelhouse as a preteen, though.

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Speaker 1: That part of it was not. But I also had

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Speaker 1: a very seldom discussed flirtation with computers and technology when

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Speaker 1: I was a kid. My mom was a computer programmer,

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Speaker 1: and so we were probably one of the first houses

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Speaker 1: in the neighborhood that had the Internet and you know,

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Speaker 1: Windows ninety five and all the cutting edge technology stuff.

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Speaker 1: And I remember I remember being very skeptical of the

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Speaker 1: Internet because I was such a you know, just give

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Speaker 1: me books, give me big stacks of books, that's what

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Speaker 1: I want. And I remember my mom sold it to

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Speaker 1: me by saying, Jordan, you can look up the entire

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Speaker 1: passenger manifest of the type planet and it only takes

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Speaker 1: two minutes to download a word page. Yeah, And I

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Speaker 1: was like, what, There's a whole world out there, And

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Speaker 1: so that was very I was just for somebody who's

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Speaker 1: is like into old timey things, like I have a

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Speaker 1: lava lamp and a record player next to me. I

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Speaker 1: was surprisingly an early adapter to the Internet. And you know,

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Speaker 1: the characters in media that I identified with as a child,

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Speaker 1: they weren't usually the kids that went out on the adventure,

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Speaker 1: they were usually the nerdy ones who stayed home by

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Speaker 1: the computer and got the chair, the exact guy in

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Speaker 1: the chair with the with the headset Mike or walkie

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Speaker 1: talkie like relaying crucial information from the computer screen. That

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Speaker 1: was like who I always identified with, Like Penny from

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Speaker 1: Inspector Gadget was one of these figures. And the River

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Speaker 1: Phoenix character in my beloved Explorers movie. And you know

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Speaker 1: I've romanticized inventors. I love Doc from Back to the

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Speaker 1: Future and the Rick Morana's character Wayne Zelensky from The

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Speaker 1: Honey Shrunk the Kids movies, and one of my favorite

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Speaker 1: movies was Short Circuit, about a guy who builds robots.

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Speaker 1: So yeah, despite my penchant for all things retro, I

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Speaker 1: was into tech stuff and the whole kind of hacker,

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Speaker 1: not really the aesthetic, but just that sort of techno

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Speaker 1: punk vibe. I like that, at least before The Matrix

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Speaker 1: birthed a whole subgenre of hacker want to be people.

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Speaker 1: And there were a lot of kids at my school

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Speaker 1: who got long trench codes from the Salvation Army in

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Speaker 1: the wake of this movie coming out, and did like

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Speaker 1: their interpretation of Kung Fu moves in the courtyard at lunch. So,

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Speaker 1: I mean, it's basically it's what you told me about

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Speaker 1: Van Halen. I do not begrudge this movie. Their bastard

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Speaker 1: sons as unpleasant as they could be. But yeah, this

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Speaker 1: movie whips. I mean, it's the Matrix. And as you say,

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Speaker 1: the timing of it was perfect because it seemed to

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Speaker 1: come at this point at the dawn of the New millennium,

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Speaker 1: when the Internet was taking off, singularity seemed to be near,

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Speaker 1: and the line between reality and computers seemed to be blurring.

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Speaker 1: And now we are at a point when we literally

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Speaker 1: don't know what's real. So that's cool. And we describe

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Speaker 1: our chosen reality as being pilled, which is a phrase

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Speaker 1: taken directly from this movie, as we'll touch on. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: so pression in a terrifying way.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, deeply. I mean, it's funny to me. You're not

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Speaker 2: like a Wachowski's fan, like you don't know their other stuff.

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Speaker 1: I gather not really. No, In fact, I don't know.

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Speaker 1: I maybe have seen the first Matrix sequel, I don't

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Speaker 1: think i've seen the third, and I've definitely not seen

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Speaker 1: the fourth, which I kind of forgot existed until today.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I hate that fourth movie and I've gotten so

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Speaker 2: many arguments about it online, but they remained fascinating to

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Speaker 2: me because they just love to use an analogy from

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Speaker 2: a sport. I barely understand they're always swinging for the

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Speaker 2: fences every time they're at the plate, you know, because

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Speaker 2: they just took their matrix money and poured it into

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Speaker 2: stuff like V for Vendetta from the famously difficult to

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Speaker 2: adapt Alan Moore. They a speed racer film that people

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Speaker 2: still go to bad for, you know, and then they

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Speaker 2: did these two big, clunky sci fi things that lost

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Speaker 2: a lot of money, like Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending,

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Speaker 2: and then they made a Netflix series that didn't do well.

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Speaker 2: And it's just like, I applaud their vigor and in

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Speaker 2: making movies that do not seem to connect.

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Speaker 1: The same way that this one has. God love them.

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Speaker 1: It's like good James Cameron. It's like not evil James Cameron.

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Speaker 2: I mean, it's James Cameron if it's yeah, I don't know,

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Speaker 2: I don't know if I can cot in that comparison.

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Speaker 2: It's James Cameron if he didn't get results.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, wait Claire.

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Speaker 2: Anyway, so from the grueling training that Keanu and most

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Speaker 2: of the rest of the cast underwent to become Neo

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Speaker 2: and the rest to the new technology the production innovated

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Speaker 2: to build the film's world to the equally depressing and

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Speaker 2: inspiring shadow the film cast twenty five years later. Here's

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Speaker 2: everything you didn't know about the Matrix.

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Speaker 1: Who Which housekis?

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Speaker 2: Lily and Lana were born in Chicago, where high school

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Speaker 2: classmates remember them as Dungeons and Dragons players who were

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Speaker 2: into theater and their Magnet School's TV program.

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Speaker 1: Which is just such a spot on origin story, quick

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Speaker 1: spotlight on the funniest thing I've ever done, as far

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Speaker 1: as my girlfriend was concerned, at least, we were walking

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Speaker 1: by a big facility with a sign out front that

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Speaker 1: said Magnet School, and as soon as I spotted it,

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Speaker 1: I said, oh no, and I threw myself against the

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Speaker 1: sign as if I was being drawn by a magnet.

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Speaker 1: Shout out to my comedy stylings proceed.

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Speaker 2: Don't ever interrupt me again with something I thought. After

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Speaker 2: graduating high school, Lana went to Bard College, New York State,

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Speaker 2: and Lily attended, I'm just watching you delete one of

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Speaker 2: your sides as I read that. After graduating high school.

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Speaker 2: Lanna went to Bard College, New York State, and attended

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Speaker 2: Emerson in Boston, but they each dropped out before graduating.

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Speaker 2: And I understand, Jordan, that you applied to both of

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Speaker 2: those schools or got in.

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Speaker 1: I did, Yes, I have no amusing anecdotes about that. Anyway.

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Speaker 2: The Wochowskis went on to run a house painting and

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Speaker 2: construction business in Chicago, which sounds like the setup to

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Speaker 2: a wonderful sitcom that I would currently watch or a

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Speaker 2: mob cover. Well, yeah, that's true. They also wrote for

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Speaker 2: Marvel's Razor Line, which is a short lived imprint based

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Speaker 2: on concepts created by horror icon Clive Barker that I

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Speaker 2: just learned about for this episode, which is why I

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Speaker 2: would considering I'm a Clive Barker fan. Their character was

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Speaker 2: the hilarious named Dex Mungo, the Ecto Kid, who was

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Speaker 2: the son of a human woman and a male ghost

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Speaker 2: and I don't know how that was ever explained, who

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Speaker 2: via his parentage, can see into the world of the

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Speaker 2: dead and you can easily see the seeds of the

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Speaker 2: matrix in this comic because the ectokid, Dex gains the

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Speaker 2: ability to travel freely in the dimension of the dead

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Speaker 2: by leaving his physical world behind, much like Neo.

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

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Speaker 2: Wrapped, Steve scrope Chi I think is how you pronounced

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Speaker 2: that it was one of the co creators, and he

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Speaker 2: would draw the six hundred page, fully fleshed out storyboard

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Speaker 2: slash comic book that essentially got the movie greenlit.

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Speaker 1: So that's all cool. What's the crucial point for our listeners,

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Speaker 1: dex Mungo not to be confused with Mungo Jerry who's

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Speaker 1: still alive, who is still alive. Yeah, that's wonderful of

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Speaker 1: in the summertime fame.

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Speaker 2: Tune in next time for more Mungo Jerry upstates thing

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Speaker 2: is Mungo something in Britain that I don't know, the

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Speaker 2: gross thing.

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

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Speaker 2: No, no, anyway, But in a way, the Matrix owes

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Speaker 2: its genesis to a completely different medium and the godfather

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Speaker 2: of Cheapo American cinema won mister Roger Corman.

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Speaker 1: Who's also still alive.

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Speaker 2: Roger Corman is also still alive.

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Speaker 1: Shout out to people who are still alive.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, it's hard these days, the Wachowski's read a copy

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Speaker 2: of Corman's book how I made one hundred movies in

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Speaker 2: Hollywood and never lost a dime, and they were suitably

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Speaker 2: inspired to write a script called Carnivore about wealthy people

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Speaker 2: being eaten by cannibals, which would have fit in great

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Speaker 2: in the past couple years of Hollywood.

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Speaker 1: I don't know why they didn't make that.

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Speaker 2: This has sadly been never brought to the screen, although

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Speaker 2: George Romero supposedly at one point expressed interest in it.

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Speaker 2: But the Carnivore script did one thing, which was catch

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Speaker 2: the eye of Warner Brothers, who bought a script from

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Speaker 2: the Waschowskis called Assassins in nineteen ninety five and crucially

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Speaker 2: options for two more. Lily Wachowski told BuzzFeed in twenty fifteen,

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Speaker 2: the first cash payment that we got on Assassins was

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Speaker 2: from Mel Gibson. He had read the script and he

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Speaker 2: was like, where did this come from. We were like, look,

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Speaker 2: we have to make a decision because we had an

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Speaker 2: offer from DDLC, which is Dino de Laurentis's company. Then

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Speaker 2: our agent told Mel's company that you know, look, these

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Speaker 2: two are super poor. They're calling from a gas station

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Speaker 2: phone right now. So Mel Gibson wrote us a check

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Speaker 2: for like one thousand dollars each to wait twenty four

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Speaker 2: hours or something like that. We were like one thousand dollars, Yes,

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Speaker 2: we're rich, and then Mel was like no. Gibson opted

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Speaker 2: to make a Braveheart instead, which is probably a good decision.

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Speaker 2: Director Richard Donner of Superman and Gooney's Fame eventually snapped

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Speaker 2: up the script for Assassins, with several big names like

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Speaker 2: Dino Dolorentis and Joel Silver producing, and I wound up

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Speaker 2: starring Sylvester Stallone and Antonio benderis perhaps needless to say

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Speaker 2: for anyone with any understanding of how Hollywood works. Though

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Speaker 2: this was not an ideal environment for two first time screenwriters.

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Speaker 2: Richard Donner ordered the Wachowski script almost completely rewritten by

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Speaker 2: Brian Hegelund, who among other things, wrote La Confidential and

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Speaker 2: Mystic River. So not a bad call, honestly, but the

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Speaker 2: Wachowski has hated it enough to try and get their

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Speaker 2: names taken off the script, and they failed. Over the WGA,

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Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure they were referring to it for a

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Speaker 2: long time as our abortion, which is not great but

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Speaker 2: they did say that the experience convinced them that they

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Speaker 2: would never survive in the world of Hollywood as writers alone.

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Speaker 2: They had to direct. So the Wachowskis had completed a

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Speaker 2: draft of The Matrix. I mean they've been working on

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Speaker 2: this thing on and off since the early nineties when

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Speaker 2: they were comic book writers. But they had a draft

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Speaker 2: ready to show as early as nineteen eighty five, and

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Speaker 2: they showed it to Joel Silver, producer extraordinaire. Joel Silver.

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Speaker 2: What else has he done? Like everything? He shouldn't have

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Speaker 2: to explain this.

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Speaker 1: He was in the Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I think

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Speaker 1: he was a producer for it, and he had a

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Speaker 1: bit part in it too.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, lost boys, I think a lot of the Batman stuff,

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Speaker 2: who maybe best known for making billions of dollars with

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Speaker 2: stuff like forty eight Hours, Streets of Fire, the Lethal

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Speaker 2: Weapon franchise, the Diehard franchise, the first two films of

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Speaker 2: the Predator series, and the entirety of the Matrix franchise,

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Speaker 2: as well as I am just now reading creating the

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Speaker 2: Rules along with two other guys for what would become

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Speaker 2: the sport Ultimate Frisbee.

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Speaker 1: You're kidding me?

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Speaker 2: I am not kidding you. That is the lead graph

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Speaker 2: on his Wikipedia page, which I have just now learned. Anyway,

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Speaker 2: the minute I started reading the script for The Matrix,

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Speaker 2: I wanted to see it. But then then Wachowski said,

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Speaker 2: and we went to direct it, that was going to

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Speaker 2: be tough. Silver told Wired in two thousand and three,

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Speaker 2: So he decided to throw them into the director's chair

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Speaker 2: for another one of the scripts that got optioned, but

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Speaker 2: a much lower stakes one, a Noirrish thriller called Bound,

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Speaker 2: starring Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershawan and Joey Paneliano. The

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Speaker 2: film did well with critics, and the LGBTQ romance at

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Speaker 2: the center of its plot gained a cult following that

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Speaker 2: persists to this day, something that supposedly Denot DiLaurentis, of

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Speaker 2: all people, lobbied to change. Lona Wichowski, however, shot down

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Speaker 2: the popular telling of Bound as audition piece for The

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Speaker 2: Matrix years later, telling BuzzFeed, Joel made that up. Probably

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Speaker 2: one of the few people in Hollywood rich enough to

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Speaker 2: say that about Joel Silver.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: Filmed over thirty eight days on a six million dollar budget,

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Speaker 2: Bound failed to become a runaway hit, but gardened enough

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Speaker 2: critical praise, especially for Tilly and Gersham's performances, that the

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Speaker 2: Wachowskis were in a good position to get the green

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Speaker 2: light for The Matrix. A funny coincidence that helped at

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Speaker 2: the successive Bound was that Warner Brothers had just watched

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Speaker 2: its own erotic revenge thriller, an expensive remake of the

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Speaker 2: fifties French film Die Bailique Flop. Lorenz the fabulously named

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Speaker 2: Lorenzo di bona Ventura, who is then a development executive

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Speaker 2: at Warner Brothers, told Wired that the company's co chairman

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Speaker 2: Terry Simmel saw Bound and exclaimed, God damn it, this

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Speaker 2: thing probably cost a fraction of our picture, and it's

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Speaker 2: so much more.

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Speaker 1: Interesting, Laurenzi de Bonaventura. Didn't he develop the rules for

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Speaker 1: a pickleball? I just want to give that time the

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Speaker 1: land and there we go, hold for applause, stretch, vamp vamp.

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Speaker 1: Even so, the Wachowskis were fighting an uphill battle for

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Speaker 1: The Matrix, an action movie that featured multiple philosophical threads,

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Speaker 1: a combination of religious imagery from both the East and

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Speaker 1: the West, all set in a dystopian future and dotted

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Speaker 1: with cyberpunk jargon. All this taken together did not make

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Speaker 1: for the most executive pleasing script on all. Wachowski told BuzzFeed.

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Speaker 1: Every single person in town rejected it. Their manager, Lawrence Mattis,

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Speaker 1: recalled to The New Yorker when I first read the Matrix,

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Speaker 1: I called them all excited because they'd written a script

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Speaker 1: about Descartes, the philosopher Rene Descartes. But then everyone read

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Speaker 1: the script and passed. Nobody got it. To this day,

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Speaker 1: I think Warner Brothers bought it half out of the

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Speaker 1: relationship with them and half because they thought something was there.

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Speaker 1: The Wachowskis clinched it by hiring Jeff Darrow, who created

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Speaker 1: the well known comic book Hard Boiled, and the aforementioned

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Speaker 1: Steve Scrochy, their old buddy from their Marvel comic days,

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Speaker 1: who made a three hundred page scene by scene comic

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Speaker 1: book based on their script, which I imagine is basically like

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Speaker 1: an elaborate storyboard. They laid this out for Warner Brothers

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Speaker 1: CoA chairman Terry Simmel and Bob Daily producer Joel Silver

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Speaker 1: told The New York Times this was virtually identical to

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Speaker 1: the movie. But even so, this presentation was quote an

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Speaker 1: unusual show. The aforementioned, incredibly named Lorenza de Bonaventura told

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Speaker 1: Wired one of the Wachowski's was explaining the story and

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Speaker 1: the other was making sound effect noises, which is a

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Speaker 1: horrible I love that all during the presentation. Imagine that

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Speaker 1: being your role when you're in a high level meeting

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Speaker 1: at Warner Brothers. All right, all right, make the pew

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Speaker 1: pew sounds. All right? Oh yeah, all right, when we

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Speaker 1: do the bullet scene, when we do this stuff. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: to like practicing that at home before going in. I'm

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Speaker 1: sure they did. They're just the most delightful nerds. I

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Speaker 1: love that so much. Asked if the company was going

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Speaker 1: to make money on the Matrix, de Bonaventure remembered, I

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Speaker 1: thought for half a second and said, we're not going

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Speaker 1: to lose any money, which is a beautiful way to

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Speaker 1: skirt the issue again. The Wachowski has caught the studio

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Speaker 1: at a good or bad time, depending on how you

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Speaker 1: look at it. The Matrix budget was put around sixty

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Speaker 1: million dollars, which at the time back in nineteen ninety

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Speaker 1: what had that been seven to eight was a big investment,

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Speaker 1: probably closer to one hundred thousand dollars today, but it

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Speaker 1: was far less than what the company had spent on

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Speaker 1: their flop Batman and Robin, which you are a huge

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Speaker 1: Batman had is widely considered to be the nator of

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Speaker 1: the franchise and basically the reason the studio started from

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Speaker 1: the ground up with the Christopher Nolan.

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Speaker 2: Films and still has its weird defend online Unfortunately. Man,

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Speaker 2: the craziest thing about Twitter rip or whatever is just that, like,

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Speaker 2: no matter what piece of movie is out there, you

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Speaker 2: will find people ready to go to bat for it.

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Speaker 2: In your mentions, you're not one of them, right to

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Speaker 2: go to bad for Batman, ever, Robben, No, that's what

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Speaker 2: I thought. I think I've told this story many many times,

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Speaker 2: but that was one of the movies that first educated

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Speaker 2: me to the concept that movies.

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Speaker 1: Could be bad.

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Speaker 2: I previously thought that movies had to be good because

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Speaker 2: they got made.

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Speaker 1: I you know what that and that makes a lot

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Speaker 1: of sense. And I bet you there's still a lot

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Speaker 1: of people out there thinking it was went through enough

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Speaker 1: very smart people and cost enough money that surely, yeah,

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Speaker 1: enough effort went into it to make it a certain level.

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Speaker 1: But no, you're absolutely right, Executive Divona Ventira said sequels

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Speaker 1: were faltering and a lot of genres were dying, action

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Speaker 1: comedy movies, buddy cop movies. We knew we needed to

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Speaker 1: do something different, so the Matrix was greenlit on the

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Speaker 1: condition that it would shoot in Australia, where sixty million

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Speaker 1: dollars would go a lot further. This is a good time,

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Speaker 1: has any to get into what the script, which apparently

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Speaker 1: went through somewhere between eleven and fourteen rewrites, entailed. Lily

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Speaker 1: Wachowski told The New York Times the script was a

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Speaker 1: synthesis of ideas that sort of came together at a

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Speaker 1: moment when we were interested in a lot of things,

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Speaker 1: making mythology relevant in a modern context, relate in quantum physics,

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Speaker 1: to Zen Buddhism, and investigating your own life. We started

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Speaker 1: out thinking of this as a comic book. We filled

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Speaker 1: notebook after notebook with ideas. Essentially, that's where the script

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Speaker 1: came from. First bong rip idea, second bong rip idea,

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Speaker 1: many bong rip ideas. Yeah, I say that with love.

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Speaker 2: I mean it is actually really fascinating to trace all

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Speaker 2: the stuff that goes into the Matrix and just see

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Speaker 2: how dense they pulled together this genius mood board from

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Speaker 2: like so many different places, and you can, you know,

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Speaker 2: when you break art, any kind of work of art

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Speaker 2: down into its kind of constituent elements. Like there's a

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Speaker 2: there's a book of interviews with Tom Waits that I

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Speaker 2: used to have that uh he talks about like the

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Speaker 2: five or ten records that like define his his stick

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Speaker 2: and I was like, hmm, yeah, that's it. That's one,

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Speaker 2: totally it. And it is just amazing how much stuff.

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Speaker 2: I mean, even if you just think of the Wachowski's

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Speaker 2: as like incredible magpies and who are able to sort

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Speaker 2: of synthesize a bunch of stuff into their own vision,

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Speaker 2: that's still an incredible feat.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: And it also it's what our buddy Billy Joel said

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Speaker 1: when people were talking about, you know, dissecting the structures

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Speaker 1: and lyrics of piano man. You know, maybe it's best

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Speaker 1: not to dissect things while it's still alive. I like that.

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Speaker 1: I like that a lot. But both the Wachowski said

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Speaker 1: read The Odyssey multiple times, along with groundbreaking cyberpunk works

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Speaker 1: by guys like William Gibson and Philip K.

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Speaker 2: Dick dude, the fun I just have to do this

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Speaker 2: as an aside. The funniest thing I haven't been able

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Speaker 2: to substantiate this because, like, I'm not a huge William

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Speaker 2: Gibson fan, but I have read his big one, The

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Speaker 2: Tape Escapes Me. Actually, this is embarrassing.

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Speaker 1: Do you like Philip K. Dick?

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Speaker 2: Are you a dickhead neuromancer? I do like Philip K.

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Speaker 2: Dick because I mean I like Philip K. Dick because

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Speaker 2: he gobbled speed like pezzes. He was writing all of

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Speaker 2: his stuff, and so every one of his books is

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Speaker 2: like this semi genius nugget of an idea that is

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Speaker 2: just filtered through so many layers of like methamphetamine addult paranoia. Yeah,

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Speaker 2: William William Gibson, I have not read further than Neuromancer,

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Speaker 2: which is sort of like his you know, all bullet points,

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Speaker 2: like big book that's very influenced and basically coined the term,

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Speaker 2: you know, cyberpunk and all this stuff. But the funniest

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Speaker 2: thing that I know about him comes from a Tumblr

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Speaker 2: post that I have not been able to sustantiate, which

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Speaker 2: was basically that when Gibson was dodging the draft and

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Speaker 2: went to Canada in the late sixties, he was just

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Speaker 2: bumming around Canada with the Nason hippie scenes there, and

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Speaker 2: he managed a headshop apparently, and then when he went

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Speaker 2: to write all of his novels and stuff, he took

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Speaker 2: their the slang that he got there and basically built

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Speaker 2: that into this worldview. So this person is like, yeah,

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Speaker 2: my parents were hippies in Canada around that time, and

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Speaker 2: so I have aunts in their sixties who sound like

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Speaker 2: they're talking out of like shadow Run or neuroroom at Mancer,

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Speaker 2: he says. Or in a different way, all of your

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Speaker 2: favorite hacker icons in cyberpunk literature talked like my old aunts.

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Speaker 1: That's yeah. Well, in terms of their cinematic influences, the

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Speaker 1: Wachowskis grew up watching a canonical cross section of twentieth

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Speaker 1: century film icons like Stanley Kubrick, John Houston, Billy Wilder,

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Speaker 1: which that's a surprising one to me, Ridley Scott, George Lucas.

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Speaker 2: I mean, when anyone says Billy Wilder, don't they just

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Speaker 2: mean we've seen suns at Boulevard a lot.

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Speaker 1: I guess to me, I always think of like some

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Speaker 1: like it Hot in the Apartment and some of the

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Speaker 1: more like major era comedy stuff. I think he did

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Speaker 1: double indemnity too, I think, which is a great from

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Speaker 1: air so I get you know what you're right withdrawn

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Speaker 1: snide aside withdrawn. And they also were big fans of

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Speaker 1: Jean Lucadar's nineteen sixty five French sci fi noir Alphaville,

429
00:23:20,119 --> 00:23:22,960
Speaker 1: and of course, oh everyone loves Fritz Lang's Metropolis. That

430
00:23:23,040 --> 00:23:26,000
Speaker 1: was a big influence on David Bowie too. No Metropolis

431
00:23:26,080 --> 00:23:30,199
Speaker 1: is great, along with anime classics like Ghost in the Shell,

432
00:23:30,359 --> 00:23:33,840
Speaker 1: which is about cybernetically enhanced humans who are, among other things,

433
00:23:34,200 --> 00:23:38,320
Speaker 1: able to extend their consciousness into a technological network. And

434
00:23:38,359 --> 00:23:40,920
Speaker 1: then they also were into Hong Kong action flicks by

435
00:23:41,040 --> 00:23:45,399
Speaker 1: people you admire, guys like John Wu. But central to

436
00:23:45,440 --> 00:23:48,840
Speaker 1: their matrix script was Plato's Allegory of the Cave, which

437
00:23:48,840 --> 00:23:52,080
Speaker 1: stars a group of people chained in a cave watching

438
00:23:52,080 --> 00:23:54,919
Speaker 1: the shadows projected on the cave wall by a fire

439
00:23:55,040 --> 00:23:59,159
Speaker 1: lit behind them. They perceived the shadows as reality, do

440
00:23:59,240 --> 00:24:03,520
Speaker 1: not know their true form. And there are also religious

441
00:24:03,520 --> 00:24:09,240
Speaker 1: elements too, as we touched on earlier, drawing from Hinduism, Buddhism, Narcissism, Judaism,

442
00:24:09,480 --> 00:24:13,439
Speaker 1: and Christianity, all of this has become fertile ground for

443
00:24:13,600 --> 00:24:18,000
Speaker 1: decades of analysis. To give just one example, Slovenian philosopher

444
00:24:18,119 --> 00:24:22,359
Speaker 1: slavalv Jijak has written about the Matrix trilogy entitled his

445
00:24:22,400 --> 00:24:25,119
Speaker 1: book on the Response to nine to eleven Welcome to

446
00:24:25,200 --> 00:24:27,960
Speaker 1: the Desert of the Real, which is a quotation from

447
00:24:28,000 --> 00:24:30,679
Speaker 1: the movie, which is in turn an allusion to a

448
00:24:30,760 --> 00:24:34,280
Speaker 1: line from Jean Boudriard's Simulacra and Simulation.

449
00:24:34,880 --> 00:24:37,399
Speaker 2: So with all that secured, production moved on to the

450
00:24:37,440 --> 00:24:43,000
Speaker 2: casting stage. It has become alternate casting canon. I guess

451
00:24:43,000 --> 00:24:45,200
Speaker 2: that or lore that Will Smith turned down the role

452
00:24:45,240 --> 00:24:48,240
Speaker 2: of Neo to make Wild Wild West because what was

453
00:24:48,280 --> 00:24:51,840
Speaker 2: supposedly concerned about the film's ambitious special effects, though Smith

454
00:24:51,840 --> 00:24:54,320
Speaker 2: has later said that he wasn't quote mature enough as

455
00:24:54,320 --> 00:24:56,840
Speaker 2: an actor at the time and that he would have

456
00:24:56,920 --> 00:25:01,760
Speaker 2: messed it up, which is objectively correct. Nick Cage also

457
00:25:01,840 --> 00:25:08,000
Speaker 2: turned down the Park because of supposed family obligations. Would

458
00:25:08,000 --> 00:25:10,320
Speaker 2: have been right after he'd made Face Off.

459
00:25:10,440 --> 00:25:12,440
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, so yeah.

460
00:25:12,440 --> 00:25:14,480
Speaker 2: I mean, he'd just worked with John wom Maybe he

461
00:25:14,520 --> 00:25:16,240
Speaker 2: didn't want to do another I Have a Gun in

462
00:25:16,280 --> 00:25:17,200
Speaker 2: each Hand movie?

463
00:25:18,440 --> 00:25:20,800
Speaker 1: What did he do? I think next he did bringing

464
00:25:20,800 --> 00:25:24,560
Speaker 1: out the Dead or City of Angels. Uh okay, City

465
00:25:24,600 --> 00:25:28,439
Speaker 1: of Angels all out. You gotta watch the wim Wenders

466
00:25:28,440 --> 00:25:32,040
Speaker 1: one that has Nick Cave in it. Yeah. Oh no.

467
00:25:32,840 --> 00:25:36,119
Speaker 2: He had just done Leaving Las Vegas, Oh, one of

468
00:25:36,160 --> 00:25:38,920
Speaker 2: the most depressing movies of all time. In ninety five,

469
00:25:39,359 --> 00:25:41,840
Speaker 2: ninety six, he did The Rock ninety seventy, did con

470
00:25:41,840 --> 00:25:44,600
Speaker 2: Air ninety Also in ninety seven he did Face Off,

471
00:25:45,080 --> 00:25:47,320
Speaker 2: and then he did City of Angels in nineteen ninety eight.

472
00:25:48,359 --> 00:25:50,800
Speaker 2: So I guess it if I'm putting the timeline wrong.

473
00:25:50,920 --> 00:25:55,120
Speaker 2: Ninety seven, Yeah, I think he had just gotten enough

474
00:25:55,119 --> 00:25:55,919
Speaker 2: of action movies.

475
00:25:56,400 --> 00:25:59,480
Speaker 1: God, that's so funny. Would he have been neo? I

476
00:25:59,520 --> 00:26:03,320
Speaker 1: would have oh yeah, yeah, yeah, oh god, I could

477
00:26:03,440 --> 00:26:08,440
Speaker 1: you know, I mean I could almost see it. Yeah.

478
00:26:08,560 --> 00:26:09,840
Speaker 1: He has that sort of.

