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Features
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The Matrix Revelations
Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne, producer Joel Silver and effects wizard John Gaeta talk about noisy raindrops and virtual cinema.
Thursday, November 6, 2003
By Todd Gilchrist
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Yesterday, The Matrix completed its four-year journey to the screen, fulfilling its promise as one of the most ambitious and philoso-phically complex science-fiction series in many years. Warner Brothers shrewdly arranged for an early morning screening of the third and final episode, The Matrix Revolutions, as part of what it described as the world’s first to-the-minute simultaneous worldwide release of a film.
“Nine a.m. New York time is zero hour,” explained producer Joel Silver at a recent press conference for The Matrix Revolutions held at the resplendent new Disney Hall in downtown Los Angeles. “We felt that our fans really would want to see the movie right away, so we had the idea to open the movies on the same day.”
The first film was a mammoth hit and its’ sequel, The Matrix Reloaded, grossed some $134 million over the first weekend of its release. Expectations for the third and final film are high, but Silver cited another possible reason why the worldwide release might benefit the filmmakers. “Because of the reality of piracy and the fact that sometimes these movies are playing in theaters or before they get there they're available on street corners, we just decided to have an absolutely moment by moment release,” he said. “This movie will begin playing on almost 20,000 screens worldwide in over 63 countries.”
Of course, getting to that final moment when the film could satisfy audiences as successfully as the two previous installments was a long and not always easy road. Generally speaking, movie critics have not been kind to The Matrix Revolutions. Silver, along with cast and crew members - many of whom have been with the series since its inception - spoke about the challenge of completing Revolutions.
The film picks up in medias res, without the benefit of a recap for those who missed Reloaded: Neo (Keanu Reeves) is in a coma, locked somewhere between the Matrix and the real world. As Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) fight to save him from the grip of the fickle Merovingian (Lambert Wilson), the humans prepare for battle against an army of sentinels that threatens to destroy Zion and end the species once and for all. Meanwhile, the Program Formerly Known as Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) has evolved into an entity that even the Matrix cannot contain, and threatens both the Matrix and humanity, infiltrating both worlds with but one goal in mind: take over what is left of Earth.
For those who saw Reloaded, many of these final plot strands were ably set up to bridge the two films and provide a suitably epic conclusion to the series. Silver was always enthusiastic about the idea of making a sort of massive, two-part film that spanned four hours and which would be shot simultaneously.
“The filmmakers felt that to attack this in this fashion, to get these two scripts done and make them both at the same time, was the best idea,” Silver recalled. “I mean, it really probably could not have been done if we didn't do it like that. Who knows when we could have put them all together again and made the second movie.”
“Plus, the Wachowski brothers had the two scripts,” Silver continued. “If they had that and they were willing to do it and we had this wonderful company of players here that wanted to invest the years of their lives in the training and the shooting, then we said let's go for it.”
Nonetheless, the open-ended conclusion of Reloaded left some audience members scratching their heads. Unlike, say, the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, which was always clearly defined as three films that would sort of merge and eventually become one, The Matrix was a singular entity. Though the staggered release of Reloaded and Revolutions was revealed explicitly in their advertising, Silver still had some ‘splaining to do after the second film was met with mixed reviews and generally skeptical reaction from audiences.
“We were very clear at Reloaded that it was only half a movie,” Silver suggested. “And the reaction to the movie was, ‘We only saw half a movie’. So this is the other half of the picture and it is the resolution of the story. I really feel that you need to see both of these movies to really get the story that the boys intended for the end of this yarn, the end of this tale. And I think it's very satisfying.”
Everything that has an ending, however, has a beginning, and effects supervisor John Gaeta was there from the get-go. He described the distance the production has covered in the past four years, when the ideas used in the first were merely a technology nut’s pipe dream.
“In [the first] Matrix we created a method that only sort of pretended to be a technology,” Gaeta said. “Whereas for the two films that we just completed, we feel that we've actually acquired the technology that was suggested. The difference between the first and the last two films is that in the first film, we were trying to show a simulated universe that is sort of a construct of the mind.”
“We wanted to get the audience into this idea where you could do amazing things like detach the time and space of the camera from the time and space of the subject before it, something you could only do in your dreams or in a more direct way like a game, an [omniscient] point of view and things like that,” Gaeta added. “We are, in fact, producing something that we call virtual cinema, which really is to some extent, the virtual component of virtual reality. There's three virtuals in one sentence.”
Gaeta feels that this virtual cinema technique will directors in the future to start imagining previously unimaginable types of content. The development, however, was not one exclusively imagined by Gaeta, but one born out of a collaboration of many, not the least of which was the writing and directing team of Larry and Andy Wachowski.
“Larry and Andy, myself, many of my associates from the first film, we talked about that throughout the making of the first film in a sort of dreamy, ideal way,” Gaeta explained. “It was like, ‘This is what we think this might be,’ and sitting here today, I believe we have reached that destination.”
Gaeta’s expertise crosses virtually every previously known method of creating effects, often combing several in one sequence, or even one shot. “We used basically every possible avenue for getting some of the visual effects accomplished,” he said. “It's almost entirely computer generated, but we have variations of that, of course.”