479
00:26:11,480 --> 00:26:15,920
Speaker 2: Stoic knife quality to some of his performances, like Raising

480
00:26:16,000 --> 00:26:18,480
Speaker 2: in Arizona, where you could see him be this sort

481
00:26:18,520 --> 00:26:20,600
Speaker 2: of tabula rossa.

482
00:26:20,320 --> 00:26:23,760
Speaker 1: For all the stuff. But exactly he's too old by that.

483
00:26:24,000 --> 00:26:26,119
Speaker 1: He can't have a neo with the receding airline.

484
00:26:28,080 --> 00:26:31,159
Speaker 2: It's also become a lore, verified by composer Don Davis,

485
00:26:31,160 --> 00:26:34,320
Speaker 2: that Johnny Depp was the studio's first choice for Neo

486
00:26:35,320 --> 00:26:37,440
Speaker 2: and if they didn't want him. I think he said

487
00:26:37,480 --> 00:26:39,840
Speaker 2: that all the studios at the time couldn't get Johnny Depp,

488
00:26:39,880 --> 00:26:43,159
Speaker 2: so they'd go to Brad Pitt or Val Kilmer. They

489
00:26:43,200 --> 00:26:45,480
Speaker 2: told the Wachowski's that if Brad Pitt would do the picture,

490
00:26:45,480 --> 00:26:48,159
Speaker 2: they'd green light it right then. So Val Kilmer and

491
00:26:48,240 --> 00:26:51,560
Speaker 2: Brad Pitt said no. So it sort of came down

492
00:26:51,600 --> 00:26:53,400
Speaker 2: to Johnny Depp and Keanu Reeves.

493
00:26:53,440 --> 00:26:55,080
Speaker 1: I just want to say that, I just want to

494
00:26:55,119 --> 00:26:58,760
Speaker 1: say that Keanu Reeves is ten months younger than Nicholas

495
00:26:58,760 --> 00:26:59,800
Speaker 1: cage Man.

496
00:27:00,920 --> 00:27:08,399
Speaker 2: Jean's hair, jeans and hair, really really wild stuff. Leonard

497
00:27:08,400 --> 00:27:10,919
Speaker 2: Dicapro was also signed on at one point, but he

498
00:27:10,960 --> 00:27:13,600
Speaker 2: got spooked away by the extensive visual effects that the

499
00:27:13,640 --> 00:27:16,520
Speaker 2: film is going to require, which, after having just undergone

500
00:27:16,520 --> 00:27:19,600
Speaker 2: a prolonged stay in a watery hell called Titanic shepherded

501
00:27:19,640 --> 00:27:24,800
Speaker 2: by James Cameron, I think is quite understandable. I cannot

502
00:27:24,800 --> 00:27:27,479
Speaker 2: stop thinking about how much this movie would have sucked.

503
00:27:27,600 --> 00:27:29,000
Speaker 1: With any of those other people.

504
00:27:30,240 --> 00:27:32,880
Speaker 2: Johnny Depp would have made some kind of weird choice,

505
00:27:32,960 --> 00:27:34,840
Speaker 2: like he would have been like, oh, he's gonna have

506
00:27:34,960 --> 00:27:35,920
Speaker 2: a congo.

507
00:27:36,040 --> 00:27:39,200
Speaker 1: Lees would have made weird choices, Nick, you would have

508
00:27:39,240 --> 00:27:44,760
Speaker 1: made weird choices. Leonardo Di Caprio would have made weird choice. Yeah. Yeah.

509
00:27:44,880 --> 00:27:49,159
Speaker 2: Funnily enough, I had never heard this before. They offered

510
00:27:49,200 --> 00:27:52,760
Speaker 2: it to Sandra Bullock. Debona venturin Joel Silver had both

511
00:27:52,800 --> 00:27:56,640
Speaker 2: worked with her on the also Sylvester Stallone starring Demolition Man,

512
00:27:56,680 --> 00:28:00,720
Speaker 2: which is a great movie, and they basically said that

513
00:28:00,760 --> 00:28:03,080
Speaker 2: they would change the character of Neo to a girl.

514
00:28:03,400 --> 00:28:06,360
Speaker 2: Deemonaventura told to Rap this in twenty nineteen. He said,

515
00:28:06,320 --> 00:28:07,960
Speaker 2: it was pretty simple. We sent her the script to

516
00:28:07,960 --> 00:28:09,879
Speaker 2: see if she was interested in it, and if she

517
00:28:09,960 --> 00:28:12,320
Speaker 2: was interested, we would try to make the change. It

518
00:28:12,440 --> 00:28:14,040
Speaker 2: just wasn't something for her at the time, so it

519
00:28:14,040 --> 00:28:17,320
Speaker 2: didn't really go anywhere. Bullock told The Today Show in

520
00:28:17,359 --> 00:28:19,600
Speaker 2: two thousand and nine, though, that she was considered for

521
00:28:19,640 --> 00:28:22,159
Speaker 2: the role of Trinity as well, and she regretted not

522
00:28:22,240 --> 00:28:24,600
Speaker 2: taking it. So either she's misremembering it or they were

523
00:28:24,640 --> 00:28:27,000
Speaker 2: so desperate to get Sandra Bullock on board they basically

524
00:28:27,000 --> 00:28:29,840
Speaker 2: handed her the script and was like, you can play anyone,

525
00:28:30,359 --> 00:28:32,720
Speaker 2: which is amazing because I would like to have seen

526
00:28:32,720 --> 00:28:37,399
Speaker 2: her play Morpheus. This brings us to Sweet Angel Baby

527
00:28:37,480 --> 00:28:41,240
Speaker 2: Keanu reeves. It is the funniest thing to me in

528
00:28:41,240 --> 00:28:47,000
Speaker 2: the world that Keanu is like the only unproblematic person

529
00:28:47,040 --> 00:28:49,480
Speaker 2: that we have of his stature at this point. I think,

530
00:28:51,280 --> 00:28:55,200
Speaker 2: like before Matt Matthew Perry died and he became bad

531
00:28:55,200 --> 00:28:59,440
Speaker 2: to say anything bad about him, His autobiography came out

532
00:28:59,480 --> 00:29:02,280
Speaker 2: like there was like a throwaway line in it about

533
00:29:02,280 --> 00:29:06,720
Speaker 2: how he felt the friends cast were like unfairly compensated

534
00:29:06,800 --> 00:29:10,640
Speaker 2: or something, or something griping and used Kanu reads as

535
00:29:10,640 --> 00:29:14,280
Speaker 2: an example of like not talented actors or something like that,

536
00:29:14,720 --> 00:29:17,440
Speaker 2: and the entire twitter just turned against him.

537
00:29:17,480 --> 00:29:20,440
Speaker 1: It was like, you keep Keanu's name out of your mouth. Well,

538
00:29:20,520 --> 00:29:23,280
Speaker 1: I think it became a recurring punchline in the memoir

539
00:29:23,280 --> 00:29:25,240
Speaker 1: if I recall. I don't think it was a throwaway line.

540
00:29:25,280 --> 00:29:27,480
Speaker 1: I think it was just a recurring joke of a book.

541
00:29:27,760 --> 00:29:29,440
Speaker 1: I could be wrong. I've actually read it, but I

542
00:29:29,480 --> 00:29:33,600
Speaker 1: believe it was a multiple reference kind of deal, or

543
00:29:33,640 --> 00:29:35,480
Speaker 1: he just became shorthand.

544
00:29:35,120 --> 00:29:40,200
Speaker 2: For Keanu would never stoop so low, I have to assume. Yeah,

545
00:29:40,240 --> 00:29:43,200
Speaker 2: I think there's like a backlash brewing against the like

546
00:29:43,400 --> 00:29:46,560
Speaker 2: canonization of him, but I am not here for a

547
00:29:46,560 --> 00:29:51,000
Speaker 2: part of it. I think I love the guy. I mean,

548
00:29:51,120 --> 00:29:57,120
Speaker 2: he he makes such fascinating choices from a person of

549
00:29:57,200 --> 00:30:02,800
Speaker 2: his stature, and he has his thing dialed in so

550
00:30:03,000 --> 00:30:05,760
Speaker 2: precisely like people, you know, people like people. I maybe

551
00:30:05,920 --> 00:30:08,320
Speaker 2: just a few critics I read, but people like have

552
00:30:08,440 --> 00:30:12,000
Speaker 2: read have like gone back and revisioned Paul Walker as

553
00:30:12,040 --> 00:30:15,560
Speaker 2: a good actor, which is stupid. But like Keanu really

554
00:30:15,600 --> 00:30:20,520
Speaker 2: I think learned how to dial in his kind of

555
00:30:20,600 --> 00:30:26,040
Speaker 2: blankness and like affect into what's become gravity in his

556
00:30:26,120 --> 00:30:29,800
Speaker 2: older age. There's this amazing line in one of the

557
00:30:29,880 --> 00:30:33,960
Speaker 2: John Wicks where someone is like asks him, like why

558
00:30:34,000 --> 00:30:36,800
Speaker 2: he's like praying to his wife or or something and

559
00:30:37,120 --> 00:30:39,880
Speaker 2: or talking to his dead wife and spoiler alert for

560
00:30:39,920 --> 00:30:42,440
Speaker 2: a franchise that hinges entirely around that one plot point

561
00:30:42,440 --> 00:30:45,920
Speaker 2: and is like ten years old, and and they're like,

562
00:30:45,960 --> 00:30:48,200
Speaker 2: are you would you think that she can hear you?

563
00:30:48,240 --> 00:30:50,240
Speaker 2: And he says no, and they're like why do you

564
00:30:50,320 --> 00:30:52,800
Speaker 2: do it then? And he just says maybe I'm wrong,

565
00:30:53,760 --> 00:30:57,640
Speaker 2: and like invests such like I just got chills thinking

566
00:30:57,640 --> 00:30:58,040
Speaker 2: about it.

567
00:30:58,080 --> 00:30:59,720
Speaker 1: Like there's such like world weary.

568
00:31:00,760 --> 00:31:03,240
Speaker 2: I mean, he's truly become like Clint Eastwood in a

569
00:31:03,320 --> 00:31:04,520
Speaker 2: non problematic way.

570
00:31:04,720 --> 00:31:08,040
Speaker 1: Wow, yeah, but he'd had it. He had a rough nineties.

571
00:31:08,760 --> 00:31:11,640
Speaker 2: He had all three of these films came out in

572
00:31:11,720 --> 00:31:15,120
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety one, Bill and Ted Point Break and My

573
00:31:15,240 --> 00:31:16,680
Speaker 2: Private Idaho.

574
00:31:16,360 --> 00:31:18,360
Speaker 1: Bill has Bogus Journey, the sequel.

575
00:31:18,120 --> 00:31:20,400
Speaker 2: Phony short not they're not the original. Yeah, but all

576
00:31:20,400 --> 00:31:24,000
Speaker 2: three of those films in nineteenety one. That's exhausting. And

577
00:31:24,040 --> 00:31:27,640
Speaker 2: then uh, Speed eventually came out, and then he proceeded

578
00:31:27,680 --> 00:31:29,600
Speaker 2: to Oh and then he did Bram Stokers Dracula, which

579
00:31:29,600 --> 00:31:32,640
Speaker 2: obviously the poor guy is terrible and he's desperately at

580
00:31:32,680 --> 00:31:36,400
Speaker 2: odds with that accent, but you know, uh, he then

581
00:31:36,520 --> 00:31:39,360
Speaker 2: just kept pingponging around to these weird choices, like he

582
00:31:39,440 --> 00:31:41,960
Speaker 2: did a Walk in the Clouds and Feeling Minnesota, which

583
00:31:41,960 --> 00:31:46,200
Speaker 2: are both romances. And then he did Johnny Mnemonic in

584
00:31:46,280 --> 00:31:48,959
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety five, which is like on the sort of

585
00:31:49,000 --> 00:31:53,040
Speaker 2: where are They Now VHS shelf alongside Hackers and lawnmower

586
00:31:53,080 --> 00:31:54,600
Speaker 2: Man in that it was one of these group of

587
00:31:54,640 --> 00:31:57,040
Speaker 2: mid nineties movies that we're kind of trying to tackle,

588
00:31:57,080 --> 00:31:59,640
Speaker 2: how we were going to understand the Internet and virtual

589
00:31:59,680 --> 00:32:04,040
Speaker 2: reality and all this stuff. I believe the plot one

590
00:32:04,040 --> 00:32:06,640
Speaker 2: of the plot points of Johnny mnemonic is that they

591
00:32:06,680 --> 00:32:10,960
Speaker 2: have to put his consciousness into a dolphin, or maybe

592
00:32:10,960 --> 00:32:11,600
Speaker 2: the other way around.

593
00:32:11,680 --> 00:32:14,080
Speaker 1: No, it's co starring Dolph Lundgren that I think. Maybe

594
00:32:14,080 --> 00:32:14,640
Speaker 1: that's good.

595
00:32:19,080 --> 00:32:20,880
Speaker 2: That film, though at least, did achieve one thing. It

596
00:32:20,920 --> 00:32:22,000
Speaker 2: helped inspire the Witch House.

597
00:32:22,080 --> 00:32:22,320
Speaker 1: Kis.

598
00:32:23,840 --> 00:32:26,240
Speaker 2: County's most recent film at the time had been The

599
00:32:26,320 --> 00:32:30,640
Speaker 2: schlocky Devil's Advocate, in which he is literally that and

600
00:32:30,640 --> 00:32:33,400
Speaker 2: Al Pacino plays the devil and it's a It's exactly

601
00:32:33,480 --> 00:32:35,760
Speaker 2: as fun as that sounds, but it didn't exactly place

602
00:32:35,800 --> 00:32:39,200
Speaker 2: him at the top of Warner Brothers call list. Kuany

603
00:32:39,280 --> 00:32:41,800
Speaker 2: they did tell Wired though, of the Matrix. When I

604
00:32:41,800 --> 00:32:45,160
Speaker 2: first read the script, it made my blood happy, which

605
00:32:45,200 --> 00:32:48,120
Speaker 2: is such a wonderfully weird and like touching thing for

606
00:32:48,120 --> 00:32:52,760
Speaker 2: an artist to say about anything, like yeah, yeah, man,

607
00:32:52,920 --> 00:32:58,000
Speaker 2: that movie makes my blood happy, especially if you read

608
00:32:58,000 --> 00:33:00,880
Speaker 2: it in his cadence, like yeah, I first that script,

609
00:33:01,840 --> 00:33:06,480
Speaker 2: It made my blood happy, made my blood happy, made

610
00:33:06,520 --> 00:33:09,400
Speaker 2: my blood happy. At one of their first meetings, the

611
00:33:09,440 --> 00:33:12,280
Speaker 2: Wachowskis told Reeves they'd need him to undergo four months

612
00:33:12,280 --> 00:33:14,760
Speaker 2: of training prior to filming, and in his words, he

613
00:33:14,840 --> 00:33:17,320
Speaker 2: got a big grin on my face and said yes,

614
00:33:18,360 --> 00:33:21,480
Speaker 2: we'll get to that training regiment later. The studio was

615
00:33:21,480 --> 00:33:24,080
Speaker 2: looking for a relative unknown to play Trinity and the

616
00:33:24,120 --> 00:33:26,400
Speaker 2: woman who would eventually go into player, Carrie Anne Moss,

617
00:33:26,680 --> 00:33:29,320
Speaker 2: was at first, like everyone else, daunted by the physical

618
00:33:29,320 --> 00:33:32,320
Speaker 2: demands of the script and doubtful of the Wachowski's abilities

619
00:33:32,600 --> 00:33:36,640
Speaker 2: to wrangle such a blockbuster with so many moving parts. Still,

620
00:33:36,680 --> 00:33:39,120
Speaker 2: after spending an hour with them going through the storyboards,

621
00:33:39,200 --> 00:33:42,080
Speaker 2: she was mollified. This is the funniest thing to me.

622
00:33:42,200 --> 00:33:44,800
Speaker 2: I guess because she was unknown, she hadn't done some

623
00:33:44,840 --> 00:33:48,200
Speaker 2: bit parts in Canada and stuff. Her screen test for

624
00:33:48,280 --> 00:33:52,760
Speaker 2: this movie was like days and hours hours and days

625
00:33:52,880 --> 00:33:56,320
Speaker 2: of doing some of this physical stuff. She told Wired

626
00:33:56,360 --> 00:34:00,520
Speaker 2: I couldn't walk for days after it. And I think

627
00:34:00,600 --> 00:34:02,880
Speaker 2: because of her stature, she was the only person that

628
00:34:02,920 --> 00:34:05,320
Speaker 2: this was subjected to, Like all of I'd talked about

629
00:34:05,320 --> 00:34:07,280
Speaker 2: this later when all of the other stars came in

630
00:34:07,320 --> 00:34:09,520
Speaker 2: and we're like, wow, we had no idea this was

631
00:34:09,560 --> 00:34:11,279
Speaker 2: going to be this hard. Carrie I Moss was like

632
00:34:11,400 --> 00:34:17,560
Speaker 2: I did, But you know, she told Entertainment Weekly, I

633
00:34:17,600 --> 00:34:18,719
Speaker 2: had no career before this.

634
00:34:19,160 --> 00:34:20,800
Speaker 1: None That said.

635
00:34:20,880 --> 00:34:23,240
Speaker 2: The audition scene did come back to bite her because

636
00:34:23,320 --> 00:34:25,799
Speaker 2: I guess The nightclub scene was what she auditioned with,

637
00:34:25,880 --> 00:34:28,000
Speaker 2: and she told the Guardian they had me in a

638
00:34:28,040 --> 00:34:32,080
Speaker 2: stiletto and I could barely do the scene stiletto shoe.

639
00:34:32,760 --> 00:34:34,759
Speaker 2: Suddenly we were there on the day of shooting and

640
00:34:34,800 --> 00:34:36,719
Speaker 2: I was unsteady. It was this whole thing in the

641
00:34:36,800 --> 00:34:39,360
Speaker 2: nightclub when I'm whispering in Keanu's ear, and I'm supposed

642
00:34:39,400 --> 00:34:41,440
Speaker 2: to be really grounded and strong, and yet I could

643
00:34:41,480 --> 00:34:44,479
Speaker 2: barely stand straight. So they took those off and gave

644
00:34:44,480 --> 00:34:48,080
Speaker 2: me a boot with a nice solid heel. This is

645
00:34:48,120 --> 00:34:51,920
Speaker 2: also really would to me. Janet Jackson was supposedly attached

646
00:34:52,000 --> 00:34:54,600
Speaker 2: to the role of Trinity and she had to back

647
00:34:54,640 --> 00:34:57,480
Speaker 2: out because she couldn't make it work with her touring commitments,

648
00:34:58,200 --> 00:35:00,759
Speaker 2: and this bothered her so much that she referenced the

649
00:35:00,800 --> 00:35:03,840
Speaker 2: matrix in the intro and outro interludes on her tenth

650
00:35:03,840 --> 00:35:05,120
Speaker 2: studio album, Discipline.

651
00:35:05,200 --> 00:35:08,960
Speaker 1: I could almost see her killing that. Well.

652
00:35:09,000 --> 00:35:11,040
Speaker 2: It's funny to me that it's funny to me that

653
00:35:11,160 --> 00:35:14,160
Speaker 2: they went they wanted like this relationship to be interracial,

654
00:35:14,320 --> 00:35:16,120
Speaker 2: because the other people that they were going to cast

655
00:35:16,160 --> 00:35:19,000
Speaker 2: were Rosie Perez, Samahayak and Jada Pinkett Smith.

656
00:35:19,280 --> 00:35:19,840
Speaker 1: Oh wow.

657
00:35:20,040 --> 00:35:22,200
Speaker 2: So there was some kind of a dimension to that

658
00:35:22,200 --> 00:35:25,560
Speaker 2: that they were interested in purposefully exploring. I think all

659
00:35:25,560 --> 00:35:27,960
Speaker 2: of those people are wrong, except for maybe Jana Jackson,

660
00:35:28,000 --> 00:35:30,600
Speaker 2: though I don't think i've seen her act. She could

661
00:35:30,600 --> 00:35:32,399
Speaker 2: certainly have learned kung fu though. I mean, the woman

662
00:35:32,480 --> 00:35:34,799
Speaker 2: is crowded dancer and was in the best shape of

663
00:35:34,800 --> 00:35:37,280
Speaker 2: her life at that point, coming off of like Velvet

664
00:35:37,320 --> 00:35:41,120
Speaker 2: Rope and all of her other nineties bangers. But yeah,

665
00:35:41,120 --> 00:35:44,080
Speaker 2: they all auditioned for it. It's kind of interesting to

666
00:35:44,160 --> 00:35:47,160
Speaker 2: me that the Witch elseki Is wanted an interracial romance

667
00:35:47,200 --> 00:35:50,719
Speaker 2: to be at the center of this, But given some

668
00:35:50,840 --> 00:35:55,560
Speaker 2: of their other stuff, not the trans stuff, I just

669
00:35:55,600 --> 00:35:57,800
Speaker 2: mean some of the way that they talk about stuff

670
00:35:58,239 --> 00:36:01,920
Speaker 2: because they're Chicago white people, could have been handled a

671
00:36:01,920 --> 00:36:05,440
Speaker 2: little insensitively, so I'm glad that they didn't.

672
00:36:06,000 --> 00:36:08,920
Speaker 1: Well, Janet Jackson would have just been coming off Poetic Justice,

673
00:36:08,960 --> 00:36:13,160
Speaker 1: the John Singleton movie, which was kind of her best

674
00:36:13,440 --> 00:36:16,600
Speaker 1: acting role. I think for somebody who's not seen everything

675
00:36:16,640 --> 00:36:19,560
Speaker 1: she's been in, I remember that being pretty good. I

676
00:36:19,560 --> 00:36:21,840
Speaker 1: mean it was like after that she did Naughty Professor

677
00:36:21,880 --> 00:36:24,440
Speaker 1: to the Clumps. So there's not really a lot to

678
00:36:24,520 --> 00:36:28,560
Speaker 1: choose from, but Uh huh, that's really interesting. This all

679
00:36:28,600 --> 00:36:32,520
Speaker 1: brings us to casting Morpheus, which ultimately came down to

680
00:36:32,600 --> 00:36:36,600
Speaker 1: Lawrence Fishburne, who the Wachowskis were four from the very start.

681
00:36:36,960 --> 00:36:39,800
Speaker 1: Warner Brothers. On the other hand, one of thou Kilmer.

682
00:36:40,840 --> 00:36:46,960
Speaker 2: Oh no, it's funny too, because of how toxic he

683
00:36:47,080 --> 00:36:47,600
Speaker 2: was considered.

684
00:36:47,640 --> 00:36:50,840
Speaker 1: Right around the time because Island of Doctor Moreau.

685
00:36:50,680 --> 00:36:54,040
Speaker 2: Came out, which was supposed to be this big that's

686
00:36:54,080 --> 00:36:56,239
Speaker 2: really fascinating and kind of horror sci fi because it

687
00:36:56,280 --> 00:37:00,920
Speaker 2: was supposed to be this big swing. The director of that, oh,

688
00:37:01,000 --> 00:37:03,480
Speaker 2: Richard Stanley. He'd made this kind of cult sci fi

689
00:37:03,560 --> 00:37:05,960
Speaker 2: hit called Hardware, and as just what we're talking about

690
00:37:05,960 --> 00:37:08,279
Speaker 2: with Chaskey's As it happens, the next thing that he

691
00:37:08,400 --> 00:37:10,440
Speaker 2: was given was this, or maybe not the next thing,

692
00:37:10,440 --> 00:37:11,719
Speaker 2: but one of the things that he was given out

693
00:37:11,760 --> 00:37:14,200
Speaker 2: of the success of that film was this Island of

694
00:37:14,200 --> 00:37:16,759
Speaker 2: Doctor Moreau remake, which was supposed to be this huge thing.

695
00:37:16,800 --> 00:37:21,480
Speaker 2: It was they had Brando's Doctor Moreau and between Richard Stanley,

696
00:37:21,760 --> 00:37:25,359
Speaker 2: Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando's egos, there was no room

697
00:37:25,400 --> 00:37:27,000
Speaker 2: left on the Island for that movie.

698
00:37:27,800 --> 00:37:29,760
Speaker 1: Uh, And it became one of the most.

699
00:37:30,520 --> 00:37:34,279
Speaker 2: Talked about catastrophic flops of the era, and he was

700
00:37:34,400 --> 00:37:37,720
Speaker 2: essentially like blacklisted from making movies for a while.

701
00:37:38,040 --> 00:37:41,360
Speaker 1: Richard Stanley was. But that movie did inspire Mini Me,

702
00:37:41,760 --> 00:37:43,600
Speaker 1: the character of Mini Me and us. Yes, it did,

703
00:37:43,880 --> 00:37:47,719
Speaker 1: that is true. It did. Anything that inspired Mini Me

704
00:37:48,040 --> 00:37:49,480
Speaker 1: has got to be problematic.

705
00:37:50,480 --> 00:37:52,480
Speaker 2: There's a great Valkilmer anecdote in here. Later, though I

706
00:37:52,520 --> 00:37:53,600
Speaker 2: forgot where I put it.

707
00:37:53,680 --> 00:37:55,600
Speaker 1: Maybe I didn't. I thought I remember there being another

708
00:37:55,640 --> 00:37:57,359
Speaker 1: Volkilm or anecdote in here. Yeah.

709
00:37:57,400 --> 00:37:59,160
Speaker 2: Sorry, it was like the next sentence out of your mouth,

710
00:37:59,200 --> 00:38:01,560
Speaker 2: and I just started ram about Island of Doctor Moreau.

711
00:38:03,440 --> 00:38:04,400
Speaker 1: The team, I promise.

712
00:38:06,920 --> 00:38:07,040
Speaker 2: Uh.

713
00:38:07,280 --> 00:38:09,640
Speaker 1: Yes, they had a meeting with al Kilmer, which went

714
00:38:09,719 --> 00:38:12,840
Speaker 1: about as well as one might expect given all that

715
00:38:12,880 --> 00:38:16,880
Speaker 1: we just said about vel Kilmer. Uh. The executive Lorenzo

716
00:38:16,920 --> 00:38:19,200
Speaker 1: di Ventura told Wired we have a meeting with him

717
00:38:19,200 --> 00:38:21,439
Speaker 1: at the bel Air Hotel where he perceies the pitch

718
00:38:21,520 --> 00:38:25,719
Speaker 1: why Morpheus should be the lead of the movie. I

719
00:38:25,800 --> 00:38:28,719
Speaker 1: knew within two minutes of the meeting that we were dead.

720
00:38:29,560 --> 00:38:34,360
Speaker 1: Also considered we're Arnold Schwarzenegger, which I can I can see,

721
00:38:34,360 --> 00:38:36,480
Speaker 1: but with just it's because of Batman and Robin that

722
00:38:36,600 --> 00:38:38,759
Speaker 1: was Joe Joel Silver had him because of that and

723
00:38:38,880 --> 00:38:44,240
Speaker 1: was like yeah, and Michael Douglas, what the hell is that?

724
00:38:44,960 --> 00:38:47,120
Speaker 2: Douglas might have been able to summon some kind of

725
00:38:47,160 --> 00:38:51,719
Speaker 2: like scrappy, gravelly voiced charm out of it, but he's

726
00:38:51,760 --> 00:38:55,480
Speaker 2: so little. I just cannot find him imposing.

727
00:38:55,600 --> 00:38:59,400
Speaker 1: There's nothing mysterious about him. That's true. I've seen his

728
00:38:59,440 --> 00:39:06,440
Speaker 1: butt in what Why basic instinct. Oh yeah, unless he

729
00:39:06,520 --> 00:39:13,160
Speaker 1: was going for like cold lizard like fury of Gordon Gecko, which.

730
00:39:13,600 --> 00:39:15,160
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, there could have been a kind of

731
00:39:15,280 --> 00:39:18,680
Speaker 2: quiet scorn to his performance of Morpheus.

732
00:39:18,680 --> 00:39:20,040
Speaker 1: But again, that's what I'm talking about.

733
00:39:20,040 --> 00:39:22,839
Speaker 2: Any one of these other people and chemistry, the whole

734
00:39:22,880 --> 00:39:25,359
Speaker 2: thing totally, you'd be like can We'd be talking about it, like, yeah,

735
00:39:25,360 --> 00:39:30,240
Speaker 2: you know that Matrix movie is really good, but Arnold, Yeah,

736
00:39:31,360 --> 00:39:33,839
Speaker 2: as you meditate on that, we'll be right back with

737
00:39:33,920 --> 00:39:47,719
Speaker 2: more too much information after these messages. Wow.

738
00:39:48,440 --> 00:39:50,640
Speaker 1: The story of how the Wachowski's got Laurence Fishburn in

739
00:39:50,640 --> 00:39:54,560
Speaker 1: their mind from Orpheus is very strange. They met him

740
00:39:54,560 --> 00:39:57,200
Speaker 1: in Las Vegas in the summer of nineteen ninety seven

741
00:39:57,800 --> 00:40:01,000
Speaker 1: at the boxing match in which Mike Tyson the ear

742
00:40:01,080 --> 00:40:06,040
Speaker 1: of a vander Holyfield. That's probably my favorite factoid of

743
00:40:06,080 --> 00:40:07,280
Speaker 1: this entire episode.

744
00:40:07,440 --> 00:40:11,000
Speaker 2: That's amazing, especially when you consider how weird they were

745
00:40:11,000 --> 00:40:11,359
Speaker 2: to him.

746
00:40:11,480 --> 00:40:15,200
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, Lana Wachowski would later tell Fishburn, I had

747
00:40:15,200 --> 00:40:18,160
Speaker 1: a dream about a man who wore mirrored sunglasses and

748
00:40:18,200 --> 00:40:21,240
Speaker 1: spoken riddles, and when I met you and heard your voice,

749
00:40:21,320 --> 00:40:25,319
Speaker 1: I knew you were that guy. What an insane thing

750
00:40:25,400 --> 00:40:28,960
Speaker 1: to say to a person. Fishburn, for his part, was

751
00:40:29,040 --> 00:40:33,000
Speaker 1: undaunted by the what you describe as naughty script. K

752
00:40:33,239 --> 00:40:38,000
Speaker 1: n O T. T. Y would like to explain naughty script.

753
00:40:38,440 --> 00:40:42,720
Speaker 1: Dense den script, Yes, dense den script, he told Vulture

754
00:40:42,760 --> 00:40:45,239
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty. After being presented with the script, I

755
00:40:45,280 --> 00:40:47,560
Speaker 1: never had any questions about whether or not it works

756
00:40:47,560 --> 00:40:50,640
Speaker 1: structurally thematically or anything on the page. There were no

757
00:40:50,680 --> 00:40:52,680
Speaker 1: red flags on the page for me at all. And

758
00:40:52,680 --> 00:40:54,799
Speaker 1: then when I met Lana and Lily they said they

759
00:40:54,840 --> 00:40:57,480
Speaker 1: wanted to make a live action anime. I was like,

760
00:40:57,960 --> 00:41:01,279
Speaker 1: yes please. I thought the character was a mix of

761
00:41:01,360 --> 00:41:05,880
Speaker 1: Darth Vader, Yoda, Obi Wan Muhammad Ali and Bruce Lee

762
00:41:06,160 --> 00:41:10,200
Speaker 1: and arrived at Morphia's stentorian voice by combining Rod Serling

763
00:41:10,239 --> 00:41:12,759
Speaker 1: of the Twilight Zone. Wow, I never even thought of that.

764
00:41:12,880 --> 00:41:15,359
Speaker 1: Leonard me moy Spot from Star Trek and James Earl

765
00:41:15,400 --> 00:41:20,279
Speaker 1: Jones Darth Vader. Wow, yeah, right on, total exactly what

766
00:41:20,320 --> 00:41:24,880
Speaker 1: that is. Yep. The Wachowskis also told him to base

767
00:41:24,880 --> 00:41:27,360
Speaker 1: the performance on the character with the same name and

768
00:41:27,440 --> 00:41:31,120
Speaker 1: Neil Gaiman's famous comic book series San Man. Little on

769
00:41:31,160 --> 00:41:35,320
Speaker 1: the nose, but sure. The Australian actor Hugo Weaving, who

770
00:41:35,360 --> 00:41:37,480
Speaker 1: was probably best known in America at that point for

771
00:41:37,560 --> 00:41:40,920
Speaker 1: his role in the drag queen cult classic comedy Priscilla,

772
00:41:41,160 --> 00:41:43,920
Speaker 1: Queen of the Desert, flew to Los Angeles to meet

773
00:41:43,920 --> 00:41:46,440
Speaker 1: the Wachowskis after hearing about the role from his agent,

774
00:41:47,120 --> 00:41:49,719
Speaker 1: spurred by how much he liked the movie Bound. The

775
00:41:49,760 --> 00:41:53,200
Speaker 1: pair meanwhile loved Hugo Weaving from both the Priscilla movie

776
00:41:53,280 --> 00:41:56,440
Speaker 1: and also his nineteen ninety one romantic comedy Proof, in

777
00:41:56,480 --> 00:41:59,240
Speaker 1: which he co stars alongside a young Russell Crowe.

778
00:42:00,080 --> 00:42:03,280
Speaker 2: Funny to me, how many how few Australian movies escape containment?

779
00:42:03,680 --> 00:42:07,319
Speaker 2: Like people become these huge stars there and then they

780
00:42:07,320 --> 00:42:08,719
Speaker 2: come to the US and were like, what.

781
00:42:08,680 --> 00:42:13,160
Speaker 1: Did you do? I don't get it? Like everyone he

782
00:42:13,280 --> 00:42:16,000
Speaker 1: was briefed on the extensive training that he would need

783
00:42:16,040 --> 00:42:19,320
Speaker 1: to undergo for the production, along with the storyboards and

784
00:42:19,440 --> 00:42:22,400
Speaker 1: all three Hugo in the Wachowski's agreed that while being an

785
00:42:22,520 --> 00:42:26,919
Speaker 1: ultra menacing, omnipotent baddie, Agent Smith would have a touch

786
00:42:26,960 --> 00:42:30,520
Speaker 1: of humor to him, part of developing more human like emotions.

787
00:42:30,520 --> 00:42:33,719
Speaker 1: As the film continues, Weaving asked at one point if

788
00:42:33,760 --> 00:42:36,759
Speaker 1: Agent Smith could have a song and dance number, which

789
00:42:38,480 --> 00:42:40,880
Speaker 1: that would have been chilling. I like that a lot.

790
00:42:41,320 --> 00:42:43,920
Speaker 2: He's so good in this movie, and it's so funny

791
00:42:43,960 --> 00:42:45,680
Speaker 2: to me that then they took him.

792
00:42:45,920 --> 00:42:48,399
Speaker 1: I mean, he had a big era, right because he was.

793
00:42:48,320 --> 00:42:50,080
Speaker 2: In all the Lord of the Rings movies. He was

794
00:42:50,280 --> 00:42:53,359
Speaker 2: in Viver Vendetta, and then like and I think now

795
00:42:53,360 --> 00:42:55,800
Speaker 2: he just plays in Australia because he doesn't like flying

796
00:42:55,840 --> 00:42:58,120
Speaker 2: as much or being away from his family. But he

797
00:42:58,239 --> 00:43:02,920
Speaker 2: is so good in this kind of sterile but deeply

798
00:43:03,040 --> 00:43:05,760
Speaker 2: felt menace is so perfect.

799
00:43:06,400 --> 00:43:08,799
Speaker 1: That monologue he gives to Morpheus about.

800
00:43:08,560 --> 00:43:14,160
Speaker 2: This this place, I feel myself becoming tainted by the

801
00:43:14,200 --> 00:43:15,000
Speaker 2: stink of it.

802
00:43:15,080 --> 00:43:18,200
Speaker 1: Like it's so good. I love it.

803
00:43:18,320 --> 00:43:20,560
Speaker 2: They took a swing on his random dude in Australia

804
00:43:20,680 --> 00:43:22,960
Speaker 2: looks like an accountant and got one of the most

805
00:43:23,160 --> 00:43:25,839
Speaker 2: iconic villains of the sciety five cannon out of it.

806
00:43:25,920 --> 00:43:28,719
Speaker 1: You know, well, you're right, he's a blank slate. He

807
00:43:28,719 --> 00:43:31,560
Speaker 1: could couldn't have been anybody that anybody in America knew.

808
00:43:31,719 --> 00:43:34,080
Speaker 2: That's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, if they brought it, who

809
00:43:34,120 --> 00:43:37,279
Speaker 2: would have been a John Actually, John mac killed this?

810
00:43:37,440 --> 00:43:38,200
Speaker 2: Are you kidding me?

811
00:43:39,360 --> 00:43:40,960
Speaker 1: John would have eight.

812
00:43:42,400 --> 00:43:44,799
Speaker 2: Who could have they brought in? Who would have ruined it?

813
00:43:44,840 --> 00:43:46,480
Speaker 2: Who is big at the well? Al Pacino?

814
00:43:49,280 --> 00:43:53,400
Speaker 1: That Trinity's got a great ass. I love how his

815
00:43:53,880 --> 00:43:57,759
Speaker 1: entire entire work. That was the one line I was

816
00:43:57,800 --> 00:44:05,080
Speaker 1: thinking of. And you also work, I mean Jack Nicholson. Yeah, yeah,

817
00:44:05,320 --> 00:44:10,040
Speaker 1: I could almost see if the thing is neo, I

818
00:44:10,120 --> 00:44:11,240
Speaker 1: am inevitability.

819
00:44:11,880 --> 00:44:17,920
Speaker 2: Mister Anderson, Actually, mister Anderson is so perfectly uh placed

820
00:44:18,120 --> 00:44:20,160
Speaker 2: in the in the voice of Jack Nicholson, that I

821
00:44:20,200 --> 00:44:23,000
Speaker 2: have to be yah, I must begrudgingly give it to him,

822
00:44:23,080 --> 00:44:24,799
Speaker 2: just because of how funny that would be to hear

823
00:44:24,880 --> 00:44:26,120
Speaker 2: him say that all the time.

824
00:44:26,760 --> 00:44:29,880
Speaker 1: I could almost see how they would maybe even consider

825
00:44:29,920 --> 00:44:32,200
Speaker 1: Jack Nicholson for that, just because he does kind of

826
00:44:32,680 --> 00:44:35,680
Speaker 1: he kind of looks like an accountant. Yeah, yeah, it

827
00:44:35,719 --> 00:44:38,480
Speaker 1: was as good as it gets era. Yeah, but it

828
00:44:38,560 --> 00:44:42,319
Speaker 1: ultimately went to the incredible Hugo Weaving, who would of

829
00:44:42,320 --> 00:44:43,960
Speaker 1: course go on to star as the hero of the

830
00:44:44,000 --> 00:44:48,320
Speaker 1: Wachowski's adaptation of V for Vendetta, which was their first

831
00:44:48,360 --> 00:44:50,799
Speaker 1: post Matrix work. Oh, I guess with all the sequels, Yeah,

832
00:44:50,800 --> 00:44:52,120
Speaker 1: it was what.

833
00:44:51,560 --> 00:44:54,280
Speaker 2: Well, I've the second and third ones were shot together,

834
00:44:54,400 --> 00:44:57,120
Speaker 2: which I didn't realize, like insane to me that anyone

835
00:44:57,200 --> 00:45:01,040
Speaker 2: lived through that ordeal of just shooting these two bloated

836
00:45:01,160 --> 00:45:02,920
Speaker 2: I mean, the second one is famously the one where

837
00:45:02,960 --> 00:45:10,200
Speaker 2: they built a highway to stage a car chase. Yeah,

838
00:45:10,239 --> 00:45:11,920
Speaker 2: and they upped the number. I read this because I

839
00:45:11,920 --> 00:45:14,239
Speaker 2: was reading about the obviously about the effects. But in

840
00:45:14,320 --> 00:45:16,800
Speaker 2: the first Matrix film there's like four hundred and twelve

841
00:45:16,920 --> 00:45:19,719
Speaker 2: computer assisted shots, and in the second one there are

842
00:45:19,760 --> 00:45:20,760
Speaker 2: over ten thousand.

843
00:45:21,040 --> 00:45:22,040
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ.

844
00:45:22,840 --> 00:45:25,040
Speaker 2: Yeah, I actually have a big soft spot for the

845
00:45:25,120 --> 00:45:28,480
Speaker 2: VFA Vandeta movie. I think it obviously with those stupid

846
00:45:28,520 --> 00:45:31,520
Speaker 2: masks have attained a second life all over the internet.

847
00:45:31,560 --> 00:45:36,319
Speaker 2: But I think, yeah, man, it's hard to take something

848
00:45:36,360 --> 00:45:39,480
Speaker 2: that is similarly so insane and dense, which is everything

849
00:45:39,480 --> 00:45:41,880
Speaker 2: that Alan Moore gets his hands on or has created

850
00:45:41,960 --> 00:45:44,040
Speaker 2: and turned it into like what I think is a

851
00:45:44,080 --> 00:45:48,800
Speaker 2: pretty okay adaptation with a lot of genuinely anti government

852
00:45:49,520 --> 00:45:52,480
Speaker 2: sentiment and still make a movie that kicks ass and

853
00:45:52,520 --> 00:45:58,000
Speaker 2: it does. Yeah. Anyway, well, Joey Payton, sorry, set me up,

854
00:45:58,000 --> 00:45:58,880
Speaker 2: Set me up, Set me up.

855
00:45:59,320 --> 00:46:01,960
Speaker 1: Ohio. Now come to my favorite part of the program,

856
00:46:02,040 --> 00:46:03,920
Speaker 1: a segment that we don't get to anywhere near enough

857
00:46:03,960 --> 00:46:07,000
Speaker 1: on TMI tell us about Joey Pants. Welcome to the

858
00:46:07,080 --> 00:46:09,399
Speaker 1: joy Pants Corn the Joey Pants time.

859
00:46:11,360 --> 00:46:13,600
Speaker 2: This factoid about him was going around on Twitter as

860
00:46:13,640 --> 00:46:15,759
Speaker 2: I was researching this, which is hilarious. You know that

861
00:46:15,800 --> 00:46:17,960
Speaker 2: the wig he wore in The Sopranos he wanted to

862
00:46:18,480 --> 00:46:23,400
Speaker 2: look like Christopher Nolan. No, it's supposed it's the exact

863
00:46:23,480 --> 00:46:25,719
Speaker 2: same hair part that Christopher Nolan has and the kind

864
00:46:25,760 --> 00:46:30,760
Speaker 2: of like straw colored blonde. The Witch Huskies knew Joey

865
00:46:30,760 --> 00:46:35,160
Speaker 2: Pants from Bound, which is so funny, and they wrote,

866
00:46:35,640 --> 00:46:38,000
Speaker 2: I love he seems like such a kind of sweet

867
00:46:38,080 --> 00:46:40,160
Speaker 2: guy who's just kind of like maybe a little baffled

868
00:46:40,160 --> 00:46:43,040
Speaker 2: at his own place in Hollywood. But like they wrote

869
00:46:43,040 --> 00:46:47,200
Speaker 2: the character in the film specifically for him, which is hilarious.

870
00:46:47,280 --> 00:46:49,920
Speaker 2: And he thinks that they also cast him because he

871
00:46:49,960 --> 00:46:51,920
Speaker 2: didn't wouldn't get anything that was going on.

872
00:46:52,120 --> 00:46:52,400
Speaker 1: Ah.

873
00:46:52,480 --> 00:46:54,520
Speaker 2: He said, they might have had a twinkle in their

874
00:46:54,560 --> 00:46:56,600
Speaker 2: eye to give me this job because they saw me

875
00:46:56,640 --> 00:46:58,240
Speaker 2: as blissfully ignorant.

876
00:46:58,560 --> 00:47:00,880
Speaker 1: He didn't read the script, which.

877
00:47:00,760 --> 00:47:05,680
Speaker 2: Is the funniest thing. And this is a long setup

878
00:47:05,719 --> 00:47:08,239
Speaker 2: that all comes from this independent article, the interview that

879
00:47:08,239 --> 00:47:10,120
Speaker 2: he gave in twenty twenty one, so bear with us.

880
00:47:10,800 --> 00:47:13,600
Speaker 2: He was having a meeting with the Wachowskis when they

881
00:47:13,600 --> 00:47:16,360
Speaker 2: told him that Warner Brothers wanted to cut the steak scene,

882
00:47:17,000 --> 00:47:19,919
Speaker 2: which is his character's most memorable part in the film.

883
00:47:19,960 --> 00:47:22,600
Speaker 2: It's this great monologue that lays out why he turns

884
00:47:22,600 --> 00:47:24,799
Speaker 2: on Morpheus. He wants to be he's discovered that real

885
00:47:24,840 --> 00:47:26,560
Speaker 2: life is hell, and he wants to get plugged back

886
00:47:26,560 --> 00:47:29,440
Speaker 2: into the matrix. So they told him, hey, the steak scene,

887
00:47:29,560 --> 00:47:32,640
Speaker 2: like Warners, wants us to cut that, and Keanu is

888
00:47:32,640 --> 00:47:36,400
Speaker 2: fighting them on it, and Joey Pants, having not read

889
00:47:36,400 --> 00:47:39,560
Speaker 2: the script, assumed that this was another of Keanu's scenes,

890
00:47:40,400 --> 00:47:42,200
Speaker 2: and he said, well, tell him to get the over it.

891
00:47:42,200 --> 00:47:44,600
Speaker 2: He's in ninety nine percent of the movie. And they

892
00:47:44,640 --> 00:47:46,600
Speaker 2: just started laughing at him because he had just shown

893
00:47:46,640 --> 00:47:48,840
Speaker 2: his ass that he had not read the script, and

894
00:47:48,880 --> 00:47:50,759
Speaker 2: he continued to show his ass in front of his

895
00:47:50,840 --> 00:47:52,680
Speaker 2: cast mates. They were at a party at Carrie Ane

896
00:47:52,680 --> 00:47:55,880
Speaker 2: Moss's house, and, in Joey Pants's words, we're all just

897
00:47:55,920 --> 00:47:58,120
Speaker 2: bullshit around. I'm trying to be interesting. So I say

898
00:47:58,120 --> 00:48:00,800
Speaker 2: to Keanu, hey man, I'm glad they kept this steak scene.

899
00:48:00,920 --> 00:48:03,360
Speaker 2: We're gonna have some fun with that. It goes so

900
00:48:03,520 --> 00:48:06,399
Speaker 2: quiet you can hear a pin drop, except for the Wachowskis,

901
00:48:06,400 --> 00:48:08,359
Speaker 2: who are on the floor laughing with tears coming out

902
00:48:08,400 --> 00:48:11,000
Speaker 2: of their eyes. Finally they're able to catch their breath

903
00:48:11,000 --> 00:48:13,279
Speaker 2: long enough for Lana to say he didn't read the

904
00:48:13,320 --> 00:48:19,319
Speaker 2: fucking script, and bless him. He developed the simplest workaround

905
00:48:19,760 --> 00:48:22,400
Speaker 2: for the intense physical demands that were placed on the cast.

906
00:48:22,920 --> 00:48:24,560
Speaker 2: He told Wired, they wanted me to be in the

907
00:48:24,560 --> 00:48:26,640
Speaker 2: best shape of my life. He was in his mid

908
00:48:26,640 --> 00:48:29,759
Speaker 2: forties at the time. No drinking, eating steam, vegetables, working

909
00:48:29,760 --> 00:48:32,759
Speaker 2: out a gym. I'm a character actor. This trainer they

910
00:48:32,840 --> 00:48:34,799
Speaker 2: hired said to me, you can do three thousand sit

911
00:48:34,840 --> 00:48:37,960
Speaker 2: ups a day, but that ain't going nowhere, presumably his midsection.

912
00:48:38,800 --> 00:48:40,960
Speaker 2: So I talked to my buddy, a plastic surgeon, and

913
00:48:41,000 --> 00:48:42,680
Speaker 2: I decided I'm going to get an eight thousand.

914
00:48:42,400 --> 00:48:43,840
Speaker 1: Dollars liposuction procedure.

915
00:48:44,520 --> 00:48:47,320
Speaker 2: Panelino subsequently sent the bill for the surgery to the studio,

916
00:48:47,440 --> 00:48:50,160
Speaker 2: claiming that the liposuction counted as research and development.

917
00:48:50,840 --> 00:48:54,320
Speaker 1: He was never reimbursed. It's his development in a way,

918
00:48:54,480 --> 00:48:55,200
Speaker 1: in a sense.

919
00:48:55,000 --> 00:48:59,160
Speaker 2: Developed him. The cast was handed a reading list by

920
00:48:59,160 --> 00:49:02,880
Speaker 2: the Wachowskis befo Or. Filming started the aforementioned simulacra and

921
00:49:02,960 --> 00:49:07,600
Speaker 2: simulation by Jean Putriade of the French. This was required

922
00:49:07,600 --> 00:49:09,880
Speaker 2: reading for most of the principal cast and crew, and

923
00:49:09,920 --> 00:49:13,600
Speaker 2: they also sent Kanu Reeves, Kevin Kelly Is out of Control,

924
00:49:13,960 --> 00:49:18,279
Speaker 2: The New Biology of Machines, and Dylan Evans's ideas on

925
00:49:18,360 --> 00:49:21,279
Speaker 2: evolutionary psychology. And I didn't put this in here, but

926
00:49:21,280 --> 00:49:23,280
Speaker 2: there's a quote from Joel Silver that were like somewhere

927
00:49:23,360 --> 00:49:25,640
Speaker 2: that's like, man, people think Keanu is dumb, but he's

928
00:49:25,640 --> 00:49:27,560
Speaker 2: one of the smartest people I've ever met. He'll send

929
00:49:27,600 --> 00:49:29,600
Speaker 2: me books that he's reading that I have no idea

930
00:49:29,680 --> 00:49:34,160
Speaker 2: what's going on in them, which Joel Silver, but still.

931
00:49:35,440 --> 00:49:38,719
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe Keanu is like to read this, tell me

932
00:49:38,800 --> 00:49:40,040
Speaker 1: what's going on? In it.

933
00:49:40,480 --> 00:49:47,399
Speaker 2: Don't you you back off, you careful counselor bless their hearts,

934
00:49:47,400 --> 00:49:50,040
Speaker 2: The Wachowskis went straight to the source for the guy

935
00:49:50,080 --> 00:49:53,000
Speaker 2: that they knew could help them stage convincingly Hong Kong

936
00:49:53,080 --> 00:49:56,360
Speaker 2: style fights. Yuen Wo Ping, who is a legend in

937
00:49:56,400 --> 00:49:58,719
Speaker 2: the industry who'd helped launch the career of Jack Chan

938
00:49:58,840 --> 00:50:04,279
Speaker 2: in the late seventies, basically responsible for the some of

939
00:50:04,320 --> 00:50:07,399
Speaker 2: the most riveting fight scenes that only complete nerds would

940
00:50:07,400 --> 00:50:09,239
Speaker 2: have seen at this point in the late eighties and

941
00:50:09,320 --> 00:50:13,320
Speaker 2: nineties by importing stuff from Hong Kong. The Wachowski's especially

942
00:50:13,360 --> 00:50:15,680
Speaker 2: liked his choreography work on nineteen ninety four's Fist of

943
00:50:15,760 --> 00:50:18,239
Speaker 2: Legend starring Jet Lee and wanted him to work on

944
00:50:18,280 --> 00:50:20,840
Speaker 2: their film, but he had already turned down several offers

945
00:50:20,840 --> 00:50:23,279
Speaker 2: from Hollywood. Basically, he just thought his English wasn't good

946
00:50:23,320 --> 00:50:26,360
Speaker 2: enough to work here, he told The South China Morning

947
00:50:26,360 --> 00:50:28,880
Speaker 2: Post in twenty nineteen. What happened then was that one

948
00:50:28,920 --> 00:50:31,520
Speaker 2: of the producers of The Matrix contacted Shaw Brothers to

949
00:50:31,560 --> 00:50:34,120
Speaker 2: find me. This is the famous Hong Kong production studio.

950
00:50:34,440 --> 00:50:36,520
Speaker 2: They seem to want me to go to Hollywood really badly,

951
00:50:36,920 --> 00:50:39,200
Speaker 2: but I still didn't want to go. The Shaw Brothers

952
00:50:39,239 --> 00:50:41,200
Speaker 2: studio told me that the producer was offering me a

953
00:50:41,200 --> 00:50:43,080
Speaker 2: free ticket to Los Angeles, and all I had to

954
00:50:43,080 --> 00:50:44,640
Speaker 2: do was turn up there and have a chat and

955
00:50:44,640 --> 00:50:46,160
Speaker 2: then I should go, as it would be the polite

956
00:50:46,200 --> 00:50:49,160
Speaker 2: thing to do. But like everyone else, he was charmed

957
00:50:49,160 --> 00:50:52,680
Speaker 2: by the Wachowski's energy and he took the job. The

958
00:50:52,719 --> 00:50:56,480
Speaker 2: principal cast members Carrie an Moss, Kana Reeves, Lawrence Fishburne,

959
00:50:56,520 --> 00:50:59,840
Speaker 2: and Hugo Weaving spent four months training with the Annual

960
00:50:59,840 --> 00:51:03,560
Speaker 2: p and his stunt team before filming even started, five

961
00:51:03,640 --> 00:51:06,800
Speaker 2: days a week, hours a day, six days maybe actually,

962
00:51:06,840 --> 00:51:09,480
Speaker 2: because he says later that Sundays there day off.

963
00:51:09,520 --> 00:51:10,360
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.

964
00:51:10,520 --> 00:51:12,600
Speaker 2: This wasn't just for fight choreography. They also had to

965
00:51:12,680 --> 00:51:15,319
Speaker 2: learn the wire work, Hong Kong style wire work, which

966
00:51:15,360 --> 00:51:18,279
Speaker 2: is really intrinsic to the way that the characters move,

967
00:51:18,400 --> 00:51:22,560
Speaker 2: and it was so necessary to the way that the

968
00:51:22,560 --> 00:51:24,719
Speaker 2: Wachaskis visualized this because they were trying to make a

969
00:51:24,760 --> 00:51:29,600
Speaker 2: comic book and their closest visual que in pictures was anime,

970
00:51:30,680 --> 00:51:32,640
Speaker 2: so they wanted to have their characters kind of float

971
00:51:32,719 --> 00:51:35,080
Speaker 2: and fly around in a way that comic book characters

972
00:51:35,080 --> 00:51:39,279
Speaker 2: would Uh. Still this took a toll. Hugo Weaving told

973
00:51:39,280 --> 00:51:42,440
Speaker 2: Wired after the first day, I was so shattered and

974
00:51:42,480 --> 00:51:44,960
Speaker 2: so shocked. I realized I was so unfit.

975
00:51:45,880 --> 00:51:46,000
Speaker 1: Uh.

976
00:51:46,320 --> 00:51:49,799
Speaker 2: He damaged his femur. At one point he had to

977
00:51:49,840 --> 00:51:54,520
Speaker 2: have surgery because of some like polyop on his leg. Uh.

978
00:51:54,840 --> 00:51:58,200
Speaker 2: And then so he came He came back on crutches basically,

979
00:51:58,239 --> 00:52:02,680
Speaker 2: And Keanu had also had surgery recently. At one point

980
00:52:02,680 --> 00:52:06,000
Speaker 2: in the nineties, he had to undergo a two level

981
00:52:06,040 --> 00:52:09,120
Speaker 2: fusion of his spine in his neck area cervical spine

982
00:52:09,560 --> 00:52:13,200
Speaker 2: because he had a hernated disk. So, as anyone knows,

983
00:52:13,600 --> 00:52:17,360
Speaker 2: that's not a light deal. He told Wired, I was

984
00:52:17,440 --> 00:52:19,520
Speaker 2: falling over in the shower in the morning because you

985
00:52:19,560 --> 00:52:22,600
Speaker 2: lose your sense of balance. One of the film's producers

986
00:52:22,920 --> 00:52:25,080
Speaker 2: said that he was told by a doctor this operation

987
00:52:25,400 --> 00:52:27,920
Speaker 2: was needed or else he could wind up a quadriplegic.

988
00:52:29,800 --> 00:52:33,040
Speaker 2: So consequently, Keanu showed up in Burbank for training wearing

989
00:52:33,120 --> 00:52:37,880
Speaker 2: a neck brace, and he was forbidden from kicking before

990
00:52:37,920 --> 00:52:42,000
Speaker 2: he sufficiently recovered. And he talks about how his character

991
00:52:42,000 --> 00:52:43,840
Speaker 2: actually doesn't do a ton of kicks in the movie,

992
00:52:44,680 --> 00:52:46,880
Speaker 2: which I don't think is really true. He does a

993
00:52:46,880 --> 00:52:49,880
Speaker 2: lot that I can remember, but I don't know. I'm

994
00:52:49,920 --> 00:52:51,799
Speaker 2: not going to contradict him. I will have to say

995
00:52:52,280 --> 00:52:55,319
Speaker 2: a lot for nerds, real nerds for this movie, and

996
00:52:55,360 --> 00:52:57,360
Speaker 2: I speak as one of you. If you haven't, you

997
00:52:57,360 --> 00:52:59,880
Speaker 2: should check out the documentary The Matrix Revisited, which is

998
00:52:59,880 --> 00:53:00,799
Speaker 2: like two hours long.

999
00:53:00,800 --> 00:53:02,040
Speaker 1: It's on YouTube, and there.

1000
00:53:02,000 --> 00:53:05,000
Speaker 2: Are these really heartrending scenes of Keanu and a neck

1001
00:53:05,040 --> 00:53:08,879
Speaker 2: brace training and what I can see is recognizable choreography

1002
00:53:08,880 --> 00:53:11,400
Speaker 2: from this movie and like going into these moves and

1003
00:53:11,400 --> 00:53:14,880
Speaker 2: then like collapsing in pain or like wincing and walking

1004
00:53:14,920 --> 00:53:16,799
Speaker 2: away because he dub his.

1005
00:53:16,760 --> 00:53:19,680
Speaker 1: Neck, and I was just like you, sweet boy.

1006
00:53:21,680 --> 00:53:24,000
Speaker 2: Jenmo Ping said he initially thought that two months of

1007
00:53:24,040 --> 00:53:26,080
Speaker 2: training would be enough to get the cast up to speed,

1008
00:53:26,320 --> 00:53:27,880
Speaker 2: and then when he saw what he was dealing with

1009
00:53:27,920 --> 00:53:30,640
Speaker 2: for the first time, he got dizzy and started to

1010
00:53:30,640 --> 00:53:33,799
Speaker 2: think that four months wouldn't even be enough. It's really

1011
00:53:33,840 --> 00:53:36,560
Speaker 2: fascinating how he designed and this is part of his

1012
00:53:36,680 --> 00:53:38,360
Speaker 2: genius than what he's done in all of his films.