Citing a few sparse examples used in the epic battle between the humans and the sentinels, Gaeta remarked, “We used miniatures for massive destruction because computing really complicated explosions and things being crushed and decimated. That's very heavy computing, and you can basically take your render farm out with an explosion.”
“It allowed us to work again with the art department to texture those things in the same sort of detailed way that we did some of the beautiful sets that we were shooting in Sydney,” he added, referring to the ornate and impossibly complex backdrops used in the first two films, such as during the Zion celebration or the Merovingian’s palace.
“Otherwise, it's entirely computer generated, of which we do two types, virtual and traditional, CGI creatures and things like that,” Gaeta said. “We have worked non-stop across the entire production span. Each year that ticked by, we would double and double again the size of the artist staff and the research and development people.”
| Though the success of the series could not have been possible without so many dedicated craftsmen working hard behind the scenes, the films would have never been able to generate such an indelible iconography without distinct on screen personalities to counterbalance all the digital trickery. For Keanu Reeves, who once again plays the role of Neo, the climax of the third episode provided him with not only an appropriately monumental set piece to end his affiliation with The Matrix, but a fairly exhausting one as well.
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In the sequence, Neo and Agent Smith fight one another for the last time, both hurtling towards their prospective destinies beneath a torrential downpour. Reeves’ training notwithstanding, the actor was sufficiently protected from potential harm, though his wardrobe has grown considerably since the first film.
“We wore wetsuits underneath our costumes,” Reeves reveals “Neo had, I think, 21 different cassocks, and I think five of them were used for the rain. Different weights, how the fabric looked in the rain and how it moved. So I had a light rain cassock, a dry, a talking cassock.”
| Even with his environment controlled, however, Reeves found that it couldn’t quite be contained. “Hugo and I found that when we would do the scenes we couldn’t hear each other,” he remembers. “The big, fat, juicy raindrops that they'd taken two months to design, were loud. So to try and feel the scene it was frustrating sometimes because you couldn’t hear yourself and you couldn’t hear your fellow actor.”
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With he history he has accumulated over the past four years, the challenge Reeves faced on the set of The Matrix Revolutions were eventually superseded by virtue of the actors’ rapport with one another. “On the first take when Hugo and I, Smith and Neo, fight, the rain came down and we realized that we couldn’t see each other,” Reeves continues. “But we'd fought so much together that we actually didn't have to see each other, which was kind of a cool thing. It was just dramatic. It was fun.”
Carrie-Anne Moss, who also uttered her first line of Matrix dialogue back in 1999, was too smitten with the passion of the filmmakers to refuse even the most daunting challenges, regardless of whether she quite understood them or not. “They are really extraordinary people, and they absolutely knew how they wanted to see each and every moment of this film,” Moss said. “We were just a conduit to their expression of the film, I think.”
| “We had so many great conversations,” she added. “They're really smart, interesting guys. It wasn't so important to me that I understood every single thing intellectually. For me it's about my heart understanding something and feeling things.”
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Moss’ fascination with the tapestry woven into The Matrix series by the Wachowskis extended to her off screen moments with the duo, and inspired more than a few lively on-set debates. “I sure loved hearing them talk about it, all of the ideas of the movie,” she said. “We all talked about it. “
“We're all I think very conscious people and looking to understand ourselves and the world more,” she continued. “The movie really reflects that, those ideas, and so in knowing them over, gosh, six years of my life, they absolutely created the character that I just gave life to. They told me how to do everything that I did. And I really wanted to give them that.”
| As the series’ prophet Morpheus, actor Laurence Fishburne suggested his off screen persona was similarly cryptic, challenging each of his interviewers with the same intense aversion to concise statements that he did to Neo and Trinity in the films. “With respect to what kids or young people will get from this divine trinity of these characters, it’s not for us to say,” Fishburne declared. “It's not for us to say. It's whatever they need. If they get whatever they need, then we've done proper service to not just the filmmakers, but the larger thing, which is the story itself.”
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Though no plans exist to continue the franchise, whether the final installment makes a mint or not, Fishburne seems satisfied with the indelible impression that Morpheus- and in fact the entire Matrix legacy- has made upon both popular culture and his own career. “The groovy thing about these characters is that they're going to live with us for the rest of our lives, so we don't necessarily have to say goodbye to them. We're going to be walking around with them for the rest of our lives, pretty much. So they're all a part of us now.”
The actor seems to rest easy with the fact that the films choose actively not to answer all of the questions they raise, suggesting that posing them in the first place is the true accomplishment. “I think what's great about it is that it doesn't really try to answer any of those questions for you,” he said. “I think it really engages you in a way.”
| Summing up the experience of watching the series, for those millions who have embraced its philosophical bent and bitten their nails watching Neo, Trinity and Morpheus escape death, Fishburne is no less poetic than his on screen alter ego. “It challenges the audience in thinking about these things and it operates on so many different levels that it allows you, if you want, to explore what the philosophies are inside of it and the religious symbolism that's inside of it,” he explained. “You can explore that. But if you want to take a really great ride and be purely entertained, you can do that as well.” |
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