1013
00:53:38,360 --> 00:53:41,440
Speaker 2: He designs the choreography to reflect the character traits of

1014
00:53:41,480 --> 00:53:45,680
Speaker 2: the people doing the fighting. Neo, is this you know, determined, scrappy, characters,

1015
00:53:45,680 --> 00:53:50,160
Speaker 2: and he's got an aggressive, fast punching offense. They highlighted

1016
00:53:50,160 --> 00:53:53,080
Speaker 2: carry Ann Moss's effemininity by having her do a lot

1017
00:53:53,080 --> 00:53:56,640
Speaker 2: of these really graceful kind of high kicks, you know,

1018
00:53:56,680 --> 00:53:58,919
Speaker 2: the famous two ones that she does as this sort

1019
00:53:58,960 --> 00:54:02,359
Speaker 2: of high kick to knock somebody out who's behind her,

1020
00:54:02,400 --> 00:54:04,880
Speaker 2: and the quote unquote scorpion kick that she does at

1021
00:54:04,880 --> 00:54:08,880
Speaker 2: one point. Agent Smith is this omnipotent badass, so he

1022
00:54:08,920 --> 00:54:11,000
Speaker 2: just kind of bulldozes his way through scenes with these

1023
00:54:11,000 --> 00:54:15,239
Speaker 2: big boxing style heavyweight punches. Morpheus has this kind of

1024
00:54:16,320 --> 00:54:20,440
Speaker 2: mentor like sense of authority and purpose. Oh yeah, I

1025
00:54:20,480 --> 00:54:24,080
Speaker 2: don't know if you want to keep this because it's.

1026
00:54:22,960 --> 00:54:23,600
Speaker 1: Sort of weird.

1027
00:54:23,640 --> 00:54:28,719
Speaker 2: But Jenmo being said of Laurence Fishbourne that he was

1028
00:54:28,760 --> 00:54:33,240
Speaker 2: born talented at bouncing and jumping, which is a weirdly

1029
00:54:33,360 --> 00:54:38,279
Speaker 2: racial thing to say, So I don't know if you

1030
00:54:38,280 --> 00:54:40,880
Speaker 2: want to put that in. Carrie Anne Mos did a

1031
00:54:40,920 --> 00:54:43,120
Speaker 2: lot of her own stunts. She did that crazy building

1032
00:54:43,239 --> 00:54:44,920
Speaker 2: jump that she did in the movie.

1033
00:54:45,160 --> 00:54:45,560
Speaker 1: Damn.

1034
00:54:45,840 --> 00:54:47,720
Speaker 2: I remember talking about that she does in the opening

1035
00:54:47,800 --> 00:54:49,640
Speaker 2: to the movie. I should say I also remember talking

1036
00:54:49,800 --> 00:54:52,120
Speaker 2: when I was reading about the making of the Matrix Reetloaded.

1037
00:54:52,200 --> 00:54:55,760
Speaker 2: Everyone said that she became the best stunt driver among them.

1038
00:54:56,120 --> 00:54:56,880
Speaker 1: That's fascinating.

1039
00:54:58,040 --> 00:55:01,600
Speaker 2: The film's executive producer, Barry Osborne said, most American stuntwork

1040
00:55:01,719 --> 00:55:04,920
Speaker 2: uses rams or pneumatics to project a person through the

1041
00:55:04,960 --> 00:55:08,319
Speaker 2: air at a certain speed with Hong Kong style. So

1042
00:55:08,360 --> 00:55:10,920
Speaker 2: that's like a pressurized ramp that you would see for

1043
00:55:10,960 --> 00:55:12,520
Speaker 2: a lot. It's how you get the big hero shot

1044
00:55:12,520 --> 00:55:14,840
Speaker 2: of somebody sprinting away from an explosion and getting like

1045
00:55:14,880 --> 00:55:17,439
Speaker 2: launched through the air. Basically, step on a ramp that's

1046
00:55:17,440 --> 00:55:19,640
Speaker 2: powered by compressed air and then you get launched onto

1047
00:55:19,719 --> 00:55:23,480
Speaker 2: like a soft landing, or you'll be thrown in a

1048
00:55:23,520 --> 00:55:27,560
Speaker 2: direction via a ram like similarly like a soft ram.

1049
00:55:27,760 --> 00:55:29,239
Speaker 1: That sounds insane to me.

1050
00:55:29,880 --> 00:55:31,960
Speaker 2: It is, yeah, I mean, and they and to be

1051
00:55:32,040 --> 00:55:35,279
Speaker 2: fair like, Hollywood also did wire stuff like I mean

1052
00:55:35,320 --> 00:55:40,080
Speaker 2: famously famously permanently injuring Ellen Burston's spine on the set

1053
00:55:40,080 --> 00:55:44,239
Speaker 2: of The Exorcist, right when the cable guys yanked her

1054
00:55:44,320 --> 00:55:48,440
Speaker 2: back too hard. But the stunts are Osborne says that

1055
00:55:48,520 --> 00:55:52,000
Speaker 2: with wirework, the stunts are far more controlled and very stylized.

1056
00:55:52,239 --> 00:55:55,600
Speaker 2: It's almost like puppeteering using a real person. It takes

1057
00:55:55,640 --> 00:56:00,360
Speaker 2: tremendous skill and finesse, and so, having brought over his

1058
00:56:00,440 --> 00:56:03,760
Speaker 2: wirework team from Hong Kong, Yen Wopeeing described it basically

1059
00:56:03,800 --> 00:56:06,200
Speaker 2: a three step process for getting the American cast up

1060
00:56:06,239 --> 00:56:08,359
Speaker 2: to that we had to train the cast to work

1061
00:56:08,360 --> 00:56:12,160
Speaker 2: with the wires, to balance with them, and then to

1062
00:56:12,560 --> 00:56:15,279
Speaker 2: hoist them up in the air and land. He says,

1063
00:56:15,280 --> 00:56:18,000
Speaker 2: the most difficult part of that process is landing without

1064
00:56:18,080 --> 00:56:20,479
Speaker 2: losing your balance. I mean, basically, for anyone who doesn't

1065
00:56:20,480 --> 00:56:24,160
Speaker 2: know what I'm talking about, they literally just are pulling

1066
00:56:24,160 --> 00:56:27,920
Speaker 2: people up and down and controlling their landings via wires

1067
00:56:27,920 --> 00:56:31,080
Speaker 2: that are removed and strapped under the wardrobe. The costume

1068
00:56:31,080 --> 00:56:33,879
Speaker 2: designer later on says that she designed all of their

1069
00:56:33,920 --> 00:56:36,880
Speaker 2: wardrobes to be able to fit all this complex gear

1070
00:56:37,239 --> 00:56:38,120
Speaker 2: under them.

1071
00:56:38,760 --> 00:56:42,000
Speaker 1: Those fin outfits, though, I mean, I guess thinking of

1072
00:56:42,000 --> 00:56:43,920
Speaker 1: Trinity's like, everything's like very fitted.

1073
00:56:44,120 --> 00:56:48,320
Speaker 2: Yeah. In that opening scene, they also had a fiberglass

1074
00:56:48,400 --> 00:56:51,520
Speaker 2: plate inserted under it, because the human body is not

1075
00:56:51,560 --> 00:56:54,040
Speaker 2: really designed to hold itself in that rigid straight pose

1076
00:56:54,120 --> 00:56:57,919
Speaker 2: that she does as long as it needed to while

1077
00:56:57,960 --> 00:57:00,839
Speaker 2: flying through the air. So they basically have propped up

1078
00:57:01,320 --> 00:57:04,520
Speaker 2: and or molded into shape by a rigid fiberglass plate

1079
00:57:04,600 --> 00:57:07,000
Speaker 2: under her wardrobe, and then the cables are stretched to

1080
00:57:07,040 --> 00:57:09,319
Speaker 2: that so she can hold the Superman pose.

1081
00:57:10,120 --> 00:57:10,840
Speaker 1: It's just wild.

1082
00:57:12,239 --> 00:57:14,160
Speaker 2: Reeves's stunt double on this film is a guy named

1083
00:57:14,239 --> 00:57:16,920
Speaker 2: Chad Steleski, who went on to helm the John Wick movies.

1084
00:57:17,160 --> 00:57:20,000
Speaker 2: He told sci Fi that sci Fi dot Com that

1085
00:57:20,280 --> 00:57:23,040
Speaker 2: wirework may look fun, but it's painful. You're in a

1086
00:57:23,080 --> 00:57:25,760
Speaker 2: tiny little harness and it's wrecking your hips and squeezing

1087
00:57:25,760 --> 00:57:28,280
Speaker 2: your other parts. So the level of endurance you have

1088
00:57:28,320 --> 00:57:31,440
Speaker 2: to go through every day for months, it's phenomenal. Very

1089
00:57:31,480 --> 00:57:34,320
Speaker 2: few people do what the Wachowskis were demanding of their cast.

1090
00:57:35,040 --> 00:57:38,160
Speaker 2: And again, one of my favorite bits of this is

1091
00:57:38,160 --> 00:57:41,400
Speaker 2: that universally, to a man, everyone talks about how Gung

1092
00:57:41,440 --> 00:57:44,640
Speaker 2: Ho Keanu was about all of this. Jenwo Ping says

1093
00:57:44,640 --> 00:57:46,520
Speaker 2: that he was the person who's most obsessed with getting

1094
00:57:46,520 --> 00:57:50,680
Speaker 2: his form correct. He would ask to train on Sundays,

1095
00:57:50,680 --> 00:57:53,960
Speaker 2: which was their day off. He also and I wasn't

1096
00:57:54,320 --> 00:57:57,320
Speaker 2: I did debated including this because I saw it kind

1097
00:57:57,360 --> 00:58:00,800
Speaker 2: of put up in like janky list goals without being

1098
00:58:00,920 --> 00:58:03,400
Speaker 2: verified elsewhere. But somebody was claiming that he did that

1099
00:58:03,520 --> 00:58:06,960
Speaker 2: ledge walk scene by himself, Oh God, which is insane.

1100
00:58:07,200 --> 00:58:10,320
Speaker 2: Also insane that at the end of filming he further

1101
00:58:10,480 --> 00:58:13,680
Speaker 2: starved himself to lose fifteen pounds and then shaved his

1102
00:58:13,720 --> 00:58:17,240
Speaker 2: head and eyebrows to do the goo waking up scene

1103
00:58:17,360 --> 00:58:17,920
Speaker 2: at the end.

1104
00:58:19,120 --> 00:58:20,360
Speaker 1: God love him.

1105
00:58:20,920 --> 00:58:24,160
Speaker 2: The film's Australian stunt coordinator, guy named Glenn Boswell, told

1106
00:58:24,200 --> 00:58:27,160
Speaker 2: sci Fi the Chinese team didn't all speak English.

1107
00:58:27,560 --> 00:58:28,760
Speaker 1: That was a bit of an issue.

1108
00:58:29,760 --> 00:58:31,480
Speaker 2: There were certain things they wanted to do that we

1109
00:58:31,480 --> 00:58:34,040
Speaker 2: couldn't do based on government guidelines. We had to try

1110
00:58:34,080 --> 00:58:36,200
Speaker 2: and explain that to them. Some of it was simple

1111
00:58:36,240 --> 00:58:38,200
Speaker 2: things like when they used a wire, they tied a

1112
00:58:38,240 --> 00:58:40,000
Speaker 2: knot in the wire to connect it to the actor.

1113
00:58:40,320 --> 00:58:41,040
Speaker 1: That's illegal.

1114
00:58:41,360 --> 00:58:43,880
Speaker 2: Certain wires cannot sustain a person, or there are certain

1115
00:58:43,880 --> 00:58:46,320
Speaker 2: ways you have to use a pulley. The stunt department

1116
00:58:46,400 --> 00:58:47,480
Speaker 2: ended up rigging.

1117
00:58:47,120 --> 00:58:48,120
Speaker 1: Most of the wirework.

1118
00:58:48,520 --> 00:58:50,760
Speaker 2: The wirework that the Chinese would do is more about

1119
00:58:50,760 --> 00:58:53,240
Speaker 2: suspending actors during a fight, and the wirework that the

1120
00:58:53,280 --> 00:58:56,000
Speaker 2: stunt department would do is anything that involved flying, leaping,

1121
00:58:56,120 --> 00:58:59,680
Speaker 2: or having heavy impacts. I'm reminded of when Jackie Chan

1122
00:58:59,720 --> 00:59:02,040
Speaker 2: brought Zone stunting over to do Rush Hour and he

1123
00:59:02,160 --> 00:59:05,600
Speaker 2: kept wanting to do things that they legally could not

1124
00:59:05,680 --> 00:59:08,480
Speaker 2: do in the States, like jump across buildings, and he

1125
00:59:08,520 --> 00:59:10,520
Speaker 2: would be like, I don't understand why that's possible, and

1126
00:59:10,520 --> 00:59:12,400
Speaker 2: they're like, well, we have laws here.

1127
00:59:13,720 --> 00:59:16,920
Speaker 1: Owen Patterson was the Australian set designer who created much

1128
00:59:16,920 --> 00:59:19,640
Speaker 1: of the look of The Matrix. He was essentially tasked

1129
00:59:19,640 --> 00:59:22,520
Speaker 1: with creating two sets at once, one for the real

1130
00:59:22,520 --> 00:59:27,560
Speaker 1: world and Morpheus's ship, the Nebucadezer and the other dystopian environs.

1131
00:59:28,240 --> 00:59:30,000
Speaker 1: They were also dealing with the fact that the world

1132
00:59:30,080 --> 00:59:33,200
Speaker 1: of The Matrix in the real world would be completely differently.

1133
00:59:33,720 --> 00:59:36,360
Speaker 1: The Matrix has a green tint like an old word

1134
00:59:36,440 --> 00:59:40,040
Speaker 1: processor text, with an uncanny cleanness and orderly to it,

1135
00:59:40,600 --> 00:59:43,160
Speaker 1: and the real world is done almost completely in blue

1136
00:59:43,160 --> 00:59:46,480
Speaker 1: and grays, which was obviously aged and distressed all the

1137
00:59:46,520 --> 00:59:49,720
Speaker 1: props who were like filthy and disgusting. Patterson, the set

1138
00:59:49,760 --> 00:59:52,040
Speaker 1: designer total fan site. In the last stage is of

1139
00:59:52,080 --> 00:59:55,080
Speaker 1: pre production, we built several sets and sat down on

1140
00:59:55,160 --> 00:59:57,240
Speaker 1: a studio space with a sample of each of the

1141
00:59:57,280 --> 00:59:59,400
Speaker 1: colors we were going to use throughout the film, and

1142
00:59:59,440 --> 01:00:01,360
Speaker 1: because of the sense of needs of the fight scenes

1143
01:00:01,400 --> 01:00:04,040
Speaker 1: and stunts, they simply built most of the sets they needed,

1144
01:00:04,080 --> 01:00:06,800
Speaker 1: including rooftops, the dojo, and the office building.

1145
01:00:06,920 --> 01:00:09,760
Speaker 2: They built a subway set around an existing station. But

1146
01:00:09,800 --> 01:00:11,800
Speaker 2: because they had to do all this crazy camera work

1147
01:00:11,880 --> 01:00:13,440
Speaker 2: and wirework, they were also like, well, we need to

1148
01:00:13,440 --> 01:00:15,880
Speaker 2: be able to move walls and floors and all this stuff.

1149
01:00:15,920 --> 01:00:19,120
Speaker 2: So it's just they would just build these enormous bespoke

1150
01:00:19,240 --> 01:00:20,080
Speaker 2: custom sets.

1151
01:00:20,440 --> 01:00:23,840
Speaker 1: God, that stuff so interesting to me, especially especially nuts

1152
01:00:23,920 --> 01:00:26,200
Speaker 1: when they like half film on location and then have

1153
01:00:26,280 --> 01:00:29,280
Speaker 1: to completely replicate it to do exactly what you just said,

1154
01:00:29,320 --> 01:00:32,040
Speaker 1: move walls. That's just insane to me. I think I

1155
01:00:32,120 --> 01:00:32,960
Speaker 1: put this later on.

1156
01:00:33,040 --> 01:00:36,560
Speaker 2: But the office set where they do the rescue and

1157
01:00:36,600 --> 01:00:40,000
Speaker 2: the lobby fight and everything, that was so big that

1158
01:00:40,040 --> 01:00:43,400
Speaker 2: it just was installed and built in an actual block

1159
01:00:43,440 --> 01:00:46,520
Speaker 2: of office buildings, and outside of it for the shots

1160
01:00:46,520 --> 01:00:48,520
Speaker 2: where they have to do the helicopter jump and stuff,

1161
01:00:48,640 --> 01:00:51,440
Speaker 2: it was a three story what they call a cyclorama,

1162
01:00:51,520 --> 01:00:54,760
Speaker 2: which is just like a movable background that you use

1163
01:00:54,840 --> 01:00:57,440
Speaker 2: in movies. So that thing was literally they had this

1164
01:00:57,720 --> 01:01:00,960
Speaker 2: office building set and then they had a background for

1165
01:01:01,120 --> 01:01:03,040
Speaker 2: it so that they could shoot out of the office

1166
01:01:03,440 --> 01:01:05,480
Speaker 2: that was as large as another building.

1167
01:01:07,800 --> 01:01:09,560
Speaker 1: What was the movie? Was it? It might have been

1168
01:01:09,560 --> 01:01:12,520
Speaker 1: them up at Christmas Carol where there was just an

1169
01:01:12,720 --> 01:01:16,640
Speaker 1: entire floor beneath the set. Oh it's not in the

1170
01:01:16,760 --> 01:01:20,960
Speaker 1: Roger Rabbit. Yeah, it's that rabbit. Yeah. That's so insane

1171
01:01:21,000 --> 01:01:21,440
Speaker 1: to me. Yep.

1172
01:01:21,480 --> 01:01:23,080
Speaker 2: And now they would just do it all the cgi

1173
01:01:23,240 --> 01:01:24,960
Speaker 2: it would look like gray garbage.

1174
01:01:25,080 --> 01:01:27,320
Speaker 1: Yep. Yes, it would the worst thing to me.

1175
01:01:27,360 --> 01:01:31,000
Speaker 2: The most unforgivable thing about the Matrix revolutions. The fourth

1176
01:01:31,000 --> 01:01:33,880
Speaker 2: one is that they are just obsessed with Whichever one

1177
01:01:33,920 --> 01:01:37,320
Speaker 2: of them did it, I think it was Lily was

1178
01:01:37,400 --> 01:01:40,560
Speaker 2: just obsessed with making like this personal statement about how

1179
01:01:40,600 --> 01:01:42,840
Speaker 2: the original Matrix had been kind of co opted and

1180
01:01:43,480 --> 01:01:46,800
Speaker 2: taken out of her hands and people Anyways, It's it's

1181
01:01:46,880 --> 01:01:48,760
Speaker 2: kind of interesting conceptually, but one of the ways that

1182
01:01:48,760 --> 01:01:52,840
Speaker 2: they lampshade it constantly is by having scenes from the

1183
01:01:52,880 --> 01:01:58,360
Speaker 2: old movie constantly like portrayed or rendered in the film.

1184
01:01:58,440 --> 01:02:00,920
Speaker 2: And it's just so sad to see something that was

1185
01:02:00,960 --> 01:02:04,280
Speaker 2: shot on film, yeah, with actual sets and a real

1186
01:02:04,320 --> 01:02:09,120
Speaker 2: wardrobe contrasted against this gray shot on digital flat look

1187
01:02:09,160 --> 01:02:12,320
Speaker 2: that everything has now. Because it just even these filmmakers

1188
01:02:12,320 --> 01:02:14,800
Speaker 2: like they've been so quote unquote I guess reduced that

1189
01:02:14,960 --> 01:02:17,400
Speaker 2: Netflix wouldn't give them enough money to make it look

1190
01:02:17,440 --> 01:02:23,440
Speaker 2: remotely similar to the other movies. Ugh obligatory, Old Man

1191
01:02:23,480 --> 01:02:25,800
Speaker 2: yels Yeah yeah, Old Man yeos at Cloud Moment.

1192
01:02:27,480 --> 01:02:30,600
Speaker 1: Well. Cinematographer Bill Pope s at an interview the sets

1193
01:02:30,600 --> 01:02:33,360
Speaker 1: for The Matrix were immense, the biggest I personally have

1194
01:02:33,440 --> 01:02:35,800
Speaker 1: ever seen, and as you mentioned earlier, the set for

1195
01:02:35,840 --> 01:02:38,680
Speaker 1: the office building was so large that it was incorporated

1196
01:02:38,680 --> 01:02:42,600
Speaker 1: into an actual block of offices in Sydney. Because the

1197
01:02:42,600 --> 01:02:45,880
Speaker 1: Wachowskis were shooting for realism, they really had to build

1198
01:02:46,040 --> 01:02:48,680
Speaker 1: a lot of the future tech invented for the film,

1199
01:02:49,160 --> 01:02:51,760
Speaker 1: like the pods and all the tech that keeps people

1200
01:02:51,800 --> 01:02:55,320
Speaker 1: trapped in them, manually triggered air power plugs that go

1201
01:02:55,400 --> 01:02:57,880
Speaker 1: into the spine, the needle that pops out of the

1202
01:02:57,920 --> 01:03:01,000
Speaker 1: back of the head. All that stuff was built from

1203
01:03:01,000 --> 01:03:03,480
Speaker 1: scratch and designed to function as it would and you know,

1204
01:03:03,600 --> 01:03:07,360
Speaker 1: quote unquote real life. Even the weird toolgun that Moss

1205
01:03:07,440 --> 01:03:10,080
Speaker 1: uses to extract the tracking device from Neo was a

1206
01:03:10,120 --> 01:03:12,800
Speaker 1: real object that not only had to have a functional

1207
01:03:12,920 --> 01:03:15,360
Speaker 1: handle to manipulate, but also had to be able to

1208
01:03:15,400 --> 01:03:19,160
Speaker 1: suction a prop into its chamber and eject it with

1209
01:03:19,280 --> 01:03:23,360
Speaker 1: a video screen. None of that was composited and what

1210
01:03:23,440 --> 01:03:25,880
Speaker 1: was shown on the video screen was actually broadcast to

1211
01:03:26,000 --> 01:03:30,360
Speaker 1: the prop from offset. So that's so much effort, so

1212
01:03:30,480 --> 01:03:32,640
Speaker 1: many moving parts. It's just insane.

1213
01:03:32,920 --> 01:03:34,520
Speaker 2: And I mean they did that the way that you

1214
01:03:34,520 --> 01:03:36,560
Speaker 2: would do like a lot of stuff, like where it's

1215
01:03:36,720 --> 01:03:38,880
Speaker 2: moving through his guts or whatever. That's like a fake

1216
01:03:39,000 --> 01:03:42,560
Speaker 2: stomach and then someone is moving the bug prop through it.

1217
01:03:42,600 --> 01:03:44,600
Speaker 2: But just the idea of being like, yeah, you have

1218
01:03:44,640 --> 01:03:47,960
Speaker 2: to create something that has you know, both suction and

1219
01:03:48,040 --> 01:03:50,200
Speaker 2: pneumatic air and it also has to have a screen.

1220
01:03:51,560 --> 01:03:56,360
Speaker 1: Go just nuts, man. And on the flip side, I

1221
01:03:56,400 --> 01:04:00,680
Speaker 1: was talking with somebody today about the lightsaber in a

1222
01:04:00,720 --> 01:04:04,320
Speaker 1: New Hope and how I guess the original ones, like

1223
01:04:05,160 --> 01:04:07,840
Speaker 1: because you know, obviously this the sword part itself was

1224
01:04:07,880 --> 01:04:12,080
Speaker 1: added in the post. The grip was just like a

1225
01:04:12,240 --> 01:04:15,000
Speaker 1: vintage I think it was like a camera flash or something.

1226
01:04:15,800 --> 01:04:18,760
Speaker 1: And you can see like in some of the shots,

1227
01:04:18,840 --> 01:04:22,440
Speaker 1: especially on like the you know the pre cleaned up editions, No, no,

1228
01:04:22,520 --> 01:04:25,440
Speaker 1: the post cleaned up editions that it's it's the really

1229
01:04:25,520 --> 01:04:27,800
Speaker 1: high res version. You can still like see the logo

1230
01:04:27,920 --> 01:04:30,920
Speaker 1: for the camera flash on it or something. That's awesome. Yeah,

1231
01:04:30,960 --> 01:04:34,640
Speaker 1: So it's like there's two ways to approach props in

1232
01:04:34,720 --> 01:04:40,120
Speaker 1: the pre cgih, I guess went the Machowskis chose violence.

1233
01:04:44,160 --> 01:04:48,440
Speaker 1: That is insane to me. Additional fun fact, one of

1234
01:04:48,440 --> 01:04:51,240
Speaker 1: the rooftop sets the actors run across was from Alex

1235
01:04:51,360 --> 01:04:55,400
Speaker 1: Priyuce's Dark City, which you say is funny given how

1236
01:04:55,440 --> 01:04:57,880
Speaker 1: much of the films get compared. Tell us more about that.

1237
01:04:57,880 --> 01:05:00,760
Speaker 1: I don't know anything about this. Oh, that's a great movie.

1238
01:05:00,800 --> 01:05:04,280
Speaker 2: Alex Proyus did the original Crow, which was timely once

1239
01:05:04,320 --> 01:05:08,320
Speaker 2: again with this rebooted piece of ass that is coming out.

1240
01:05:09,360 --> 01:05:12,160
Speaker 2: The look at that film is so embarrassing. But Proyus

1241
01:05:12,160 --> 01:05:16,360
Speaker 2: did the original Crow, and Dark City is this really

1242
01:05:17,560 --> 01:05:21,080
Speaker 2: far out kind of concept that happens to suspiciously mirror

1243
01:05:21,080 --> 01:05:26,720
Speaker 2: that of the Matrix. It's this gorgeous neo Noir German

1244
01:05:26,760 --> 01:05:32,439
Speaker 2: expressionist Gothic city that is inhabited by these creepy it's

1245
01:05:32,480 --> 01:05:36,200
Speaker 2: controlled by these creepy I mean they basically all look

1246
01:05:36,280 --> 01:05:43,120
Speaker 2: like different versions of Nosferatu, who put these omnipotent beans

1247
01:05:43,160 --> 01:05:46,680
Speaker 2: who kind of force everyone to go to sleep and

1248
01:05:46,800 --> 01:05:50,760
Speaker 2: move the city around in their dreams and like rearrange

1249
01:05:50,800 --> 01:05:54,080
Speaker 2: the city scape according to people's memory and one protagonist

1250
01:05:54,160 --> 01:05:57,000
Speaker 2: who's like waking up to that reality. It's a really

1251
01:05:57,040 --> 01:05:59,280
Speaker 2: beautiful film and it's the funniest thing that I know

1252
01:05:59,280 --> 01:06:02,480
Speaker 2: about it is that Rodre Ebert loved alex Porus and

1253
01:06:02,480 --> 01:06:05,360
Speaker 2: would like four star every single one of this movies,

1254
01:06:05,400 --> 01:06:08,480
Speaker 2: even like the Knocked Good ones. But yeah, Dark City

1255
01:06:08,480 --> 01:06:09,320
Speaker 2: Whips check it out.

1256
01:06:09,480 --> 01:06:13,720
Speaker 1: Cool. Costume designer Kim Barrett worked on all three films

1257
01:06:13,720 --> 01:06:17,200
Speaker 1: on the Matrix trilogy, and she's responsible for the iconic

1258
01:06:17,320 --> 01:06:22,040
Speaker 1: long coats. Those came from her envisioning their characters as superheroes.

1259
01:06:22,600 --> 01:06:26,000
Speaker 1: Matchowski's wanted a cape esque feature to swirl around as

1260
01:06:26,000 --> 01:06:29,160
Speaker 1: they flew about, and they were all designed functionally to

1261
01:06:29,240 --> 01:06:32,959
Speaker 1: work with the stunt rigs. For example, Trinity's already form

1262
01:06:33,000 --> 01:06:35,520
Speaker 1: fitting costume at times had to fit over oh you

1263
01:06:35,560 --> 01:06:38,080
Speaker 1: mentioned this earlier, had to fit over a rigid fiberglass

1264
01:06:38,080 --> 01:06:41,040
Speaker 1: plate to keep her body rigid while flying through the air.

1265
01:06:42,200 --> 01:06:44,000
Speaker 1: Barrett said, we had to put in a plate that's

1266
01:06:44,040 --> 01:06:47,120
Speaker 1: molded to her body shape underneath, then harness them up

1267
01:06:47,320 --> 01:06:49,600
Speaker 1: and put their costume over the top. So there's a

1268
01:06:49,600 --> 01:06:52,840
Speaker 1: lot of lacing and tying up. And I really like

1269
01:06:52,880 --> 01:06:55,520
Speaker 1: this Hugo weaving got off the easiest terms of all

1270
01:06:55,520 --> 01:06:57,760
Speaker 1: the costumes. They dressed him up in a sixty style

1271
01:06:57,920 --> 01:07:00,720
Speaker 1: Secret Service suit, which I think is really cool suit,

1272
01:07:00,800 --> 01:07:03,480
Speaker 1: very mad men. Yeah, although anything white that he was

1273
01:07:03,480 --> 01:07:06,520
Speaker 1: wearing in the Matrix world was sent through a green

1274
01:07:06,840 --> 01:07:10,160
Speaker 1: wash to help with the whole coloring tint of that world.

1275
01:07:11,480 --> 01:07:14,040
Speaker 2: It's funny because she also talks about they would do

1276
01:07:14,120 --> 01:07:17,560
Speaker 2: wind tests with all of the coats, so they had

1277
01:07:17,680 --> 01:07:20,880
Speaker 2: like leather ones, which obviously don't like flap in the wind,

1278
01:07:20,960 --> 01:07:22,880
Speaker 2: So they were just like holding coats in front of

1279
01:07:22,960 --> 01:07:26,520
Speaker 2: fans and seeing how that they would flutter the most cinematically.

1280
01:07:27,640 --> 01:07:31,200
Speaker 1: That's so funny. I always just assumed it was leather. Yeah, no,

1281
01:07:31,520 --> 01:07:34,120
Speaker 1: what would it have been like? PVC must have been

1282
01:07:34,240 --> 01:07:37,520
Speaker 1: read the next sentence. Oh oh, let's see, here we go,

1283
01:07:39,040 --> 01:07:41,280
Speaker 1: Oh oh, here we go. Costumes were designed with the

1284
01:07:41,280 --> 01:07:45,160
Speaker 1: limited budgeted mind. Barrett wanted Trinity to quote seem like

1285
01:07:45,200 --> 01:07:48,520
Speaker 1: an oil slick. I love that, so she dressed her

1286
01:07:48,520 --> 01:07:52,400
Speaker 1: in mostly PVC, while Neo's coat was a wool blend

1287
01:07:52,520 --> 01:07:57,440
Speaker 1: that costs three dollars a yard. Barrett also designed all

1288
01:07:57,440 --> 01:08:00,320
Speaker 1: of the characters' boots. Since there are so many close

1289
01:08:00,400 --> 01:08:02,760
Speaker 1: ups of people's feet. They couldn't source anything that had

1290
01:08:02,760 --> 01:08:03,600
Speaker 1: a logo on it.

1291
01:08:03,600 --> 01:08:05,400
Speaker 2: It's crazy to me that Keanu does all that stuff

1292
01:08:05,440 --> 01:08:07,600
Speaker 2: in these huge industrial goth boot Yes.

1293
01:08:07,640 --> 01:08:09,480
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't you know.

1294
01:08:09,600 --> 01:08:14,040
Speaker 2: I actually don't know. I don't think I've ever found

1295
01:08:14,040 --> 01:08:17,240
Speaker 2: this out whether or not he did the he does

1296
01:08:17,280 --> 01:08:20,800
Speaker 2: that kick at the end where he he kicks Agent

1297
01:08:20,880 --> 01:08:23,880
Speaker 2: Smith and then holds his leg up and rotates his

1298
01:08:24,000 --> 01:08:27,439
Speaker 2: hip joint and then brings it ninety degrees around. I

1299
01:08:27,520 --> 01:08:31,080
Speaker 2: have no idea if they did that with wires or not.

1300
01:08:31,160 --> 01:08:34,360
Speaker 2: But if they didn't, he must have been a tremendously

1301
01:08:34,400 --> 01:08:38,160
Speaker 2: strong man. Yeah, because that is so hard, even barefoot,

1302
01:08:38,200 --> 01:08:41,400
Speaker 2: and he does it in these enormous Doc Martin's ass

1303
01:08:41,840 --> 01:08:43,759
Speaker 2: buckle boots.

1304
01:08:44,479 --> 01:08:46,439
Speaker 1: That's so weird. He's gonna be sixty this year.

1305
01:08:48,120 --> 01:08:52,280
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I want, I really want him to start

1306
01:08:52,280 --> 01:08:56,800
Speaker 2: getting his uh his like Elder Gravitas, rolls like age

1307
01:08:56,840 --> 01:08:59,000
Speaker 2: into like his Bill Murray drama Phase.

1308
01:09:00,360 --> 01:09:03,679
Speaker 1: Cousin. Designer Kim Barrett also commissioned the film's custom eye

1309
01:09:03,720 --> 01:09:09,400
Speaker 1: wear from indie designer Richard Walker, whose line Blind Design

1310
01:09:10,040 --> 01:09:12,439
Speaker 1: was then sold with an ees was then sold at

1311
01:09:12,479 --> 01:09:15,880
Speaker 1: high end retailers like Barney's in New York. Actors had

1312
01:09:15,880 --> 01:09:19,280
Speaker 1: to sit through the arduous body casting process, since each

1313
01:09:19,320 --> 01:09:22,440
Speaker 1: pair of these glasses was handmade to their bone structures,

1314
01:09:22,840 --> 01:09:25,360
Speaker 1: and they only had two or three pairs per actor.

1315
01:09:26,080 --> 01:09:29,400
Speaker 1: A difficult consideration effector in when much of your film

1316
01:09:29,640 --> 01:09:35,320
Speaker 1: is things flying in people's faces. Wow, Yeah, that that

1317
01:09:35,479 --> 01:09:37,479
Speaker 1: seems like something you maybe would want to spring for

1318
01:09:38,520 --> 01:09:39,160
Speaker 1: a little.

1319
01:09:38,920 --> 01:09:42,760
Speaker 2: More, especially the little tiny armless ones that has that

1320
01:09:42,960 --> 01:09:45,719
Speaker 2: just go over the bridge of your nose like that's wild.

1321
01:09:46,160 --> 01:09:49,080
Speaker 1: For camera work, the Wachowski's re teamed with their cinematographer

1322
01:09:49,120 --> 01:09:52,280
Speaker 1: Bill Pope, we mentioned earlier, who'd worked with them on Bound,

1323
01:09:52,920 --> 01:09:55,280
Speaker 1: and Funnily enough, the Wachowskis knew him from his work

1324
01:09:55,320 --> 01:09:58,360
Speaker 1: on Army of Darkness, the third installment of the Evil

1325
01:09:58,400 --> 01:10:02,760
Speaker 1: Dead franchise. In an interview with the American Society of Cinematographers,

1326
01:10:02,920 --> 01:10:06,080
Speaker 1: Pope explained, we didn't necessarily want the matrix world to

1327
01:10:06,120 --> 01:10:09,879
Speaker 1: resemble our present world. We didn't want any cheery blue skies.

1328
01:10:10,320 --> 01:10:13,240
Speaker 1: In Australia, the sky is a brilliant blue virtually all

1329
01:10:13,280 --> 01:10:17,080
Speaker 1: the time, but we wanted bald white skies. All of

1330
01:10:17,120 --> 01:10:20,040
Speaker 1: our translate backings for stage work were altered to have

1331
01:10:20,080 --> 01:10:23,200
Speaker 1: white skies, and on actual exterior shots in which we

1332
01:10:23,240 --> 01:10:26,000
Speaker 1: see a lot of sky, we digitally enhanced the skies

1333
01:10:26,040 --> 01:10:29,400
Speaker 1: to make them white. Additionally, since we wanted the matrix

1334
01:10:29,439 --> 01:10:32,720
Speaker 1: reality to be really unappealing, we asked ourselves what is

1335
01:10:32,760 --> 01:10:35,960
Speaker 1: the most unappealing color? I think we all agreed on green,

1336
01:10:36,360 --> 01:10:39,640
Speaker 1: So for those scenes we sometimes used green filters and

1337
01:10:39,680 --> 01:10:41,759
Speaker 1: I'd add a bit of green to the color timing.

1338
01:10:41,880 --> 01:10:43,600
Speaker 2: This must have been one of the last movies to

1339
01:10:43,680 --> 01:10:47,840
Speaker 2: do that, because isn't O Brother, where art thou the

1340
01:10:47,880 --> 01:10:51,879
Speaker 2: first film that was like digitally color corrected.

1341
01:10:52,920 --> 01:10:55,120
Speaker 1: I didn't know that. Wow, I think this would have

1342
01:10:55,160 --> 01:10:57,360
Speaker 1: been the that would have been like the year after this. Yeah,

1343
01:10:57,520 --> 01:10:59,559
Speaker 1: two thousand. Well, because I remember when we were doing

1344
01:11:00,040 --> 01:11:02,000
Speaker 1: the episode of Freaks and Geeks, they were talking about

1345
01:11:02,000 --> 01:11:08,200
Speaker 1: how they would color die just with gray. Everything looked discussing.

1346
01:11:10,520 --> 01:11:12,760
Speaker 3: We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right

1347
01:11:12,800 --> 01:11:28,759
Speaker 3: back with more too much information in just a moment, Let's.

1348
01:11:28,600 --> 01:11:32,040
Speaker 1: Just go to the sound design corner. Why not? Yeah.

1349
01:11:32,120 --> 01:11:34,799
Speaker 2: One of them is from the film's audio guys Dane Davis,

1350
01:11:35,760 --> 01:11:39,240
Speaker 2: which is just I love sound I love fully fully

1351
01:11:39,439 --> 01:11:42,680
Speaker 2: movie sound design work. I'm always tickled to hear how

1352
01:11:42,720 --> 01:11:46,360
Speaker 2: they get specific sound effects and to get adequate fight sounds.

1353
01:11:47,320 --> 01:11:50,880
Speaker 2: He would whip like car antennas past microphones to get

1354
01:11:50,880 --> 01:11:53,639
Speaker 2: the fist wooshing sound. And at one point he also

1355
01:11:53,800 --> 01:11:58,000
Speaker 2: just had two guys, two jiu jitsu practitioners inside a

1356
01:11:58,040 --> 01:12:00,880
Speaker 2: recording booth for four days. It was just like, yeah,

1357
01:12:00,960 --> 01:12:01,879
Speaker 2: just fight each other.

1358
01:12:04,479 --> 01:12:07,360
Speaker 1: We'll get the best bit somewhere. Yeah, just keep going. Yeah, no,

1359
01:12:07,479 --> 01:12:11,200
Speaker 1: go ahead, Yeah, I'm in the booth. Yeah rolling.

1360
01:12:13,520 --> 01:12:15,360
Speaker 2: It was like a four by six or four x

1361
01:12:15,400 --> 01:12:17,320
Speaker 2: eight something too, which is even funnier that they were

1362
01:12:17,320 --> 01:12:20,040
Speaker 2: literally just wrestling in like a postage sized stamp like

1363
01:12:20,160 --> 01:12:25,120
Speaker 2: vocal booth isolation. Poop, Oh my god, the sound of

1364
01:12:25,160 --> 01:12:30,480
Speaker 2: the Sentinel robots dying. He fired two inch lead cannonballs

1365
01:12:30,520 --> 01:12:34,000
Speaker 2: through a line of washing machines and trash bins filled

1366
01:12:34,000 --> 01:12:34,800
Speaker 2: with metal junk.

1367
01:12:35,240 --> 01:12:39,640
Speaker 1: That's incredible. Wow. Oh I did a question for you.

1368
01:12:39,720 --> 01:12:43,360
Speaker 1: I was just that we that lightsaber facto. I came

1369
01:12:43,439 --> 01:12:46,000
Speaker 1: up earlier today because I was trying to remember how

1370
01:12:46,040 --> 01:12:48,720
Speaker 1: did they get what? What was it? Was it the

1371
01:12:48,760 --> 01:12:51,840
Speaker 1: sound of doors opening on the Death Star or was

1372
01:12:51,920 --> 01:12:55,639
Speaker 1: something funny? Oh? It was just like paper being ripped

1373
01:12:55,680 --> 01:12:59,000
Speaker 1: or something. Yeah, oh yeah, I don't this.

1374
01:12:59,160 --> 01:13:02,160
Speaker 2: The fully design is Star Wars as his own whole

1375
01:13:02,200 --> 01:13:04,599
Speaker 2: world because it was so much of it was super

1376
01:13:04,680 --> 01:13:08,360
Speaker 2: cheap for that, especially for that first one. But now

1377
01:13:08,400 --> 01:13:10,439
Speaker 2: I can't place the exact thing that you're talking about.

1378
01:13:11,880 --> 01:13:14,599
Speaker 2: The other Davis connected to the film's sound was composer

1379
01:13:14,640 --> 01:13:17,240
Speaker 2: Don Davis. They are not He and the sound guy

1380
01:13:17,240 --> 01:13:19,800
Speaker 2: are not related. The Wachowskis were big fans of Rage

1381
01:13:19,800 --> 01:13:21,679
Speaker 2: against the Machine, which is a little on the nose

1382
01:13:21,800 --> 01:13:27,679
Speaker 2: and Ministry, the pioneering industrial band whose groundbreaking drum programming

1383
01:13:27,720 --> 01:13:31,360
Speaker 2: would inspire everyone from zz Top, which is an actual,

1384
01:13:31,439 --> 01:13:32,599
Speaker 2: real and true thing.

1385
01:13:34,240 --> 01:13:35,599
Speaker 1: To the Strokes.

1386
01:13:36,040 --> 01:13:38,000
Speaker 2: They loved the work that he had done on Bound,

1387
01:13:38,200 --> 01:13:40,800
Speaker 2: particularly one sound effect, which was the sound of a

1388
01:13:40,880 --> 01:13:44,759
Speaker 2: manipulated digitally like the sound of a pile driver machine,

1389
01:13:44,800 --> 01:13:48,400
Speaker 2: an actual irl pile driver machine that he mixed into

1390
01:13:48,479 --> 01:13:52,240
Speaker 2: the sound effects and score. He said, they were very

1391
01:13:52,280 --> 01:13:54,120
Speaker 2: happy with my approach to compose the score in a

1392
01:13:54,200 --> 01:13:58,360
Speaker 2: very minimalist and postmodern way. I think the minimalist thing

1393
01:13:58,439 --> 01:13:59,960
Speaker 2: really comes in there because I hear a lot of

1394
01:14:00,000 --> 01:14:04,240
Speaker 2: Philip Glass in the in the strings. It does this

1395
01:14:04,320 --> 01:14:07,200
Speaker 2: one recurring motif. That's actually quite funny, where it's just

1396
01:14:07,200 --> 01:14:09,559
Speaker 2: doing like a drum exercise, like I don't know if

1397
01:14:09,560 --> 01:14:11,400
Speaker 2: you've ever hung out with a bunch of drummers, but

1398
01:14:11,720 --> 01:14:15,240
Speaker 2: I have, and they do this thing on the It's

1399
01:14:15,280 --> 01:14:18,120
Speaker 2: just basic drum rudiments where you take like a cord

1400
01:14:18,120 --> 01:14:20,599
Speaker 2: and no pulse and you just do the different rhythmic

1401
01:14:20,640 --> 01:14:25,040
Speaker 2: subdivisions over it. So you do quarter, quarter, eighth, that that, that,

1402
01:14:25,040 --> 01:14:31,360
Speaker 2: that triple, its sixteens, and that's just what the score does.

1403
01:14:31,640 --> 01:14:37,200
Speaker 2: At a certain point. It's like what, Uh so I

1404
01:14:37,280 --> 01:14:40,439
Speaker 2: just think that's neat. And he uses that pile driver

1405
01:14:40,560 --> 01:14:43,040
Speaker 2: thing again. Uh he does it when Neo walks through

1406
01:14:43,080 --> 01:14:45,040
Speaker 2: the metal detector at the building and each one of

1407
01:14:45,040 --> 01:14:48,479
Speaker 2: his steps make this huge, like metallic, echoey clanging noise,

1408
01:14:48,960 --> 01:14:51,880
Speaker 2: really fascinating stuff.

1409
01:14:50,960 --> 01:14:53,600
Speaker 1: Before it move on. I I I found I was

1410
01:14:53,600 --> 01:14:56,360
Speaker 1: looking for it. It was actually the doors opening on

1411
01:14:56,640 --> 01:14:59,840
Speaker 1: Star Trek, the doors of the Enterprise. The sound of

1412
01:14:59,840 --> 01:15:02,320
Speaker 1: the made from a piece of paper being slid from

1413
01:15:02,360 --> 01:15:03,040
Speaker 1: an envelope.

1414
01:15:03,160 --> 01:15:05,320
Speaker 2: It's like the one sample that they had right like

1415
01:15:05,360 --> 01:15:07,080
Speaker 2: they reused it every single time.

1416
01:15:07,200 --> 01:15:10,519
Speaker 1: Yep. Yeah, that's great stuff. I love that.

1417
01:15:11,160 --> 01:15:14,240
Speaker 2: The big problem with the score was that the Wachowskis

1418
01:15:14,240 --> 01:15:17,599
Speaker 2: apparently wanted a choir and for some of the stuff,

1419
01:15:17,600 --> 01:15:20,439
Speaker 2: and Don Davis was like, well, the film was He

1420
01:15:20,479 --> 01:15:23,080
Speaker 2: explained to the Hollywood Reporter the film was shot in Sydney.

1421
01:15:23,840 --> 01:15:26,120
Speaker 2: While the five or six SAG actors got waivers to

1422
01:15:26,160 --> 01:15:29,360
Speaker 2: shoot over overseas, Warner Brothers was unwilling to engage the

1423
01:15:29,360 --> 01:15:32,960
Speaker 2: Screen Actors Guild for Los Angeles singers who work under

1424
01:15:33,000 --> 01:15:36,479
Speaker 2: a SAG contract, So I actually had to contract former

1425
01:15:36,520 --> 01:15:39,880
Speaker 2: members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and we recorded the

1426
01:15:39,960 --> 01:15:43,160
Speaker 2: vocal elements of the score in Salt Lake City. So

1427
01:15:43,200 --> 01:15:47,600
Speaker 2: there you have it, folks. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir is

1428
01:15:47,640 --> 01:15:52,920
Speaker 2: on the sound check to the Matrix. Probably interesting to

1429
01:15:52,960 --> 01:15:54,640
Speaker 2: no one but me, but he also talks about the

1430
01:15:55,000 --> 01:15:58,640
Speaker 2: process of scoring this. He would basically come up with

1431
01:15:58,680 --> 01:16:01,000
Speaker 2: themes and stuff on a synthesize, are played to the

1432
01:16:01,040 --> 01:16:04,880
Speaker 2: Wazowskis as they showed him cuts and scenes, and then

1433
01:16:05,120 --> 01:16:08,479
Speaker 2: orchestrate it, which meant that basically he was able to

1434
01:16:09,160 --> 01:16:13,599
Speaker 2: match the orchestration precisely to the cuts of the film

1435
01:16:13,680 --> 01:16:15,519
Speaker 2: so that they didn't have any tempt music in this,

1436
01:16:15,960 --> 01:16:17,920
Speaker 2: which is a big thing in test screenings and stuff

1437
01:16:17,920 --> 01:16:20,479
Speaker 2: where before the soundtrack is completed, people will just throw

1438
01:16:20,520 --> 01:16:23,880
Speaker 2: in like generic sounding classical or generic sounding film music,

1439
01:16:23,960 --> 01:16:27,720
Speaker 2: probably AI generated at this point, but they had the

1440
01:16:27,760 --> 01:16:30,920
Speaker 2: benefit of actually having this soundtrack go live to every

1441
01:16:30,960 --> 01:16:35,360
Speaker 2: single preview, cut and screening that they sent. Also fun facts,

1442
01:16:35,600 --> 01:16:38,040
Speaker 2: Don Davis is a big fan of anagrams.

1443
01:16:39,240 --> 01:16:41,920
Speaker 1: Who isn't really it's true, but a lot of.

1444
01:16:41,920 --> 01:16:45,880
Speaker 2: The titles in the in the Matrix score or like

1445
01:16:46,280 --> 01:16:50,000
Speaker 2: like one of them. The Dojo music is credited to

1446
01:16:50,120 --> 01:16:54,080
Speaker 2: the Bow Whisk Orchestra, which is an anagram of Wachowski Brothers.

1447
01:16:55,520 --> 01:16:55,960
Speaker 1: As they were.

1448
01:16:57,160 --> 01:17:02,760
Speaker 2: Yes, please don't cancel us so little money. Meanwhile, the

1449
01:17:04,160 --> 01:17:07,599
Speaker 2: selections for the film just maybe the most nineteen ninety

1450
01:17:07,680 --> 01:17:12,000
Speaker 2: nine soundtrack possible. Deaftones, Ridge Against the Machine, Marilyn Manson

1451
01:17:12,200 --> 01:17:16,880
Speaker 2: perhaps most indelibly, Rob Zombies Aseni and Earworm Dragula, and

1452
01:17:16,960 --> 01:17:19,800
Speaker 2: then a lot of electronic artists Massive Attack is in there,

1453
01:17:20,000 --> 01:17:23,200
Speaker 2: propeller Head. My favorite cut from the movie, which is

1454
01:17:23,320 --> 01:17:29,080
Speaker 2: Rob Dugan's Club to Death Parentheses Kure Amino Mix Parentheses

1455
01:17:29,120 --> 01:17:33,120
Speaker 2: closed that's most often known as the Woman in the

1456
01:17:33,200 --> 01:17:35,840
Speaker 2: Red Dress song. If you downloaded this from LimeWire, like

1457
01:17:35,960 --> 01:17:37,960
Speaker 2: I did back in the day. It was probably called

1458
01:17:38,000 --> 01:17:38,439
Speaker 2: The Woman in.

1459
01:17:38,439 --> 01:17:39,080
Speaker 1: The Red Dress.

1460
01:17:40,840 --> 01:17:45,160
Speaker 2: That has some really cool classical string samples. Edward Elgar's

1461
01:17:45,320 --> 01:17:50,519
Speaker 2: Enigma Variations is the intro quote samples Gustav Holtz Jupiter

1462
01:17:50,760 --> 01:17:54,719
Speaker 2: the Bringer of Jolilithy from his Planet Famous Planets suite.

1463
01:17:56,080 --> 01:17:59,280
Speaker 2: And lastly, that song uses the Honey Dripper's iconic Impeach

1464
01:17:59,400 --> 01:18:01,840
Speaker 2: the President break, which is another one of the most

1465
01:18:01,880 --> 01:18:08,240
Speaker 2: sampled hip hop trip hop electronic drum breaks of all time. Sorry,

1466
01:18:08,360 --> 01:18:10,160
Speaker 2: I'm a big nerd well, I mean part of the

1467
01:18:10,640 --> 01:18:12,800
Speaker 2: the thing I love about the sample, about the electronic

1468
01:18:13,320 --> 01:18:15,920
Speaker 2: access to this is that like it really dovetails well

1469
01:18:16,000 --> 01:18:19,720
Speaker 2: with the movies theme of like the organic versus the yes,

1470
01:18:19,880 --> 01:18:22,400
Speaker 2: you know, because it is all of this recontextualization of

1471
01:18:22,520 --> 01:18:26,440
Speaker 2: acoustic music chopped and re sampled and synthesized.

1472
01:18:26,560 --> 01:18:37,320
Speaker 1: So clever stuff wild wild stuff wild. Yes. Oh, that

1473
01:18:37,640 --> 01:18:40,360
Speaker 1: hasn't come back for a while. No, because I've been

1474
01:18:40,439 --> 01:18:41,479
Speaker 1: trained not to do it.

1475
01:18:41,920 --> 01:18:44,519
Speaker 2: Probably the speaking as as as what I always call

1476
01:18:44,800 --> 01:18:48,120
Speaker 2: movie magic, the biggest movie magic moments in the film

1477
01:18:48,200 --> 01:18:49,840
Speaker 2: are come from bullet time.

1478
01:18:53,960 --> 01:18:56,240
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, that was that was That was a sound

1479
01:18:56,320 --> 01:18:57,680
Speaker 1: of evamorration.

1480
01:19:00,680 --> 01:19:02,760
Speaker 2: It's just so silly to call it the bullet time,

1481
01:19:02,880 --> 01:19:07,000
Speaker 2: but it was in the shooting script the Wachowski's. It's

1482
01:19:07,040 --> 01:19:09,679
Speaker 2: their term for how they would visualize how the characters

1483
01:19:09,920 --> 01:19:13,040
Speaker 2: are able to move at these superhuman speeds to dodge bullets,

1484
01:19:13,960 --> 01:19:16,880
Speaker 2: and in the shooting script they describe it thusly, we

1485
01:19:17,120 --> 01:19:20,719
Speaker 2: enter the liquid space of bullet time. The air sizzles

1486
01:19:20,760 --> 01:19:23,719
Speaker 2: with wads of lead like angry flies as Neo twists

1487
01:19:23,880 --> 01:19:27,880
Speaker 2: bends ducks just between them. Neo bent impossibly back, one

1488
01:19:27,920 --> 01:19:30,320
Speaker 2: hand on the ground is a spiraling gray ball. Shears

1489
01:19:30,400 --> 01:19:33,960
Speaker 2: open his shoulder, and that's it. They had no idea

1490
01:19:34,760 --> 01:19:37,800
Speaker 2: how they were going to pull this off, Lana told Wired.

1491
01:19:37,840 --> 01:19:39,600
Speaker 2: People would say, well, how are you going to do that?

1492
01:19:39,760 --> 01:19:43,680
Speaker 2: And we were like, we're working on it. Most distilled,

1493
01:19:43,720 --> 01:19:47,080
Speaker 2: done to its most basic essence. Bullet time is basically

1494
01:19:47,240 --> 01:19:50,679
Speaker 2: wanting a camera to move it its normal speed while

1495
01:19:50,800 --> 01:19:55,280
Speaker 2: capturing slow motion imagery, and they initially took the most

1496
01:19:55,400 --> 01:19:58,960
Speaker 2: direct route to this by attaching a slow motion camera

1497
01:19:59,439 --> 01:20:02,040
Speaker 2: to like a really fast moving dolly or sled.

1498
01:20:03,040 --> 01:20:05,040
Speaker 1: That was quickly discarded for practical reasons.

1499
01:20:06,800 --> 01:20:10,320
Speaker 2: Mass Illusions was an SFX company that was later renamed Manax,

1500
01:20:11,080 --> 01:20:13,360
Speaker 2: but they had just won an Oscar for creating the

1501
01:20:13,560 --> 01:20:16,639
Speaker 2: afterlife that Robin Williams travers is in What Dreams May Come.

1502
01:20:17,160 --> 01:20:19,040
Speaker 2: But they actually the Wachelsea's actually met with them as

1503
01:20:19,040 --> 01:20:22,559
Speaker 2: early as nineteen ninety six when their script was still

1504
01:20:22,600 --> 01:20:27,800
Speaker 2: being worked on, and the Mannix's person who ended up

1505
01:20:27,840 --> 01:20:31,160
Speaker 2: working on the Matrix, guy named John Gata. He told

1506
01:20:31,200 --> 01:20:36,080
Speaker 2: Empire I would credit Otomo Katsuhiro, who co wrote and

1507
01:20:36,160 --> 01:20:40,439
Speaker 2: directed Akira, which definitely blew me away, along with Michelle Gondry.

1508
01:20:41,320 --> 01:20:44,800
Speaker 2: Michelle Gondry's music videos were experimenting with a type of

1509
01:20:44,960 --> 01:20:48,280
Speaker 2: technique called view morphing that you can see and I

1510
01:20:48,360 --> 01:20:54,000
Speaker 2: forget which one. So the scene takes place that it

1511
01:20:54,080 --> 01:20:56,360
Speaker 2: was in the shooting crip takes place on a rooftop,

1512
01:20:56,920 --> 01:20:59,920
Speaker 2: But the way that they executed the bulletinme portions of

1513
01:21:00,040 --> 01:21:02,439
Speaker 2: that was that Reeves was on a sound stage all

1514
01:21:02,520 --> 01:21:06,080
Speaker 2: green walls. He was wired up and one hundred and

1515
01:21:06,120 --> 01:21:08,880
Speaker 2: twenty still cameras were kind of set up around him

1516
01:21:08,920 --> 01:21:12,080
Speaker 2: in a spiral descending spiral, and as the wires pulled

1517
01:21:12,120 --> 01:21:14,920
Speaker 2: him backwards and kind of hold him up, the cameras

1518
01:21:16,000 --> 01:21:19,880
Speaker 2: take still shots in a succession around him, while a

1519
01:21:19,960 --> 01:21:23,719
Speaker 2: pair of regular motion picture film cameras also capture his movements.

1520
01:21:24,400 --> 01:21:29,240
Speaker 2: So you add the live action stuff to the stills,

1521
01:21:30,120 --> 01:21:34,040
Speaker 2: and then you put that in a computer and composite

1522
01:21:34,080 --> 01:21:38,360
Speaker 2: it all together. And that scene, the backwards bend, took

1523
01:21:38,520 --> 01:21:42,040
Speaker 2: two years and cost seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

1524
01:21:44,000 --> 01:21:48,439
Speaker 2: What also they shot, I mean they essentially also shot

1525
01:21:48,479 --> 01:21:51,479
Speaker 2: all that stuff twice and in the Countess case on

1526
01:21:51,560 --> 01:21:54,679
Speaker 2: the storytops the roof of a thirty five story building,

1527
01:21:55,920 --> 01:21:58,400
Speaker 2: Glenn Boswell told sci Fi. I found a portable trust

1528
01:21:58,520 --> 01:22:01,360
Speaker 2: staging system where you can break it down into pieces

1529
01:22:01,400 --> 01:22:03,000
Speaker 2: to fit it into an elevator. To get it to

1530
01:22:03,080 --> 01:22:05,760
Speaker 2: the rooftop, I just had to rig Keanu and get

1531
01:22:05,800 --> 01:22:07,400
Speaker 2: them to lean back in it so that they could

1532
01:22:07,439 --> 01:22:08,800
Speaker 2: shoot in a way where they didn't see it in

1533
01:22:08,840 --> 01:22:12,200
Speaker 2: the camera. After the bullet time was done on the roof,

1534
01:22:12,320 --> 01:22:14,679
Speaker 2: we had to do it at the studio and recreate

1535
01:22:14,800 --> 01:22:17,519
Speaker 2: and match what we did on the roof. So this

1536
01:22:17,680 --> 01:22:22,080
Speaker 2: was all draining for everyone, obviously. Chad Scleski talks about

1537
01:22:22,280 --> 01:22:24,680
Speaker 2: aside from regular shooting, we spent every weekend on a

1538
01:22:24,760 --> 01:22:26,760
Speaker 2: sound stage where we do the specific moves that the

1539
01:22:26,800 --> 01:22:29,120
Speaker 2: Wachowskis felt We're going to be highlighted with bullet time.

1540
01:22:29,439 --> 01:22:32,559
Speaker 2: We did tests and rehearsals. The effects people would photograph

1541
01:22:32,680 --> 01:22:34,360
Speaker 2: me and the other doubles doing what they were going

1542
01:22:34,400 --> 01:22:36,360
Speaker 2: to have Kanu and the other actors do, and then

1543
01:22:36,400 --> 01:22:38,880
Speaker 2: they'd go back to the drawing board that would dial

1544
01:22:39,000 --> 01:22:40,200
Speaker 2: that took months to dial in.

1545
01:22:41,320 --> 01:22:43,800
Speaker 1: I mean I almost needed to do the math on this.

1546
01:22:44,240 --> 01:22:46,960
Speaker 1: That shot. How long is that in the movie?

1547
01:22:47,280 --> 01:22:51,040
Speaker 2: Not long, Not very long at all, Okay, I just

1548
01:22:51,120 --> 01:22:55,080
Speaker 2: wanted to highlight that. Yeah, those rehearsals were not just

1549
01:22:55,160 --> 01:22:59,559
Speaker 2: for the stunt team. Basically, they scanned the footage from

1550
01:22:59,600 --> 01:23:03,880
Speaker 2: these dry runs in and then the computer spit out

1551
01:23:04,960 --> 01:23:10,120
Speaker 2: a tracking system for the cameras to trigger and capture

1552
01:23:10,120 --> 01:23:13,000
Speaker 2: their movements, to trigger and guide their movements. I should

1553
01:23:13,040 --> 01:23:15,720
Speaker 2: say this is I'm imagining it's similar to what they

1554
01:23:15,800 --> 01:23:19,280
Speaker 2: did on Dead Ringers, which is where Jeremy Irons plays

1555
01:23:19,320 --> 01:23:22,880
Speaker 2: a set of twins, and they basically created early computer

1556
01:23:23,000 --> 01:23:26,160
Speaker 2: system that would move the camera in precisely the same ways,

1557
01:23:26,240 --> 01:23:28,679
Speaker 2: take after take, so that he could do both scenes

1558
01:23:29,240 --> 01:23:29,920
Speaker 2: or both parts.

1559
01:23:30,160 --> 01:23:31,880
Speaker 1: I think we talked about that for The Parents Trap

1560
01:23:32,000 --> 01:23:32,680
Speaker 1: actually too.

1561
01:23:32,920 --> 01:23:38,000
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, but so after scanning the first footage into

1562
01:23:38,000 --> 01:23:41,000
Speaker 2: the computer and having the computer map the camera movements,

1563
01:23:42,680 --> 01:23:46,040
Speaker 2: they had to scan the stills back into the computer

1564
01:23:46,560 --> 01:23:49,759
Speaker 2: along with the motion picture footage, and then the computer

1565
01:23:50,000 --> 01:23:55,040
Speaker 2: would generate by itself in between images to kind of

1566
01:23:55,200 --> 01:23:59,000
Speaker 2: string all that disparate stuff together, just how animators would

1567
01:23:59,040 --> 01:24:02,080
Speaker 2: do it, Just really sane stuff. I cannot believe that

1568
01:24:02,160 --> 01:24:04,559
Speaker 2: they And you know, man, it's such a fascinating thing

1569
01:24:04,680 --> 01:24:08,240
Speaker 2: in film history because it is one of the first genuinely,

1570
01:24:08,560 --> 01:24:12,360
Speaker 2: most genuinely innovative things I have seen that kind of

1571
01:24:12,400 --> 01:24:15,280
Speaker 2: came out of nowhere. They invented a visual language for this,

1572
01:24:15,520 --> 01:24:18,200
Speaker 2: Like so emotion existed, but people hadn't been trying to

1573
01:24:18,360 --> 01:24:24,200
Speaker 2: move cameras independently of slow motion. I mean, like when

1574
01:24:24,240 --> 01:24:26,720
Speaker 2: you think of like existing film special effects that had

1575
01:24:26,760 --> 01:24:29,519
Speaker 2: been up to this time, like really groundbreaking. It's all

1576
01:24:29,640 --> 01:24:32,920
Speaker 2: kind of iterations on existing technology. The only thing I

1577
01:24:32,960 --> 01:24:34,560
Speaker 2: can compare it to is the stuff James Cameron was

1578
01:24:34,600 --> 01:24:36,800
Speaker 2: doing in like the Abyss when he developed when he

1579
01:24:36,880 --> 01:24:40,439
Speaker 2: pushed them to develop, like the morphing effects. Just nuts

1580
01:24:41,400 --> 01:24:44,080
Speaker 2: and these two people this was their first big budget movie. Yeah,

1581
01:24:45,200 --> 01:24:47,960
Speaker 2: we will invent a new visual language and build it

1582
01:24:48,040 --> 01:24:48,679
Speaker 2: from scratch.

1583
01:24:49,439 --> 01:24:51,680
Speaker 1: I mean you almost need to wonder if so much

1584
01:24:51,720 --> 01:24:54,160
Speaker 1: of that came from the fact that they just didn't

1585
01:24:54,240 --> 01:24:57,880
Speaker 1: know what was and what wasn't possible. Oh sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

1586
01:24:58,280 --> 01:25:00,639
Speaker 1: And then it was like, well, okay, we've got this budget,

1587
01:25:00,800 --> 01:25:02,360
Speaker 1: get me somebody who could figure out how to do

1588
01:25:02,520 --> 01:25:05,920
Speaker 1: this go yeah, and then it became somebody else's headache

1589
01:25:05,920 --> 01:25:09,360
Speaker 1: and they were just like tapping their watch. That's so incredibing. Yeah,

1590
01:25:09,600 --> 01:25:11,160
Speaker 1: not to always bring it back to this, but my

1591
01:25:11,800 --> 01:25:14,000
Speaker 1: legally obligated Beetle moment. I mean it's the same with

1592
01:25:14,040 --> 01:25:15,559
Speaker 1: the Beatles, with a lot of the stuff that they

1593
01:25:15,600 --> 01:25:18,040
Speaker 1: were asking their producer, George Martin to do because they

1594
01:25:18,120 --> 01:25:20,360
Speaker 1: just didn't know that it wasn't something they was supposed

1595
01:25:20,360 --> 01:25:24,200
Speaker 1: to be able to do, you know. I like that. Yeah,

1596
01:25:25,680 --> 01:25:28,719
Speaker 1: but this rigor wasn't only reserved for bullet time scenes.

1597
01:25:29,280 --> 01:25:33,439
Speaker 1: Chad Stallski, the stunt coordinator, continued for most stunts you

1598
01:25:33,560 --> 01:25:36,240
Speaker 1: get five takes, maybe ten, but to show that Keanu

1599
01:25:36,320 --> 01:25:38,880
Speaker 1: and the actors were doing their own moves, that Wuchowsi's

1600
01:25:38,880 --> 01:25:41,479
Speaker 1: didn't want a lot of cuts. It wasn't weird to

1601
01:25:41,600 --> 01:25:45,160
Speaker 1: do twenty to thirty takes twenty to thirty takes of

1602
01:25:45,200 --> 01:25:52,519
Speaker 1: these excruciating, painful moves. Wow, incredible. This was actually something

1603
01:25:52,560 --> 01:25:55,439
Speaker 1: of a quiet revolution in Hollywood at the time. You write,

1604
01:25:57,600 --> 01:26:01,040
Speaker 1: I gotta give you credit. Oh thanks man. Whereas fight

1605
01:26:01,120 --> 01:26:03,439
Speaker 1: scenes prior to this were created in the edit room

1606
01:26:03,640 --> 01:26:06,960
Speaker 1: centering around big hero punches or kicks strung together from

1607
01:26:07,000 --> 01:26:10,640
Speaker 1: lots of separate shots, movies like The Matrix and Your

1608
01:26:10,680 --> 01:26:14,760
Speaker 1: Beloved Blade, your prior created a new expectation that action

1609
01:26:14,960 --> 01:26:18,639
Speaker 1: heroes should convincingly be able to hold down fight scenes

1610
01:26:18,920 --> 01:26:21,000
Speaker 1: for long with just one or two punches at a time.

1611
01:26:21,320 --> 01:26:22,000
Speaker 1: I always say that.

1612
01:26:22,040 --> 01:26:24,559
Speaker 2: You can judge how good of a fighter an actor

1613
01:26:24,720 --> 01:26:27,160
Speaker 2: is by the length of the cuts in any given

1614
01:26:27,240 --> 01:26:29,599
Speaker 2: fight scene. And it's really embarrassing when you go back

1615
01:26:29,640 --> 01:26:32,760
Speaker 2: and watch stuff pre Blade in The Matrix, like those

1616
01:26:32,800 --> 01:26:34,640
Speaker 2: two movies coming out of the One two Punch and

1617
01:26:34,720 --> 01:26:37,320
Speaker 2: then Crouching Tiger. The following year was just like, oh,

1618
01:26:37,479 --> 01:26:39,559
Speaker 2: we have to make fight scenes look good now because

1619
01:26:39,560 --> 01:26:43,080
Speaker 2: everything else is just people throwing these big haymaker punches.

1620
01:26:43,400 --> 01:26:46,960
Speaker 2: I I just watched Roadhouse recently and all like, Sweezy

1621
01:26:47,640 --> 01:26:52,160
Speaker 2: bless him looks like a camel throwing his kicks, and

1622
01:26:52,320 --> 01:26:55,120
Speaker 2: that film is actually pretty good about having unbroken strings

1623
01:26:55,160 --> 01:26:58,479
Speaker 2: of action fight choreography. But yeah, man, like, especially when

1624
01:26:58,479 --> 01:26:59,680
Speaker 2: you look at some of the Nick Cage stuff I

1625
01:26:59,680 --> 01:27:02,360
Speaker 2: watch on air recently, and it's just so like watching

1626
01:27:02,439 --> 01:27:03,160
Speaker 2: him do these fights.

1627
01:27:03,160 --> 01:27:05,400
Speaker 1: He's supposed to be this like special Ranger bad ass.

1628
01:27:05,479 --> 01:27:09,120
Speaker 2: It's just like so many quick cuts, so many different angles,

1629
01:27:09,200 --> 01:27:11,000
Speaker 2: just to disguise the fact that these guys could only

1630
01:27:11,080 --> 01:27:13,439
Speaker 2: do like one or two things at a time, whereas

1631
01:27:13,479 --> 01:27:15,360
Speaker 2: these Hong Kong guys are used to being like, Okay,

1632
01:27:15,560 --> 01:27:18,360
Speaker 2: here's thirty moves to chain together that you have to memorize,

1633
01:27:18,400 --> 01:27:20,720
Speaker 2: and we will film that until you get it right

1634
01:27:21,600 --> 01:27:23,160
Speaker 2: and then move on to the next thirty.

1635
01:27:23,960 --> 01:27:27,120
Speaker 1: This film is due tomorrow. We have a fun fact

1636
01:27:27,120 --> 01:27:30,040
Speaker 1: about the stuntman, Chaz Taluski.

1637
01:27:30,320 --> 01:27:33,120
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I mean this poor guy. Virtually everyone got injured.

1638
01:27:33,200 --> 01:27:35,439
Speaker 2: I think they had to start disguising the bruises on

1639
01:27:35,600 --> 01:27:38,280
Speaker 2: Morpheus and Keanu after the dojo fight scene because they

1640
01:27:38,320 --> 01:27:40,280
Speaker 2: didn't have any padding and they were just like wailing

1641
01:27:40,320 --> 01:27:42,439
Speaker 2: on each other's arms because so much of it is

1642
01:27:42,560 --> 01:27:45,840
Speaker 2: like this Chinese style wind chung blocking and punching, and

1643
01:27:45,920 --> 01:27:47,920
Speaker 2: they just gave each other huge bruises up and down

1644
01:27:47,920 --> 01:27:48,599
Speaker 2: their forearms.

1645
01:27:49,800 --> 01:27:50,880
Speaker 1: Everyone got injured on this.

1646
01:27:51,320 --> 01:27:54,120
Speaker 2: I think Carrie an Moss fractured her ankle doing the

1647
01:27:54,720 --> 01:27:57,400
Speaker 2: cartwheel off the wall and the lobby scene. It's just

1648
01:27:57,439 --> 01:27:59,840
Speaker 2: amazing that I can just name different shots in this

1649
01:28:00,040 --> 01:28:02,639
Speaker 2: movie and everyone would instantly go yeah, that that heart

1650
01:28:02,760 --> 01:28:07,440
Speaker 2: was tight as hell. Stileski got messed up, though, specifically

1651
01:28:07,479 --> 01:28:10,639
Speaker 2: in the scene where they were shooting the subway fight

1652
01:28:10,800 --> 01:28:15,559
Speaker 2: where Agent Smith throws Kean or throws Neo up into

1653
01:28:15,600 --> 01:28:18,679
Speaker 2: the subway and then he ceiling and then he hits

1654
01:28:18,720 --> 01:28:22,360
Speaker 2: the ground again. That got Chad for his efforts a

1655
01:28:22,400 --> 01:28:25,679
Speaker 2: dislocated shoulder, damaged knees, and several broken ribs.

1656
01:28:25,920 --> 01:28:33,120
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ worth it, Yeah, yeah, well, Perhaps unsurprisingly, the

1657
01:28:33,200 --> 01:28:36,920
Speaker 1: Matrix started to run over time and budget. The Wachowski's

1658
01:28:36,960 --> 01:28:40,760
Speaker 1: threatened to walk if the studio started trimming scenes, but

1659
01:28:41,120 --> 01:28:43,360
Speaker 1: they were kind of helped in their feud with the

1660
01:28:43,400 --> 01:28:47,160
Speaker 1: studio by their film's editor, Zak Steinberg, who'd cut together

1661
01:28:47,280 --> 01:28:49,160
Speaker 1: some of the early scenes in the film which he

1662
01:28:49,200 --> 01:28:51,680
Speaker 1: sent to the executives to mollify them, and this had

1663
01:28:51,840 --> 01:28:55,559
Speaker 1: the intended effect. The studio extended the shoot from ninety

1664
01:28:55,680 --> 01:28:59,120
Speaker 1: days to one hundred and eighteen days, so they added

1665
01:28:59,320 --> 01:29:02,200
Speaker 1: a month. Four weeks still doesn't seem like a hell

1666
01:29:02,280 --> 01:29:03,320
Speaker 1: of a lot of time to me.

1667
01:29:03,800 --> 01:29:06,160
Speaker 2: But Jordan, now it's time for lightning round yees. Facts

1668
01:29:06,200 --> 01:29:08,360
Speaker 2: that don't fit anywhere else. Yeah, maybe they did, but

1669
01:29:08,439 --> 01:29:10,800
Speaker 2: I was writing it sequentially and did not reinsert them

1670
01:29:10,800 --> 01:29:11,919
Speaker 2: where they would have been appropriate.

1671
01:29:13,320 --> 01:29:17,080
Speaker 1: They literally had to rewrite airspace laws in New South Wales,

1672
01:29:17,160 --> 01:29:20,760
Speaker 1: Australia to get the helicopter shots in because the full

1673
01:29:20,800 --> 01:29:24,240
Speaker 1: scale shooting model of the helicopter didn't have blades, so

1674
01:29:24,320 --> 01:29:26,559
Speaker 1: they had to use a real helicopter in a few

1675
01:29:26,680 --> 01:29:30,800
Speaker 1: long shots and they were filming in restricted airspace. Could

1676
01:29:30,960 --> 01:29:34,240
Speaker 1: just add blades to a model helicopter. It seems like

1677
01:29:34,320 --> 01:29:38,200
Speaker 1: the rather than getting the laws changed. That maybe seems like.

1678
01:29:38,520 --> 01:29:41,280
Speaker 2: I've restrained from a lot of anti Australian sentiment in this,

1679
01:29:41,439 --> 01:29:43,519
Speaker 2: but it just speaks to the cartoonish nature of that

1680
01:29:43,600 --> 01:29:45,439
Speaker 2: country that they walked in and we're like, hey, we

1681
01:29:45,520 --> 01:29:48,519
Speaker 2: need to we got to rewrite some of your airspace

1682
01:29:48,680 --> 01:29:54,439
Speaker 2: laws in Asia. Yeah, they're like, fine, we'll do it

1683
01:29:54,520 --> 01:29:59,000
Speaker 2: for a faustus like a Winnie Blues, maybe a Lamb

1684
01:29:59,080 --> 01:30:02,719
Speaker 2: Kebab that's pretty good vacation in Bali.

1685
01:30:04,280 --> 01:30:07,960
Speaker 1: I love Australians. Yes, Nick Cave is Australian. Ac DC

1686
01:30:08,120 --> 01:30:10,840
Speaker 1: are Australian. Front of the Pod Phil is Australian and

1687
01:30:11,000 --> 01:30:14,719
Speaker 1: Phil Phil Yes. For the woman in the red dress scene,

1688
01:30:15,000 --> 01:30:18,360
Speaker 1: the directors hired several sets of twins to be in

1689
01:30:18,479 --> 01:30:21,479
Speaker 1: the crowd walking past, implying that since this was a

1690
01:30:21,520 --> 01:30:25,080
Speaker 1: training video, the programmer would have gotten a little lazy

1691
01:30:25,240 --> 01:30:28,479
Speaker 1: and just started copy pasting people in. I love that.

1692
01:30:29,600 --> 01:30:32,000
Speaker 2: I didn't talk a ton about the guns in this movie,

1693
01:30:32,080 --> 01:30:36,519
Speaker 2: because I don't like glorifying guns, but just some fun

1694
01:30:36,600 --> 01:30:39,200
Speaker 2: notes about how they designed stuff, like that when Mouse

1695
01:30:39,240 --> 01:30:41,760
Speaker 2: gets spoiler alert killed by the agents, that he pulls

1696
01:30:41,760 --> 01:30:44,599
Speaker 2: out those huge machine guns and starts firing them. Those

1697
01:30:44,640 --> 01:30:47,760
Speaker 2: were custom designed for the movie. And the fact that

1698
01:30:47,880 --> 01:30:52,360
Speaker 2: the agents all carry desert Eagle fifty cows is like

1699
01:30:53,560 --> 01:30:57,480
Speaker 2: a spoof or a joke that just like the Wachowski's

1700
01:30:57,520 --> 01:30:59,880
Speaker 2: talked one of they when they talk to the film's armor.

1701
01:31:00,120 --> 01:31:01,400
Speaker 2: They were like, Oh, yeah, we want them to have

1702
01:31:01,520 --> 01:31:06,040
Speaker 2: like these huge guns, and the fifty cow desert Eagle

1703
01:31:06,160 --> 01:31:08,200
Speaker 2: is like a clown gun, like it should not exist

1704
01:31:08,280 --> 01:31:10,280
Speaker 2: in the real world because it's so large and you

1705
01:31:10,400 --> 01:31:13,040
Speaker 2: can't fire it one handed. People can't handle the recoil

1706
01:31:14,280 --> 01:31:18,519
Speaker 2: for you know, for reference, when the famous Dirty Harry

1707
01:31:18,560 --> 01:31:20,879
Speaker 2: speak when he talks about the three fifty seven magnum,

1708
01:31:21,520 --> 01:31:25,760
Speaker 2: So a fifty cow desert eagle is thirteen more than

1709
01:31:25,840 --> 01:31:32,240
Speaker 2: that in terms of gun measurements. So they gave them

1710
01:31:32,280 --> 01:31:35,519
Speaker 2: these fifty cow, these enormous guns, and we're just like, yeah,

1711
01:31:35,560 --> 01:31:37,439
Speaker 2: fire in one handed all the time. It'll be cooler,

1712
01:31:37,520 --> 01:31:40,519
Speaker 2: It'll like, it will just look like the agents are

1713
01:31:40,640 --> 01:31:43,599
Speaker 2: that powerful that they can fire this tank cannon one handed.

1714
01:31:44,960 --> 01:31:49,560
Speaker 1: I don't know. I think that's neat, also neat and

1715
01:31:49,720 --> 01:31:55,120
Speaker 1: equally kind of disturbing in its own way. These springloaded

1716
01:31:55,240 --> 01:31:58,800
Speaker 1: cell phones used in the film something creepy because they're

1717
01:31:58,840 --> 01:32:01,479
Speaker 1: spring loaded, so there's like a violence to them when

1718
01:32:01,479 --> 01:32:05,439
Speaker 1: they pop open. Right, come on, yeah, shoot, I.

1719
01:32:05,439 --> 01:32:07,040
Speaker 2: Thought it was I thought it was the coolest thing

1720
01:32:07,080 --> 01:32:10,000
Speaker 2: I'd ever see it. Well, and then to my shock,

1721
01:32:10,120 --> 01:32:12,479
Speaker 2: you could not get it because they designed it.

1722
01:32:13,600 --> 01:32:17,840
Speaker 1: Yes, these were no Kia stilettos are eight one one

1723
01:32:18,000 --> 01:32:21,120
Speaker 1: zeros or eighty one tens. I don't know how you

1724
01:32:21,200 --> 01:32:24,160
Speaker 1: say that. Uh, And they were referred to cloaqually as

1725
01:32:24,280 --> 01:32:28,120
Speaker 1: the banana phone, and that spring mechanism was indeed an

1726
01:32:28,120 --> 01:32:30,800
Speaker 1: addition for the film, so it did not come stock

1727
01:32:30,960 --> 01:32:34,360
Speaker 1: like that, which was disappointing, huge failure. The young Alex

1728
01:32:34,439 --> 01:32:38,320
Speaker 1: Heigel Uh you touched on this earlier. Counta Reeves and

1729
01:32:38,400 --> 01:32:41,280
Speaker 1: Hugo Weaving nicknamed each other the neck and the leg

1730
01:32:41,760 --> 01:32:45,479
Speaker 1: during pre production in reference to their respective complicating injuries.

1731
01:32:46,000 --> 01:32:48,519
Speaker 1: Weaving had a pull up removed from his leg and

1732
01:32:48,560 --> 01:32:52,000
Speaker 1: would later crack two ribs and hurt his wrist and

1733
01:32:52,160 --> 01:32:54,880
Speaker 1: carry on. Moss sprained her ankle shooting the lobby scene.

1734
01:32:54,880 --> 01:32:58,560
Speaker 1: At one point, as you mentioned, the protein sloped that

1735
01:32:58,640 --> 01:33:04,320
Speaker 1: the crew of the Nebukadez Aerat is rice porridge. Why

1736
01:33:04,400 --> 01:33:06,160
Speaker 1: is it called Nebukadezer? I mean that's a I know,

1737
01:33:06,280 --> 01:33:10,599
Speaker 1: that's an Egyptian king. Yeah, it's an old Testament reference.

1738
01:33:11,320 --> 01:33:15,439
Speaker 1: Oh of course, gotcha? Gotcha. During the scene in the

1739
01:33:15,479 --> 01:33:18,679
Speaker 1: Oracles living room where Neo meets other candidates for oneness,

1740
01:33:19,160 --> 01:33:22,280
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventy two rabbit horror movie Night of the

1741
01:33:22,479 --> 01:33:26,519
Speaker 1: Lepis is playing on TV. Rabbit Horror. Is that? Is

1742
01:33:26,560 --> 01:33:31,720
Speaker 1: that a genre? Is that a subgenre other than binicula

1743
01:33:32,439 --> 01:33:34,040
Speaker 1: and this movie. I don't think so.

1744
01:33:35,720 --> 01:33:38,920
Speaker 2: Well, maybe Monty Python, Oh yeah, yeah, yea yeah, it's

1745
01:33:38,960 --> 01:33:40,880
Speaker 2: like the most famous scary rabbit of all time.

1746
01:33:41,840 --> 01:33:45,240
Speaker 1: Speaking of TVs, the antique television Morpheus shows to Neo

1747
01:33:45,400 --> 01:33:52,480
Speaker 1: in the Construct is an Awa amalgamated Wireless Australiasia Radiola

1748
01:33:52,680 --> 01:33:57,959
Speaker 1: Deep Image Model two O nine C. Wow, I applaud

1749
01:33:59,160 --> 01:34:04,480
Speaker 1: the granul nice. There are a couple of Biblical illusions

1750
01:34:04,479 --> 01:34:07,920
Speaker 1: strewn throughout the film. Agent Smith's car has the license

1751
01:34:07,960 --> 01:34:12,160
Speaker 1: plate is by four one six referring to Isaiah fifty

1752
01:34:12,240 --> 01:34:16,519
Speaker 1: four sixteen, which reads, behold, I have created the smith

1753
01:34:16,680 --> 01:34:19,360
Speaker 1: that bloweth the coals in the fire, and that time

1754
01:34:19,600 --> 01:34:23,840
Speaker 1: to stop there Smith, get it. That's good, it's good.

1755
01:34:23,960 --> 01:34:28,240
Speaker 1: That's good. And the nihbu Godezer's core etching Mark three

1756
01:34:28,479 --> 01:34:32,240
Speaker 1: number eleven model as a possible reference to Mark three eleven,

1757
01:34:32,640 --> 01:34:36,040
Speaker 1: which reads, and whoever those possessed by evil spirits caught

1758
01:34:36,120 --> 01:34:38,479
Speaker 1: sight of him, they would fall down in front of him,

1759
01:34:38,520 --> 01:34:41,640
Speaker 1: shrieking you are the son of God, which they did.

1760
01:34:41,960 --> 01:34:44,599
Speaker 1: My Catholic priest ancestors are very proud of me right now.

1761
01:34:46,000 --> 01:34:48,720
Speaker 1: Most of the accubo, no, I don't like needles. Most

1762
01:34:48,760 --> 01:34:52,120
Speaker 1: of the accupucture needles in Neo's body are stuck in

1763
01:34:52,200 --> 01:34:55,920
Speaker 1: a prosthetic. That's good. That covers Keonu's chest, except for

1764
01:34:56,000 --> 01:34:59,400
Speaker 1: the needles in his ears, which were inserted by an

1765
01:34:59,479 --> 01:35:05,559
Speaker 1: onset acupuncturist. Oh, I can have you ever had accupuncture done? Yeah?

1766
01:35:05,560 --> 01:35:09,679
Speaker 1: All the time. It's great, but it's got needles. Yeah,

1767
01:35:10,439 --> 01:35:13,000
Speaker 1: well is it great? I don't know. That's good for

1768
01:35:13,120 --> 01:35:18,519
Speaker 1: muscle stuff. I use it for my back and neck situation. Well,

1769
01:35:18,520 --> 01:35:20,320
Speaker 1: it's hurting my back and neck because I'm getting tense

1770
01:35:20,400 --> 01:35:23,600
Speaker 1: just thinking about it. Moving on the horrifying scene in

1771
01:35:23,640 --> 01:35:28,560
Speaker 1: which Neo's mouth melts shut. That was an intentional homage

1772
01:35:28,680 --> 01:35:30,800
Speaker 1: to the sci fi novel I Have No Mouth and

1773
01:35:30,880 --> 01:35:33,400
Speaker 1: I Most Scream by Harlan Ellison.

1774
01:35:33,920 --> 01:35:36,720
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's truly one of the greatest titles of all time.

1775
01:35:37,000 --> 01:35:40,360
Speaker 2: Harlan Ellison is one of those deeply unsung heroes who's

1776
01:35:40,439 --> 01:35:43,120
Speaker 2: like one of the most quietly influential sci fi authors

1777
01:35:43,120 --> 01:35:45,720
Speaker 2: of all time. He wrote Deep In with a Glass Hand,

1778
01:35:45,760 --> 01:35:48,280
Speaker 2: which is an episode of The Outer Limits. Oh that

1779
01:35:48,479 --> 01:35:51,880
Speaker 2: was wound later found to be so similar to The

1780
01:35:52,040 --> 01:35:57,000
Speaker 2: Terminator that newer cuts of the original film feature with

1781
01:35:57,560 --> 01:36:00,000
Speaker 2: the credit that says like grateful acknowledgment to the word

1782
01:36:00,200 --> 01:36:01,439
Speaker 2: of Harlan Ellison or something.

1783
01:36:01,560 --> 01:36:05,439
Speaker 1: Ooh, I love that you could just rattle the stuff off.

1784
01:36:05,720 --> 01:36:07,439
Speaker 1: I can only do that with like the Titanic and

1785
01:36:07,479 --> 01:36:11,120
Speaker 1: the Beatles. Well, I have no Mathelm. I'm of scream is.

1786
01:36:11,160 --> 01:36:14,559
Speaker 2: That is one of the more famous ones, although hilariously enough,

1787
01:36:16,000 --> 01:36:19,599
Speaker 2: Harlan Ellison wrote himself Terminator was not stolen from Demon

1788
01:36:19,640 --> 01:36:20,400
Speaker 2: with a glass hand.

1789
01:36:20,640 --> 01:36:22,599
Speaker 1: It was a rip off of my other Outer Limit

1790
01:36:22,720 --> 01:36:27,519
Speaker 1: script Soldier and finally our last lightning round. Fun fact.

1791
01:36:27,640 --> 01:36:30,880
Speaker 1: The cascading green code used to render the Matrix in

1792
01:36:30,920 --> 01:36:34,360
Speaker 1: the real world was a custom typeface designed by Simon

1793
01:36:34,439 --> 01:36:39,639
Speaker 1: Whiteley that included Japanese characters, Arabic numerals, and Western Latin letters.

1794
01:36:40,280 --> 01:36:43,360
Speaker 1: In a twenty seventeen interview at CNET, he attributed the

1795
01:36:43,439 --> 01:36:46,519
Speaker 1: design to his wife, who's from Japan, saying I like

1796
01:36:46,640 --> 01:36:49,280
Speaker 1: to tell everybody that the Matrix code is made out

1797
01:36:49,320 --> 01:36:53,559
Speaker 1: of Japanese sushi recipes. I think I've read that before,

1798
01:36:53,600 --> 01:36:55,800
Speaker 1: and I thought he was serious, but I'm guessing he's kidding.

1799
01:36:57,160 --> 01:36:58,400
Speaker 1: Who's to say, yeah.

1800
01:36:59,320 --> 01:37:02,320
Speaker 2: Filming on the Matrix ended and post production began in

1801
01:37:02,400 --> 01:37:05,920
Speaker 2: October of nineteen ninety eight. Wachowski stayed in Australia until

1802
01:37:05,960 --> 01:37:08,960
Speaker 2: November and continued editing the film until shortly before its release.

1803
01:37:09,520 --> 01:37:12,880
Speaker 2: Warner Brothers was nervous after the aforementioned and similar Dark

1804
01:37:12,960 --> 01:37:14,960
Speaker 2: City kind of flopped at the box office, and so

1805
01:37:15,040 --> 01:37:15,960
Speaker 2: they decided to bet.

1806
01:37:15,840 --> 01:37:16,639
Speaker 1: Big on ads.

1807
01:37:16,800 --> 01:37:18,920
Speaker 2: It took out a nineteen ninety nine Super Bowl ad

1808
01:37:19,000 --> 01:37:22,400
Speaker 2: for the movie, but interestingly, they were kind of hands

1809
01:37:22,439 --> 01:37:25,920
Speaker 2: off at this point. The editor Zach Stainberg told Wired

1810
01:37:26,120 --> 01:37:29,200
Speaker 2: that they had a great test meeting and then our

1811
01:37:29,240 --> 01:37:30,880
Speaker 2: test screening, and they were in a meeting with the

1812
01:37:31,240 --> 01:37:34,160
Speaker 2: Warners co chairs Bob Daily and Terry Simel, and Terry said,

1813
01:37:34,400 --> 01:37:36,760
Speaker 2: we love this movie. Their only note to us was

1814
01:37:36,840 --> 01:37:39,120
Speaker 2: to take five to ten minutes out. We ended up

1815
01:37:39,120 --> 01:37:41,160
Speaker 2: taking five and a half minutes out and they never

1816
01:37:41,240 --> 01:37:42,439
Speaker 2: even looked at that final cut.

1817
01:37:43,000 --> 01:37:45,479
Speaker 1: Hilarious. They didn't have worried.

1818
01:37:45,560 --> 01:37:47,560
Speaker 2: The Matrix opened to theaters in the United States on

1819
01:37:47,640 --> 01:37:50,400
Speaker 2: March thirty first, nineteen ninety nine, to widespread acclaim and

1820
01:37:50,520 --> 01:37:53,519
Speaker 2: went on to gross four hundred and sixty million dollars

1821
01:37:53,560 --> 01:37:56,799
Speaker 2: on its sixty three million budget, becoming the highest grossing

1822
01:37:56,840 --> 01:37:59,000
Speaker 2: Warner Brothers film. Of nineteen ninety nine and the fourth

1823
01:37:59,120 --> 01:38:01,640
Speaker 2: highest grossing film of that year. It's funny because they

1824
01:38:01,640 --> 01:38:04,920
Speaker 2: were a little scared of putting it up against Phantom Menace,

1825
01:38:05,000 --> 01:38:08,360
Speaker 2: which came out in May of that year. Oh and

1826
01:38:08,479 --> 01:38:10,760
Speaker 2: then The Mummy also came out right around that time.

1827
01:38:10,880 --> 01:38:14,080
Speaker 2: It was like a big kind of sneak hit, sneak blockbuster.

1828
01:38:14,400 --> 01:38:17,200
Speaker 2: What a great couple of months for blockbusters. Man, Yeah,

1829
01:38:17,680 --> 01:38:20,360
Speaker 2: funnily enough. Also being a David cronenbergner, and I have

1830
01:38:20,439 --> 01:38:23,720
Speaker 2: to note this, David Cronenberg's Exist Ends with a Z

1831
01:38:24,160 --> 01:38:27,320
Speaker 2: was released shortly after The Matrix and starred Jennifer Jason

1832
01:38:27,400 --> 01:38:30,679
Speaker 2: Lee as a celebrity video game designer whose creation drops

1833
01:38:30,720 --> 01:38:33,519
Speaker 2: players into a fake but believable world, which is the

1834
01:38:33,600 --> 01:38:37,240
Speaker 2: exact setup for Keanu Reeves's character in the fourth Matrix film.

1835
01:38:37,600 --> 01:38:41,599
Speaker 2: They make him a game designer whose creation is widely

1836
01:38:41,680 --> 01:38:47,639
Speaker 2: celebrated as immersive, starting to wonder if they just keep

1837
01:38:47,720 --> 01:38:48,760
Speaker 2: tabs on everything and.

1838
01:38:50,280 --> 01:38:55,000
Speaker 1: Steal it na taking that back.

1839
01:38:55,920 --> 01:38:58,519
Speaker 2: Just under a month after The Matrix came out, though,

1840
01:38:58,520 --> 01:39:03,200
Speaker 2: the Columbine massacre pulled the movie into a darker area

1841
01:39:03,240 --> 01:39:06,600
Speaker 2: of the discourse. The resemblance between the film's fetishization of

1842
01:39:06,680 --> 01:39:09,519
Speaker 2: firearms and the wardrobes resemblance to the trench coats worn

1843
01:39:09,560 --> 01:39:13,200
Speaker 2: by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The overall fetishization of

1844
01:39:13,240 --> 01:39:15,960
Speaker 2: gunplay in the movie did little help, but in the end,

1845
01:39:16,800 --> 01:39:20,439
Speaker 2: Matrix just kind of steamrolled past all of that, like

1846
01:39:21,120 --> 01:39:26,639
Speaker 2: the brief blip when video games and violent movies were

1847
01:39:26,680 --> 01:39:30,160
Speaker 2: such a hot talking point. I remember this, and it

1848
01:39:30,320 --> 01:39:33,639
Speaker 2: was quickly eclipsed by like Marilyn Manson. Don't you remember,

1849
01:39:33,720 --> 01:39:36,320
Speaker 2: like eminem I remember that music being so much of

1850
01:39:36,360 --> 01:39:37,000
Speaker 2: a bigger.

1851
01:39:36,800 --> 01:39:38,599
Speaker 1: Deal than movies. Oh big time.

1852
01:39:38,720 --> 01:39:43,800
Speaker 2: Yeah, what a stupid country. The Matrix received nominations at

1853
01:39:43,800 --> 01:39:46,679
Speaker 2: the seventy second Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects, Best

1854
01:39:46,720 --> 01:39:49,360
Speaker 2: Film Editing, Best Sound, and Best Sound Editing, and it

1855
01:39:49,520 --> 01:39:51,960
Speaker 2: won all four categories. I think it's one of the

1856
01:39:52,160 --> 01:39:54,800
Speaker 2: only cases in which a film won all of the

1857
01:39:54,880 --> 01:39:59,080
Speaker 2: categories in which it was nominated and also wasn't nominated

1858
01:39:59,120 --> 01:40:02,200
Speaker 2: for any of the Big one four. A while in

1859
01:40:02,240 --> 01:40:04,559
Speaker 2: two thousand and nine, the Matrix was ranked thirty ninth

1860
01:40:04,640 --> 01:40:07,960
Speaker 2: on Empire Magazine's Reader, Actor and Critic voted list of

1861
01:40:08,000 --> 01:40:10,479
Speaker 2: the five hundred greatest movies of all Time, voted as

1862
01:40:10,520 --> 01:40:13,479
Speaker 2: the fourth best science fiction film in the twenty eleven

1863
01:40:13,600 --> 01:40:16,840
Speaker 2: list Best of Film based on a poll conducted by

1864
01:40:16,880 --> 01:40:19,960
Speaker 2: ABC and People Magazine. And it must be said that

1865
01:40:20,000 --> 01:40:23,160
Speaker 2: in twenty twelve, The Matrix was selected for preservation in

1866
01:40:23,160 --> 01:40:25,320
Speaker 2: the United States National Film Registry by the Library of

1867
01:40:25,360 --> 01:40:33,080
Speaker 2: Congress for being quote culturally, historically and esthetically significant.

1868
01:40:33,560 --> 01:40:36,200
Speaker 1: Twenty twelve or thirteen years. What took him so long?

1869
01:40:36,880 --> 01:40:42,000
Speaker 1: I know it should have been canonized upon its release. Well, obviously,

1870
01:40:42,080 --> 01:40:44,960
Speaker 1: the runaway success of the film changed everyone's life, or

1871
01:40:44,960 --> 01:40:47,920
Speaker 1: at least the life everyone involved in it. Kyanta Reeve

1872
01:40:48,000 --> 01:40:51,320
Speaker 1: became a full on action star slash you say, the

1873
01:40:51,640 --> 01:40:54,920
Speaker 1: maybe most dangerous man in Hollywood that he was always

1874
01:40:54,960 --> 01:40:57,040
Speaker 1: meant to be. Why was he the most dangerous man

1875
01:40:57,120 --> 01:40:57,679
Speaker 1: in Hollywood?

1876
01:40:58,240 --> 01:41:01,280
Speaker 2: Well, because after learning all this kung fust uh for

1877
01:41:01,320 --> 01:41:05,000
Speaker 2: the John Wick movies, he also learned like CQC, which

1878
01:41:05,080 --> 01:41:07,720
Speaker 2: is like the military close quarter combat stuff that has

1879
01:41:07,760 --> 01:41:12,120
Speaker 2: elements of like krav maga and you know, Brazilian jiu jitsu.

1880
01:41:12,280 --> 01:41:13,920
Speaker 1: So he learned all that stuff for John Wick.

1881
01:41:13,960 --> 01:41:16,720
Speaker 2: And then he also just added firearms training to his

1882
01:41:17,160 --> 01:41:18,519
Speaker 2: Like don't you remember when they were mate when they

1883
01:41:18,560 --> 01:41:20,479
Speaker 2: talked about the Making of John Wick how he became

1884
01:41:20,600 --> 01:41:23,800
Speaker 2: like an expert marksman with like everything from pistols to

1885
01:41:23,880 --> 01:41:26,200
Speaker 2: shotguns to like long rifles because he had to do

1886
01:41:26,280 --> 01:41:28,000
Speaker 2: it all in the movie and was so committed to

1887
01:41:28,120 --> 01:41:32,000
Speaker 2: it that he became like a legitimately dangerous gun user.

1888
01:41:32,800 --> 01:41:34,679
Speaker 2: I just love the fact that he's like the most

1889
01:41:34,760 --> 01:41:37,120
Speaker 2: chill dude of all time, and he's like, I've also

1890
01:41:37,280 --> 01:41:42,960
Speaker 2: mastered several arts of killing, So that's Kean and then swords,

1891
01:41:43,000 --> 01:41:46,040
Speaker 2: and then swords too, because he did he did a

1892
01:41:46,880 --> 01:41:51,080
Speaker 2: very maligned flop of a Samurai movie that rid all

1893
01:41:51,280 --> 01:41:54,760
Speaker 2: in its original Japanese for some reason, because among his

1894
01:41:54,880 --> 01:41:57,960
Speaker 2: heritages is Japanese, I think, but he wanted to do

1895
01:41:58,040 --> 01:42:00,840
Speaker 2: the whole movie in Japanese, and so presumably he's also

1896
01:42:00,920 --> 01:42:01,840
Speaker 2: really good with the sword.

1897
01:42:02,439 --> 01:42:05,559
Speaker 1: Has he done like non action like, does he done

1898
01:42:05,600 --> 01:42:07,800
Speaker 1: like any rom coms or anything? Or or is he

1899
01:42:08,000 --> 01:42:10,840
Speaker 1: purely an action guy these days? The Lake House in

1900
01:42:11,080 --> 01:42:15,680
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety nine, I think he did. He was in Thumbsucker,

1901
01:42:15,760 --> 01:42:20,200
Speaker 1: which I remember seeing in theaters for some reason. Replacements

1902
01:42:20,280 --> 01:42:23,800
Speaker 1: was his next big one after it. Oh Man with

1903
01:42:23,960 --> 01:42:27,040
Speaker 1: Gene Hackman, Right, that's correct? Hell yeah?

1904
01:42:28,840 --> 01:42:34,599
Speaker 2: Anyway, Oh and Constantine God Constantine Whips. Also in two

1905
01:42:34,640 --> 01:42:38,959
Speaker 2: thousand and five he did Scanner Darkly, which is probably

1906
01:42:39,200 --> 01:42:42,960
Speaker 2: the probably the best, into my mind, Philip K. Dick

1907
01:42:43,000 --> 01:42:45,519
Speaker 2: adaptation that's ever gone out on screen, and another movie

1908
01:42:45,600 --> 01:42:49,120
Speaker 2: that makes tremendous use of his dialed in kind of

1909
01:42:49,240 --> 01:42:52,559
Speaker 2: blank affect. Yeah, everyone go check out Scanner dark That rules.

1910
01:42:52,800 --> 01:42:56,120
Speaker 1: I remember seeing that in theaters too. Yeah, big Keanu

1911
01:42:56,160 --> 01:42:58,880
Speaker 1: Reeves high school movie experience. I ever thought about that.

1912
01:42:59,240 --> 01:43:02,880
Speaker 1: I'm so glad for you. Yeah, so that's Keanu Reeves.

1913
01:43:03,360 --> 01:43:06,439
Speaker 1: Luachowskis became a Listers Upon the release of The Matrix.

1914
01:43:06,880 --> 01:43:10,800
Speaker 1: Carrie On Moss stopped being able to wear sunglasses outside

1915
01:43:11,280 --> 01:43:14,760
Speaker 1: because she was recognized instantly in them, which is the

1916
01:43:14,840 --> 01:43:19,840
Speaker 1: opposite of every other celebrity who wears Love's I love that.

1917
01:43:20,560 --> 01:43:22,400
Speaker 2: I mean until she grew her hair out, she probably

1918
01:43:22,560 --> 01:43:27,040
Speaker 2: she just had a tremendously recognizable face and head. When

1919
01:43:27,080 --> 01:43:30,240
Speaker 2: you add sunglasses to it, people just started breaking their

1920
01:43:30,280 --> 01:43:31,479
Speaker 2: next looking at her in the public.

1921
01:43:31,560 --> 01:43:34,720
Speaker 1: I guess between The Matrix and Rush Hour the previous year,

1922
01:43:34,840 --> 01:43:37,920
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety eight, Hollywood quickly took notice of how much

1923
01:43:38,000 --> 01:43:40,560
Speaker 1: money there was to be made via Hong Kong, and

1924
01:43:40,640 --> 01:43:42,600
Speaker 1: one of the most direct beneficiaries of this was the

1925
01:43:42,680 --> 01:43:46,760
Speaker 1: runaway success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which made us

1926
01:43:46,840 --> 01:43:49,599
Speaker 1: stars out of longtime Hong Kong legends like Chow Young

1927
01:43:49,680 --> 01:43:53,160
Speaker 1: Fat and Michelle Yo, and gave us audiences his first

1928
01:43:53,160 --> 01:43:56,320
Speaker 1: big exposure to the historical epic genre. The film belongs

1929
01:43:56,360 --> 01:43:59,160
Speaker 1: to called Wouja. You didn't think I was going to

1930
01:43:59,200 --> 01:44:01,920
Speaker 1: pronounce that, right? You nailed that, dude. I've heard you

1931
01:44:02,000 --> 01:44:07,000
Speaker 1: said enough times. You teach me, you teach me. Bullet

1932
01:44:07,040 --> 01:44:10,880
Speaker 1: time quickly infiltrated other films and even video games. The

1933
01:44:11,000 --> 01:44:14,280
Speaker 1: game Max Pain I remember Max Pain literally named one

1934
01:44:14,320 --> 01:44:18,120
Speaker 1: of its central mechanics bullet time, though the game had

1935
01:44:18,160 --> 01:44:19,840
Speaker 1: been in development more or less at the same time

1936
01:44:19,880 --> 01:44:22,479
Speaker 1: as the matrix, so it wasn't a complete steal. Do

1937
01:44:22,520 --> 01:44:26,280
Speaker 1: you remember the XFL Oh my god, yeah wow.

1938
01:44:26,560 --> 01:44:29,120
Speaker 2: The XFL used a rudimentary form of bullet time for

1939
01:44:29,200 --> 01:44:33,840
Speaker 2: its replays. They used the same still camera rotating. They

1940
01:44:33,880 --> 01:44:36,439
Speaker 2: had cameras. I think one of their big quote unquote

1941
01:44:36,479 --> 01:44:39,240
Speaker 2: innovations that actually affected the NFL was that they allowed

1942
01:44:39,320 --> 01:44:42,639
Speaker 2: cameras lower and over the field so that you could

1943
01:44:42,680 --> 01:44:45,920
Speaker 2: get a closer look at stuff. And I distinctly remember

1944
01:44:46,000 --> 01:44:48,880
Speaker 2: watching one of those XFL games and seeing the bullet

1945
01:44:48,920 --> 01:44:50,519
Speaker 2: time rotating camera thing.

1946
01:44:50,800 --> 01:44:53,880
Speaker 1: That's really funny, A dude, episode of the XFL. What

1947
01:44:54,000 --> 01:44:57,479
Speaker 1: will happened with that? Oh yeah, dude, it's so fascinating.

1948
01:44:57,600 --> 01:44:58,800
Speaker 2: I think a bunch of those guys went to the

1949
01:44:58,920 --> 01:45:01,040
Speaker 2: NFL and a bunch of them became professional wrestlers. And

1950
01:45:01,200 --> 01:45:03,120
Speaker 2: Vincent is a human is a monster?

1951
01:45:03,439 --> 01:45:06,519
Speaker 1: Yeah? Oh yeah. The Matrix also blew up the whole

1952
01:45:06,640 --> 01:45:11,160
Speaker 1: sort of techno adjacent hacker culture. As you say, suddenly,

1953
01:45:11,360 --> 01:45:14,920
Speaker 1: people wearing PVC to do drugs in Berlin warehouse parties

1954
01:45:15,000 --> 01:45:18,160
Speaker 1: were seen as cool as hell. We don't have enough

1955
01:45:18,200 --> 01:45:20,920
Speaker 1: time to get remotely into the expanded universe of the Matrix,

1956
01:45:20,960 --> 01:45:24,680
Speaker 1: which involves comic books, video games, the Animatrix, which made

1957
01:45:24,720 --> 01:45:28,280
Speaker 1: the ties to Japanese animation explicit by having various prominent

1958
01:45:28,360 --> 01:45:32,720
Speaker 1: animators render in universe stories into an anthology. And that's

1959
01:45:33,240 --> 01:45:35,640
Speaker 1: not even touching on the three sequels.

1960
01:45:35,439 --> 01:45:38,680
Speaker 2: Which I will not no no, no no Reloaded has

1961
01:45:38,720 --> 01:45:49,599
Speaker 2: some killer fight scenes, revolutions is that was a guy outside?

1962
01:45:49,640 --> 01:45:50,679
Speaker 2: But I share his sentiment.

1963
01:45:52,280 --> 01:45:54,599
Speaker 1: Let's say, listeners. Heigl has been quiet for about twenty

1964
01:45:54,640 --> 01:45:58,080
Speaker 1: five seconds now that I edited down staring off into

1965
01:45:58,120 --> 01:46:02,920
Speaker 1: middle distance. As early as two thousand, colleges began offering

1966
01:46:03,000 --> 01:46:07,120
Speaker 1: introductory philosophy courses tied to this movie, and as the

1967
01:46:07,120 --> 01:46:10,240
Speaker 1: two thousand and five book Philosophers Explore the Matrix puts it.

1968
01:46:10,880 --> 01:46:13,320
Speaker 1: By the end of nineteen ninety nine, when nearly every

1969
01:46:13,400 --> 01:46:17,800
Speaker 1: undergraduate aged American had seen The Matrix, philosophy professors rejoiced,

1970
01:46:18,240 --> 01:46:21,559
Speaker 1: here was a deceptive visual reality scenario burned into our

1971
01:46:21,600 --> 01:46:26,000
Speaker 1: collective cinematic imagination. No more explaining how the evil demon

1972
01:46:26,160 --> 01:46:29,799
Speaker 1: causes my sensory experience, no more explaining how the scientists

1973
01:46:29,840 --> 01:46:33,000
Speaker 1: built the experience machine. Now we could just say it's

1974
01:46:33,200 --> 01:46:38,559
Speaker 1: like in the Matrix. But that's great. Yeah, yeah, between

1975
01:46:38,640 --> 01:46:44,639
Speaker 1: this and Groundhog Day, really yeah, hitting the philosophy, yeah,

1976
01:46:45,000 --> 01:46:47,519
Speaker 1: good for us. Wow, it's almost as if we're going

1977
01:46:47,560 --> 01:46:49,160
Speaker 1: through stuff and trying to figure things out.

1978
01:46:51,040 --> 01:46:53,679
Speaker 2: Next up Jean Paul Sartre's Nausea.

1979
01:46:56,560 --> 01:46:59,800
Speaker 1: But as with any world conquering success, the naysayers came

1980
01:46:59,800 --> 01:47:04,080
Speaker 1: out force. Allegations of plagiarism were leveled at the Wachowskis

1981
01:47:04,120 --> 01:47:07,200
Speaker 1: for lifting bits and pieces of the Matrix from varying sources.

1982
01:47:07,800 --> 01:47:10,080
Speaker 1: One of the most prominent critics was comic book legend

1983
01:47:10,160 --> 01:47:13,080
Speaker 1: Grant Morrison, whose work had been tackling many of the

1984
01:47:13,160 --> 01:47:16,200
Speaker 1: themes of the matrix for years. For instance, in a

1985
01:47:16,320 --> 01:47:19,360
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety two issue of Doom Patrol written by Morrison,

1986
01:47:19,680 --> 01:47:23,479
Speaker 1: the self explanatory robot man's consciousness becomes stuck in an

1987
01:47:23,560 --> 01:47:26,680
Speaker 1: artificial reality called the data Matrix.

1988
01:47:28,560 --> 01:47:32,479
Speaker 2: I'm not generally one to add fuel to the matrix,

1989
01:47:32,520 --> 01:47:36,000
Speaker 2: to the Wachowskis or plagiarists fire, but when you see

1990
01:47:36,000 --> 01:47:41,360
Speaker 2: it in Tota, yeah, you're like all right, Like between

1991
01:47:41,439 --> 01:47:44,800
Speaker 2: this and Dark City and all this other stuff, a

1992
01:47:44,920 --> 01:47:48,160
Speaker 2: case could be made, especially I didn't show you any

1993
01:47:48,280 --> 01:47:50,880
Speaker 2: art of the Invisibles where one of the guys looks

1994
01:47:51,000 --> 01:47:52,519
Speaker 2: exactly like Laurence Fishburn.

1995
01:47:53,560 --> 01:47:56,600
Speaker 1: This robot man, whose consciousness has become infused in the

1996
01:47:56,720 --> 01:47:59,640
Speaker 1: data Matrix, goes on a journey to realize he is

1997
01:47:59,680 --> 01:48:03,720
Speaker 1: in a simulation before finding a way to ascend to reality.

1998
01:48:04,160 --> 01:48:06,479
Speaker 1: Gray Morris and I. He wasn't happy about this. He

1999
01:48:06,560 --> 01:48:08,840
Speaker 1: was also mad that many of the visual touchstones of

2000
01:48:08,880 --> 01:48:11,320
Speaker 1: The Invisibles, as you mentioned, probably his most famous work

2001
01:48:11,600 --> 01:48:15,120
Speaker 1: depicted the same leather clad goth and raver subcultures that

2002
01:48:15,240 --> 01:48:18,120
Speaker 1: The Matrix rated for its style, and there's also a

2003
01:48:18,160 --> 01:48:20,160
Speaker 1: scene in The Invisibles where Guy has to jump off

2004
01:48:20,160 --> 01:48:25,400
Speaker 1: a skyscraper as an initiation, much like Neo does. The

2005
01:48:25,640 --> 01:48:28,679
Speaker 1: entire premise of The Invisibles, a secret group of rebels

2006
01:48:28,760 --> 01:48:31,960
Speaker 1: roaming multiple planes of reality preaching that the real world's

2007
01:48:32,000 --> 01:48:35,160
Speaker 1: being controlled by inhuman masters and imploring the audience to

2008
01:48:35,200 --> 01:48:38,680
Speaker 1: wake up is, as you note, pretty dead on as

2009
01:48:38,720 --> 01:48:42,320
Speaker 1: far as comparisons to The Matrix go. The protagonist of

2010
01:48:42,400 --> 01:48:45,559
Speaker 1: The Invisibles is supposed to be a reincarnation of the Buddha,

2011
01:48:46,160 --> 01:48:51,840
Speaker 1: and he's even referred to as the One, So yeah,

2012
01:48:52,080 --> 01:48:53,639
Speaker 1: it's all pretty damning.

2013
01:48:53,840 --> 01:48:56,000
Speaker 2: It really was a banner era for white people stealing

2014
01:48:56,040 --> 01:48:58,080
Speaker 2: from anime. One of the most famous things from this

2015
01:48:58,200 --> 01:49:03,920
Speaker 2: time is Requiem for Dream and which Darren Aronofsky wanted

2016
01:49:03,960 --> 01:49:08,040
Speaker 2: to include a shot that was basically a recreation of

2017
01:49:08,120 --> 01:49:13,200
Speaker 2: a frame from a Japanese animation animated film called Perfect Blue,

2018
01:49:14,320 --> 01:49:19,479
Speaker 2: and he simply bought the rights to the film or

2019
01:49:19,520 --> 01:49:21,200
Speaker 2: wrote them into the budget or whatever, and just so

2020
01:49:21,320 --> 01:49:23,840
Speaker 2: you could get away with it. Very funny stuff.

2021
01:49:24,200 --> 01:49:29,240
Speaker 1: Grant Morrison, the author of The Invisibles and Doom, patrol.

2022
01:49:29,439 --> 01:49:34,120
Speaker 1: Those comic books that will say most likely inspired the Matrix.

2023
01:49:34,520 --> 01:49:37,639
Speaker 1: Have spoken about this a few times. In one extensive

2024
01:49:37,680 --> 01:49:40,720
Speaker 1: interview for the book Anarchy for the Masses, A Disinformation

2025
01:49:40,840 --> 01:49:43,960
Speaker 1: Guide to the Invisibles, he talked about seeing his ideas

2026
01:49:44,000 --> 01:49:47,160
Speaker 1: appear in the mainstream. He said, suddenly I felt my

2027
01:49:47,320 --> 01:49:50,559
Speaker 1: territory was invaded. That was stuff nobody had ever been

2028
01:49:50,600 --> 01:49:53,760
Speaker 1: doing in comic books or in pop culture. The Invisibles

2029
01:49:53,840 --> 01:49:56,439
Speaker 1: was on the set of The Matrix. People who were

2030
01:49:56,479 --> 01:49:59,240
Speaker 1: there have told me the Machowski's are comic fans. They

2031
01:49:59,320 --> 01:50:02,440
Speaker 1: were Vertigo the imprint the published Invisibles fans. In particular,

2032
01:50:03,680 --> 01:50:07,000
Speaker 1: the Wachowskis apparently have not commented publicly about this aspect

2033
01:50:07,080 --> 01:50:10,400
Speaker 1: of their work, which speaks volumes.

2034
01:50:11,880 --> 01:50:13,200
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, part of it was just that they

2035
01:50:13,200 --> 01:50:16,400
Speaker 2: were basically recluses, which for good reason, as we'll get

2036
01:50:16,439 --> 01:50:21,679
Speaker 2: into later, because the press were awful to them. But yeah,

2037
01:50:21,760 --> 01:50:25,200
Speaker 2: they just didn't do interviews, a lot of interviews and

2038
01:50:25,240 --> 01:50:29,479
Speaker 2: basically just lived quietly in Chicago. The funniest thing that

2039
01:50:29,560 --> 01:50:32,559
Speaker 2: comes up when you talk about alleged cases of plagiarism

2040
01:50:32,640 --> 01:50:35,360
Speaker 2: in the Matrix is the weird legend of Sophia Stuart.

2041
01:50:36,120 --> 01:50:38,960
Speaker 2: She has a still living writer who, if you believe,

2042
01:50:39,360 --> 01:50:42,680
Speaker 2: won a judgment against the Wachowskis for stealing part of

2043
01:50:42,760 --> 01:50:46,479
Speaker 2: her screenplay treatment The Third Eye. In a two thousand

2044
01:50:46,479 --> 01:50:49,640
Speaker 2: and three lawsuit, Stewart named both the original Terminator and

2045
01:50:49,800 --> 01:50:52,480
Speaker 2: the Matrix as stolen from her treatment, which was copyrighted

2046
01:50:52,520 --> 01:50:56,120
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty three. She supposedly answered a magazine ad

2047
01:50:56,160 --> 01:50:58,919
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty six that said the Wachowskis were soliciting

2048
01:50:58,960 --> 01:51:02,080
Speaker 2: science fiction stories made into a comic book. She also

2049
01:51:02,240 --> 01:51:04,599
Speaker 2: further alleged that her six page treatment had been sent

2050
01:51:04,680 --> 01:51:07,000
Speaker 2: to Fox as early as nineteen eighty one, although they

2051
01:51:07,040 --> 01:51:09,320
Speaker 2: didn't get around to rejecting it until nineteen eighty five.

2052
01:51:10,520 --> 01:51:12,600
Speaker 2: Stuart failed to show up for her court date, and

2053
01:51:12,680 --> 01:51:16,400
Speaker 2: the lawsuit was dismissed, but the story basically went wide

2054
01:51:16,960 --> 01:51:21,000
Speaker 2: When this is so funny, I'm I'm gonna have a

2055
01:51:21,040 --> 01:51:23,519
Speaker 2: hard time reading it. The story went wide on the

2056
01:51:23,600 --> 01:51:26,800
Speaker 2: Internet when an October two thousand and four article by

2057
01:51:26,840 --> 01:51:30,519
Speaker 2: the Salt Lake Community College Globe titled Mother of the

2058
01:51:30,600 --> 01:51:35,280
Speaker 2: Matrix Victorious, mistakenly said that Stuart would recover the damages

2059
01:51:35,360 --> 01:51:38,880
Speaker 2: she sought from the alleged plagiarism, receiving quote one of

2060
01:51:38,920 --> 01:51:41,360
Speaker 2: the biggest payoffs in the history of Hollywood's as the

2061
01:51:41,439 --> 01:51:44,519
Speaker 2: gross receipts of both films and their sequels total over

2062
01:51:44,600 --> 01:51:48,639
Speaker 2: two point five billion dollars. The article, as you may expect,

2063
01:51:49,200 --> 01:51:51,600
Speaker 2: was later found to be riddled with errors, as the

2064
01:51:51,760 --> 01:51:55,439
Speaker 2: student reporter had mistaken Stuart's successful counter of an early

2065
01:51:55,520 --> 01:52:01,000
Speaker 2: dismissal motion as her winning the entire case. Like community college.

2066
01:52:01,080 --> 01:52:06,320
Speaker 2: Globe issued a correction and regretted the air, but the

2067
01:52:06,439 --> 01:52:08,960
Speaker 2: original story had already been picked up by the wider

2068
01:52:09,040 --> 01:52:14,040
Speaker 2: Internet and could not be stopped. Stewart is hilariously still online.

2069
01:52:14,800 --> 01:52:17,400
Speaker 2: Her Twitter bio reads, I am the creator owner of

2070
01:52:17,520 --> 01:52:21,640
Speaker 2: the Matrix and Terminator films, the official owner of both franchises,

2071
01:52:21,720 --> 01:52:25,080
Speaker 2: as per adjudicated in the Utah Federal Courts nine twenty five,

2072
01:52:25,240 --> 01:52:29,120
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen, and she maintains the site truth about Matrix

2073
01:52:29,160 --> 01:52:30,720
Speaker 2: dot Com to continue to.

2074
01:52:30,720 --> 01:52:32,639
Speaker 1: Make her case. You should make that your Twitter bio

2075
01:52:33,600 --> 01:52:36,559
Speaker 1: truth about Matrix dot Com. Oh, the official owner.

2076
01:52:36,760 --> 01:52:39,840
Speaker 2: Yes, I'm just I haven't really made this a bit yet,

2077
01:52:39,880 --> 01:52:42,200
Speaker 2: but I said I was going to start saying I

2078
01:52:42,280 --> 01:52:47,160
Speaker 2: did an uncredited my credit on everything. While we're talking

2079
01:52:47,160 --> 01:52:48,960
Speaker 2: about courts, though, we might as well segue into something

2080
01:52:49,000 --> 01:52:52,599
Speaker 2: that also popped up my research. The matrix defense, which

2081
01:52:52,640 --> 01:52:55,320
Speaker 2: has become a form of insanity plea used several times

2082
01:52:55,439 --> 01:52:59,040
Speaker 2: in criminal cases. Defendants justify their actions by saying that

2083
01:52:59,080 --> 01:53:00,960
Speaker 2: they believed at the time of committing their crimes that

2084
01:53:01,000 --> 01:53:04,560
Speaker 2: they were plugged into the matrix. Perhaps most shockingly, it

2085
01:53:04,680 --> 01:53:08,240
Speaker 2: has worked. Ton De Lynn Ansley of Hamilton, Ohio was

2086
01:53:08,240 --> 01:53:10,799
Speaker 2: found not guilty by reason of insanity using this defense

2087
01:53:10,840 --> 01:53:13,080
Speaker 2: after shooting her land lady in the head. In July

2088
01:53:13,280 --> 01:53:16,920
Speaker 2: two thousand and two, Vadim Messiges of San Francisco offered

2089
01:53:16,960 --> 01:53:20,320
Speaker 2: a matrix explanation to police after chopping up his landlady

2090
01:53:20,920 --> 01:53:24,320
Speaker 2: and was declared mentally incompetent to stand trial. And it

2091
01:53:24,439 --> 01:53:28,280
Speaker 2: was the defense strategy of Joshua Cook's lawyer in his

2092
01:53:28,439 --> 01:53:31,000
Speaker 2: two thousand and three trial for the murder of his

2093
01:53:31,120 --> 01:53:34,280
Speaker 2: adoptive parents before he opted to plead guilty.

2094
01:53:36,880 --> 01:53:44,280
Speaker 1: So that's all a bomber, And it gets worse because

2095
01:53:44,320 --> 01:53:47,880
Speaker 1: the darker elements of the matrix became even more widespread.

2096
01:53:48,960 --> 01:53:51,040
Speaker 1: One of the biggest and most tragic legacies of the

2097
01:53:51,080 --> 01:53:54,200
Speaker 1: matrix stems from the scene where Morpheus offers Neo a

2098
01:53:54,400 --> 01:53:57,360
Speaker 1: choice to return to his regular life or awaken in

2099
01:53:57,400 --> 01:54:01,519
Speaker 1: the real world, visualizing the decision as red and blue pills.

2100
01:54:02,320 --> 01:54:05,559
Speaker 1: The term was politicized fairly quickly, with its first use

2101
01:54:05,640 --> 01:54:07,640
Speaker 1: popping up in the two thousand and six essay The

2102
01:54:07,720 --> 01:54:12,360
Speaker 1: Red Pill by University of Colorado sociology professor Kathleen J. Tierney,

2103
01:54:12,800 --> 01:54:15,160
Speaker 1: in which she implored readers to quote take the red

2104
01:54:15,240 --> 01:54:19,280
Speaker 1: pill and realize that quote post September eleventh, policies and

2105
01:54:19,400 --> 01:54:22,960
Speaker 1: plans have actually made the nation more vulnerable, both the

2106
01:54:23,080 --> 01:54:27,960
Speaker 1: natural disasters and to future terrorist attacks. And this was Yeah,

2107
01:54:28,920 --> 01:54:32,120
Speaker 1: she was right to say it. This was in the

2108
01:54:32,200 --> 01:54:36,360
Speaker 1: context of the bosched response to Hurricane Katrina. A year later,

2109
01:54:36,480 --> 01:54:39,480
Speaker 1: in two thousand and seven, the blogger Curtis Jarvin used

2110
01:54:39,520 --> 01:54:43,400
Speaker 1: the phrase in a post written under the pseudonym Mensius

2111
01:54:43,640 --> 01:54:49,480
Speaker 1: Moldbug titled the Case against Democracy ten red Pills This

2112
01:54:49,720 --> 01:54:54,280
Speaker 1: Stupid Country. The term began to metastasize online in the

2113
01:54:54,360 --> 01:54:58,560
Speaker 1: early twenty tens, with anti feminists or men's rights activists

2114
01:54:58,920 --> 01:55:01,960
Speaker 1: referring to their views as quote the red pill, which

2115
01:55:02,040 --> 01:55:05,879
Speaker 1: the subreddit the red Pill founded in twenty twelve. Defines

2116
01:55:05,920 --> 01:55:09,200
Speaker 1: as quote the recognition and awareness of the way that feminism,

2117
01:55:09,320 --> 01:55:15,560
Speaker 1: feminists and their white knight enablers affect society. Given that genesis,

2118
01:55:15,760 --> 01:55:19,400
Speaker 1: it's not difficult to see how the term began to

2119
01:55:19,560 --> 01:55:24,400
Speaker 1: slant more right, as you say, with a conspiracy forward

2120
01:55:24,480 --> 01:55:30,400
Speaker 1: YouTube account called James Redpills America discussing a quote prefabricated

2121
01:55:30,520 --> 01:55:34,520
Speaker 1: world controlled by a select few, seemingly all powerful forces

2122
01:55:34,960 --> 01:55:39,920
Speaker 1: like the banksters, the Rothschilds, and George Soros. A twenty

2123
01:55:39,960 --> 01:55:43,400
Speaker 1: sixteen documentary titled The Red Pill about the men's rights

2124
01:55:43,480 --> 01:55:47,320
Speaker 1: movements was released, and Candice Owens created the anti Democrat

2125
01:55:47,440 --> 01:55:50,640
Speaker 1: channel Red Pill Black, with the intent of leading Black

2126
01:55:50,680 --> 01:55:58,120
Speaker 1: Americans away from the Democratic Party. Bud Wait, there's more. Yeah.

2127
01:55:59,080 --> 01:56:01,080
Speaker 2: In the end, the color of the pill doesn't matter

2128
01:56:01,200 --> 01:56:03,280
Speaker 2: as the As you mentioned in our intro, the suffix

2129
01:56:03,400 --> 01:56:06,520
Speaker 2: pilled is passed around online referring to all different worldviews.

2130
01:56:06,920 --> 01:56:10,120
Speaker 2: Black pill for nihilism, green pilled for their belief and

2131
01:56:10,320 --> 01:56:13,360
Speaker 2: or fear that reptilian aliens are enforcing a new world order.

2132
01:56:14,840 --> 01:56:18,200
Speaker 2: Most hilariously, back in the nineties, prescription estrogen was in

2133
01:56:18,280 --> 01:56:21,160
Speaker 2: fact a shade of red. The er point six five

2134
01:56:21,200 --> 01:56:24,840
Speaker 2: milligram premarin tablet was a sort of dark maroon. Currently, though,

2135
01:56:24,960 --> 01:56:28,040
Speaker 2: the most common form of orally administered prescription estrogen today

2136
01:56:28,680 --> 01:56:31,400
Speaker 2: is a blue two milligram estradol pill supplied by the

2137
01:56:31,520 --> 01:56:35,440
Speaker 2: Israeli pharmaceutical company Teva. Make of all that what you will.

2138
01:56:37,760 --> 01:56:41,200
Speaker 2: That this whole thing, though, is probably the darkest aspect

2139
01:56:41,240 --> 01:56:44,080
Speaker 2: to the Matrix. It's and in one of its gross

2140
01:56:44,320 --> 01:56:47,840
Speaker 2: kind of unintended side effects of its legacy, without necessarily

2141
01:56:47,920 --> 01:56:51,120
Speaker 2: meaning to, the Wacawski's created a convenient shorthand to graft

2142
01:56:51,200 --> 01:56:54,960
Speaker 2: onto an America's extant distrust of authority and or reason.

2143
01:56:55,680 --> 01:56:58,600
Speaker 2: Writing for Vulture in twenty nineteen, Mark Harris extrapolated on

2144
01:56:58,680 --> 01:57:01,280
Speaker 2: that better than I could today, the matrix is less

2145
01:57:01,280 --> 01:57:03,760
Speaker 2: of a touchstone than something that's now so deeply threaded

2146
01:57:03,800 --> 01:57:05,320
Speaker 2: into the way we think and talk that it can

2147
01:57:05,400 --> 01:57:09,560
Speaker 2: sometimes feel invisible. Its loudest manifestations are also the most malignant,

2148
01:57:10,040 --> 01:57:13,400
Speaker 2: the clown in hell, mad, profit fulminations of Alex Jones's

2149
01:57:13,480 --> 01:57:17,480
Speaker 2: Info Wars, Pizzagate, QAnon, and the anti Semitic mutterings about

2150
01:57:17,520 --> 01:57:20,280
Speaker 2: lizard people, the idea that reality is just a pane

2151
01:57:20,320 --> 01:57:22,640
Speaker 2: of glass concealing the truth that the only way to

2152
01:57:22,680 --> 01:57:24,880
Speaker 2: reach that is to pick up a rock and throw it.

2153
01:57:25,200 --> 01:57:27,800
Speaker 2: Later on, he continues, the Matrix did not offer its

2154
01:57:27,840 --> 01:57:30,600
Speaker 2: disciples the joy of discovering a new reality, but rather

2155
01:57:30,680 --> 01:57:35,760
Speaker 2: the empowerment of a nullification, of casting off whatever temporal, physical, practical,

2156
01:57:35,960 --> 01:57:39,360
Speaker 2: or apparent reality doesn't suit you. The film gives everyone

2157
01:57:39,440 --> 01:57:41,880
Speaker 2: the authority to say this isn't happening.

2158
01:57:42,600 --> 01:57:44,600
Speaker 1: Hm. Hm, that's all kind of terrifying. Yeah.

2159
01:57:45,680 --> 01:57:48,920
Speaker 2: Most maybe the most fitting thing about all of these interpretations,

2160
01:57:48,960 --> 01:57:50,880
Speaker 2: if you will, is that the quote that sets off

2161
01:57:50,920 --> 01:57:53,320
Speaker 2: Morpheus's speech in the film What If I Told You?

2162
01:57:54,760 --> 01:57:57,520
Speaker 2: Is never actually spoken in any of the movies. It's

2163
01:57:57,560 --> 01:57:58,720
Speaker 2: a total Mandela effect.

2164
01:57:59,200 --> 01:57:59,360
Speaker 1: Shoh.

2165
01:58:01,120 --> 01:58:02,880
Speaker 2: The closest thing he actually comes up with at one

2166
01:58:02,880 --> 01:58:04,920
Speaker 2: point is do you want to know what it is?

2167
01:58:07,240 --> 01:58:09,520
Speaker 1: Yeah? What If I told You? Not an actual line

2168
01:58:09,560 --> 01:58:12,080
Speaker 1: in any of the Matrix movies. That's even scarier. All

2169
01:58:12,120 --> 01:58:14,880
Speaker 1: of this is scary. I don't like. Let's move, it

2170
01:58:14,920 --> 01:58:19,040
Speaker 1: get worse before it gets better, and then worse again. Well,

2171
01:58:19,080 --> 01:58:20,880
Speaker 1: here we're going to end on a more positive note,

2172
01:58:21,120 --> 01:58:25,000
Speaker 1: which is the Matrix legacy as a transgender text. This

2173
01:58:25,240 --> 01:58:27,720
Speaker 1: was present from day one. One of the most common

2174
01:58:27,760 --> 01:58:29,760
Speaker 1: pieces of law about the film is that the character

2175
01:58:29,880 --> 01:58:32,320
Speaker 1: of Switch was supposed to be portrayed as having different

2176
01:58:32,440 --> 01:58:34,720
Speaker 1: genders in the real world and the world of the

2177
01:58:34,840 --> 01:58:39,400
Speaker 1: Matrix ans her dying line, not like this, which suddenly

2178
01:58:39,520 --> 01:58:44,000
Speaker 1: has an extra punch to it. Given this reading, counter

2179
01:58:44,120 --> 01:58:46,520
Speaker 1: Eve sold Entertainment Weekly in an interview for this most

2180
01:58:46,560 --> 01:58:49,520
Speaker 1: recent movie, there was an early draft of the original

2181
01:58:49,560 --> 01:58:52,200
Speaker 1: Matrix script where the Matrix avatar would be a different

2182
01:58:52,320 --> 01:58:55,560
Speaker 1: sex than the Zion reality. I think the studio wasn't

2183
01:58:55,600 --> 01:58:59,280
Speaker 1: ready for that version, he added. This subtext was made

2184
01:58:59,360 --> 01:59:02,720
Speaker 1: pretty text rule in twenty twelve when Lana Wachowski publicly

2185
01:59:02,760 --> 01:59:05,240
Speaker 1: came out as a trans woman while doing press for

2186
01:59:05,320 --> 01:59:08,480
Speaker 1: the film Cloud Atlas, and her sister Lily followed suit

2187
01:59:08,560 --> 01:59:11,800
Speaker 1: in twenty sixteen. This was all preceded by a lot

2188
01:59:11,840 --> 01:59:15,520
Speaker 1: of nasty gossip about the Wachowski's personal life. The tabloids

2189
01:59:15,560 --> 01:59:19,200
Speaker 1: had a field day when Dominatrix Ilsa Stritch, whose real

2190
01:59:19,280 --> 01:59:23,160
Speaker 1: name is Karen Winslow, accompanied Lana to the Matrix reloaded premiere.

2191
01:59:24,000 --> 01:59:28,320
Speaker 1: This got messier when Jake Miller, Winslow's estranged husband, popped

2192
01:59:28,360 --> 01:59:31,040
Speaker 1: up in the London tabloids to explain that Lana had

2193
01:59:31,120 --> 01:59:34,680
Speaker 1: stolen his wife after the two met in Winslow's Dungeon.

2194
01:59:35,600 --> 01:59:38,160
Speaker 1: Miller is a trans man who's better known these days

2195
01:59:38,200 --> 01:59:42,920
Speaker 1: as Buck Angel. Miller essentially outed Lana, claiming in the

2196
01:59:43,000 --> 01:59:46,000
Speaker 1: tabloids who paid for a story, that Lana was taking

2197
01:59:46,080 --> 01:59:49,720
Speaker 1: female hormones to prepare for a gender transition. Since then,

2198
01:59:49,760 --> 01:59:52,520
Speaker 1: the Wachowskis had become much more vocal about The Matrix's

2199
01:59:52,600 --> 01:59:55,920
Speaker 1: roots in the trans experience. Lily told the website them

2200
01:59:56,400 --> 01:59:58,760
Speaker 1: the Matrix is a trans allegory in that it was

2201
01:59:58,800 --> 02:00:01,800
Speaker 1: written by two closets trans women, and so all of

2202
02:00:01,840 --> 02:00:04,240
Speaker 1: the things that are in it are super duper trans.

2203
02:00:04,640 --> 02:00:07,280
Speaker 1: With all the decisions we made with that film, there's

2204
02:00:07,400 --> 02:00:11,200
Speaker 1: just this burbling transness simmering below everything. It's not like

2205
02:00:11,280 --> 02:00:14,120
Speaker 1: these were conscious decisions, but more like we're finding our

2206
02:00:14,160 --> 02:00:18,400
Speaker 1: way instinctively. It's these two closeted trans women. When people say, oh,

2207
02:00:18,480 --> 02:00:21,280
Speaker 1: it's a trans allegory, it's like, yeah, it is. But

2208
02:00:21,400 --> 02:00:24,280
Speaker 1: we weren't like, hey, let's write a trans allegory. That's

2209
02:00:24,320 --> 02:00:26,920
Speaker 1: not how it started. We were like, hey, let's write

2210
02:00:26,960 --> 02:00:30,400
Speaker 1: this action film, and then we got our and then

2211
02:00:30,440 --> 02:00:33,360
Speaker 1: we got our trans all over it, and then we

2212
02:00:33,440 --> 02:00:36,040
Speaker 1: got our trands all over it. I don't know how

2213
02:00:36,080 --> 02:00:41,120
Speaker 1: to put the emphasis on that phrase, but the Wachowski's

2214
02:00:41,120 --> 02:00:43,760
Speaker 1: would go on to create Sense eight, a sci fi

2215
02:00:43,960 --> 02:00:48,760
Speaker 1: series featuring transwomen Nomi Marx. Lana Wachowski told The New

2216
02:00:48,840 --> 02:00:51,200
Speaker 1: Yorker in twenty twelve how much she was struggling with

2217
02:00:51,280 --> 02:00:53,960
Speaker 1: her gender identity around the time of the second and

2218
02:00:54,080 --> 02:00:57,120
Speaker 1: third Matrix films. She said, for years, I couldn't even

2219
02:00:57,200 --> 02:01:00,800
Speaker 1: say the words transgendered to transsexual. When I began to

2220
02:01:00,880 --> 02:01:03,280
Speaker 1: admit it to myself, I knew I would eventually have

2221
02:01:03,400 --> 02:01:05,680
Speaker 1: to tell my parents and my brother and my sisters.

2222
02:01:06,640 --> 02:01:09,280
Speaker 1: This fact would inject such terror into me that I

2223
02:01:09,320 --> 02:01:14,520
Speaker 1: couldn't sleep for days. And because the British tabloids are

2224
02:01:15,040 --> 02:01:18,040
Speaker 1: the worst, hands down, Lily was moved to make a

2225
02:01:18,080 --> 02:01:21,240
Speaker 1: public statement in twenty sixteen when The Daily Mail turned

2226
02:01:21,320 --> 02:01:24,680
Speaker 1: up at her door pressing the issue. Statement to The

2227
02:01:24,720 --> 02:01:28,360
Speaker 1: Windy cd Times read in part, I just wanted needed

2228
02:01:28,600 --> 02:01:31,000
Speaker 1: some time to get my head right, to feel comfortable.

2229
02:01:31,800 --> 02:01:36,680
Speaker 1: But apparently I don't get to decide this, so that's horrible.

2230
02:01:37,040 --> 02:01:41,240
Speaker 1: Emily Vanderwolf, a critic who's written eloquently about trans Themes

2231
02:01:41,360 --> 02:01:44,640
Speaker 1: and the Matrix talk to NPR about the cognitive dissonance

2232
02:01:44,680 --> 02:01:47,320
Speaker 1: of the film's adoption by the alt right and its

2233
02:01:47,360 --> 02:01:51,520
Speaker 1: importance to the trans community. She says, if you're a transperson,

2234
02:01:52,080 --> 02:01:53,720
Speaker 1: there is sort of this idea that you're living in

2235
02:01:53,800 --> 02:01:56,720
Speaker 1: a muffling cocoon that's keeping you from seeing the reality

2236
02:01:56,800 --> 02:01:59,800
Speaker 1: of yourself. And that cocoon, to some degree, is the

2237
02:02:00,000 --> 02:02:03,040
Speaker 1: idea of fixed gender identity, which is one that society

2238
02:02:03,080 --> 02:02:05,760
Speaker 1: has built the top. And to be trands you have

2239
02:02:05,840 --> 02:02:08,520
Speaker 1: to sort of assail that idea, and in the process

2240
02:02:08,560 --> 02:02:11,400
Speaker 1: of doing so you may question other things about reality.

2241
02:02:11,560 --> 02:02:13,960
Speaker 1: But she also sees the universality of the film as

2242
02:02:14,000 --> 02:02:17,960
Speaker 1: a feature, not a bug. Quote. It does weirdly speak

2243
02:02:18,000 --> 02:02:20,960
Speaker 1: to the movie's cultural ubiquity, to this movie's ability to

2244
02:02:21,000 --> 02:02:23,160
Speaker 1: speak to all sorts of people in a similar way

2245
02:02:23,360 --> 02:02:25,640
Speaker 1: but to different ends that I think often marks the

2246
02:02:25,720 --> 02:02:29,600
Speaker 1: most important and greatest movies ever made. Well said, that's

2247
02:02:29,720 --> 02:02:30,160
Speaker 1: very true.

2248
02:02:31,400 --> 02:02:34,160
Speaker 2: I just want to throw this out. We're two sisseet

2249
02:02:34,160 --> 02:02:39,320
Speaker 2: white guys. Yeah, we're quoting a lot. Vander Werf and

2250
02:02:39,320 --> 02:02:44,200
Speaker 2: another piece for Vox identified what I me personally. The

2251
02:02:44,280 --> 02:02:48,120
Speaker 2: aforementioned Alex Heidez set White Guy is the most terrifying

2252
02:02:48,160 --> 02:02:51,120
Speaker 2: aspect of the Matrix. The movie, as we mentioned earlier,

2253
02:02:51,160 --> 02:02:53,000
Speaker 2: was released at a time when Hollywood was just beginning

2254
02:02:53,040 --> 02:02:57,560
Speaker 2: to understand and incorporate the Internet. Sandra Bullock's The Net

2255
02:02:57,760 --> 02:02:59,920
Speaker 2: was released the same year Keanu put out Johnny toman

2256
02:03:00,200 --> 02:03:03,040
Speaker 2: I Think Hackers came out around the same time. Vander

2257
02:03:03,080 --> 02:03:05,200
Speaker 2: Worff writes, the movie's coolest trick is the way it

2258
02:03:05,280 --> 02:03:07,800
Speaker 2: inverts what you'd expect from a movie released in nineteen

2259
02:03:07,880 --> 02:03:11,040
Speaker 2: ninety nine by making the Internet the poisonous capitalist space

2260
02:03:11,120 --> 02:03:14,960
Speaker 2: that keeps people emotionally numb. The Internet becoming a poisonous

2261
02:03:15,000 --> 02:03:19,640
Speaker 2: capitalist faux utopia is perhaps the matrix's most accidentally accurate prediction.

2262
02:03:21,040 --> 02:03:22,720
Speaker 2: We didn't waited this long to get to this point,

2263
02:03:22,800 --> 02:03:26,000
Speaker 2: but the film's central premise of machines converting humans into

2264
02:03:26,120 --> 02:03:30,520
Speaker 2: docile power sources has been well debunked. Robert Hurt, a

2265
02:03:30,600 --> 02:03:34,000
Speaker 2: Caltech based visualization scientist who has worked on many NASA projects,

2266
02:03:34,080 --> 02:03:38,040
Speaker 2: including the Splitzer space Telescope, told Esquire it happens to

2267
02:03:38,120 --> 02:03:40,440
Speaker 2: be my least favorite plot device in a sci fi

2268
02:03:40,560 --> 02:03:43,800
Speaker 2: movie in decades. Humans consume quite a lot of high

2269
02:03:43,880 --> 02:03:46,680
Speaker 2: energy products like food, and oxygen, and only thing that

2270
02:03:46,760 --> 02:03:49,520
Speaker 2: they produced that could count as energy would be basically heat.

2271
02:03:50,120 --> 02:03:51,800
Speaker 2: But if you took all the food just burned it,

2272
02:03:51,880 --> 02:03:53,760
Speaker 2: you'd get way more heat out of that. You can

2273
02:03:53,840 --> 02:03:57,080
Speaker 2: chock it up to thermodynamics and entropy. Some systems just

2274
02:03:57,120 --> 02:03:59,960
Speaker 2: don't process efficiently, and basically you can count on getting

2275
02:04:00,080 --> 02:04:03,080
Speaker 2: less energy out than you put in. But in a

2276
02:04:03,280 --> 02:04:08,040
Speaker 2: truly cosmically horrifying and hilarious turn of events, that's exactly

2277
02:04:08,120 --> 02:04:12,280
Speaker 2: what happened. With a different and more mundane slant, the

2278
02:04:12,400 --> 02:04:14,320
Speaker 2: utopian promise of the internet is a place where you

2279
02:04:14,360 --> 02:04:17,040
Speaker 2: could become your truest self has dissolved into a series

2280
02:04:17,080 --> 02:04:20,280
Speaker 2: of walled gardens controlled by the greediest, most soulless human

2281
02:04:20,320 --> 02:04:23,760
Speaker 2: beings possible. Rather than your physical energy, the internet and

2282
02:04:23,840 --> 02:04:27,040
Speaker 2: social media simply take your time, mental health, and productivity

2283
02:04:27,320 --> 02:04:31,520
Speaker 2: and turn it into sweet, monetizable data. Every fleece vested

2284
02:04:31,760 --> 02:04:35,960
Speaker 2: polo alto blue check mark dork Hawking ais of revolutionary

2285
02:04:36,000 --> 02:04:39,120
Speaker 2: tools a miniature agent smith seeking a way to ring

2286
02:04:39,240 --> 02:04:41,520
Speaker 2: every scent they can out of the human experience without

2287
02:04:41,520 --> 02:04:44,280
Speaker 2: getting too much of the stink on them. We didn't

2288
02:04:44,360 --> 02:04:47,480
Speaker 2: need the machines to do this. We just needed venture capitalists.

2289
02:04:48,520 --> 02:04:50,960
Speaker 2: The ultimate lesson of the matrix and the Internet, at

2290
02:04:51,080 --> 02:04:53,280
Speaker 2: least for the users who make up the platforms being

2291
02:04:53,360 --> 02:04:56,440
Speaker 2: choked to death by the technocapitalist set, could really still

2292
02:04:56,520 --> 02:04:58,960
Speaker 2: just boil down to you can count on getting less

2293
02:04:59,120 --> 02:05:03,240
Speaker 2: energy out then you put in. That does not, however,

2294
02:05:03,440 --> 02:05:07,760
Speaker 2: hold true for iHeartMedia's fine slate of podcast offerings, which

2295
02:05:07,840 --> 02:05:12,280
Speaker 2: you can find on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, and now

2296
02:05:12,280 --> 02:05:13,360
Speaker 2: you get YouTube.

2297
02:05:13,080 --> 02:05:15,400
Speaker 1: Shows and now on YouTube. That's right, check us out

2298
02:05:15,440 --> 02:05:16,240
Speaker 1: on YouTube, folks.

2299
02:05:17,200 --> 02:05:21,920
Speaker 2: Yeah, gonna walk all that back and says to us more.

2300
02:05:21,960 --> 02:05:25,040
Speaker 1: At our new partnership with People Magazine and People dot com.

2301
02:05:26,120 --> 02:05:30,360
Speaker 2: Admondly, this is just my take as a musician and writer.

2302
02:05:31,360 --> 02:05:33,760
Speaker 2: I have a hard time seeing the Internet and social

2303
02:05:33,800 --> 02:05:37,800
Speaker 2: media as anything but damaging. But if you want the

2304
02:05:37,840 --> 02:05:40,240
Speaker 2: most positive slant, you can keep taking it back to

2305
02:05:41,520 --> 02:05:44,560
Speaker 2: what Lana and Lily originally got out of it, which

2306
02:05:44,720 --> 02:05:47,920
Speaker 2: was an allegory for becoming the person that they always

2307
02:05:47,960 --> 02:05:50,560
Speaker 2: wanted to be all along, and they just happened to

2308
02:05:50,600 --> 02:05:52,560
Speaker 2: make one of the greatest movies of all time out

2309
02:05:52,560 --> 02:05:57,160
Speaker 2: of it. I'm Alex Igel. This has been too much information.

2310
02:05:57,680 --> 02:06:01,800
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening and you're Jordan. That's right, We'll see

2311
02:06:01,800 --> 02:06:03,240
Speaker 2: you next time, and there is no spoon.

2312
02:06:08,720 --> 02:06:11,840
Speaker 1: Too much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's

2313
02:06:11,880 --> 02:06:15,280
Speaker 1: executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtogg. The show's

2314
02:06:15,280 --> 02:06:17,680
Speaker 1: supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

2315
02:06:18,000 --> 02:06:21,080
Speaker 2: The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtog

2316
02:06:21,160 --> 02:06:22,240
Speaker 2: and Alex Heigel.

2317
02:06:22,080 --> 02:06:25,280
Speaker 1: With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.

2318
02:06:25,640 --> 02:06:27,680
Speaker 1: If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave

2319
02:06:27,760 --> 02:06:30,680
Speaker 1: us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the

2320
02:06:30,720 --> 02:06:34,000
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your

2321
02:06:34,040 --> 02:06:34,760
Speaker 1: favorite shows