Development In 1994, the Wachowskis presented the script for the film
Assassins to
Warner Bros. Pictures. After reading the script,
Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the company's president of production at the time, decided to purchase it and included two more films,
Bound and
The Matrix, in the contract. The Wachowskis first directed
Bound, which became a critical success. Using this momentum, they asked to direct
The Matrix. In 1996, the Wachowskis pitched the role of Neo to
Will Smith. Smith explained on his
YouTube channel that the idea was for him to be Neo, while Morpheus was to be played by
Val Kilmer. He later explained that he did not quite understand the concept and he turned down the role to instead film
Wild Wild West.
Brad Pitt also turned down the role of Neo.
Madonna also turned down an undisclosed role, a decision she would later regret.
Joel Silver soon joined the project as producer. Although the film had key supporters, including Silver and Di Bonaventura,
The Matrix was still a big gamble for Warner Bros., according to
Screened. The studio was investing $60 million in a script by a pair of relatively inexperienced directors who wanted to use complicated special effects that had never been achieved before. The storyboard eventually earned the approval of Warner Bros., and the decision was made to film in Australia to make the most of the budget. According to editor
Zach Staenberg, after the production team sent an edit to studio executives of the film's first few minutes—featuring Trinity's encounter with police and Agents—the project had "total support" from Warner Bros.
Pre-production The cast were required to be able to understand and explain the premise of
The Matrix. In early 1997, the Wachowskis had Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss read
Simulacra and Simulation,
Kevin Kelly's
Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, and
Dylan Evans's ideas on
evolutionary psychology before they read the film's script. Yuen was optimistic but then began to worry when he realized how unfit the actors were. Prior to the pre-production, Reeves underwent a two-level fusion of his cervical (neck) spine due to spinal cord compression from a herniated disc ("I was falling over in the shower in the morning"). He was still recovering by the time of pre-production, but he insisted on training, so Yuen let him practice punches and lighter moves. Reeves trained hard and even requested training on days off. However, the surgery still made him unable to kick for two out of four months of training. As a result, Reeves did not kick much in the film. Weaving had to undergo
hip surgery after he sustained an injury during the training process. Filming began in March 1998 and wrapped in August 1998;
principal photography took 118 days. Due to Reeves's neck injury (see above), some of the action scenes had to be rescheduled to wait for his full recovery. As a result, the filming began with scenes that did not require much physical exertion, such as the scene in Thomas Anderson's office, the interrogation room, Locations for these scenes included
Martin Place's fountain in Sydney, halfway between it and the adjacent Colonial Building, and the Colonial Building itself. During the scene set on a government building rooftop, the team filmed extra footage of Neo dodging bullets in case the
bullet time process did not work. The bullet-time fight scene was filmed on the roof of
Symantec Corporation building in Kent Street, opposite
Sussex Street. Moss performed the shots featuring Trinity at the beginning of the film and performed all the wire stunts herself. During the rehearsal of the lobby scene, in which Trinity runs on a wall, Moss injured her leg and was ultimately unable to film the shot in one take. She stated that she was under a lot of pressure at the time and was devastated when she realized that she would be unable to do it. The
dojo set was built well before the actual filming. During the filming of these action sequences, there was significant physical contact between the actors, earning them bruises. Reeves's injury and his insufficient training with wires before filming meant he was unable to perform the triple kicks satisfactorily and became frustrated with himself, causing the scene to be postponed. The scene was shot successfully a few days later, with Reeves using only three takes. Yuen altered the choreography and made the actors pull their punches in the last sequence of the scene, creating a training feel. The filmmakers originally planned to shoot the subway scene in an actual
subway station, but the complexity of the fight and related wire work required shooting the scene on a set. The set was built around an existing train storage facility, which had real train tracks. Filming the scene when Neo slammed Smith into the ceiling,
Chad Stahelski, Reeves's stunt double, sustained several injuries, including
broken ribs, knees, and a
dislocated shoulder. Another stuntman was injured by a hydraulic puller during a shot in which Neo was slammed into a booth. The office building in which Smith interrogated Morpheus was a large set, and the outside view from inside the building was a large, three story high
cyclorama. The helicopter was a full-scale, lightweight mock-up suspended by a wire rope operated by a tilting mechanism mounted to the studio roof beams. The helicopter had a real minigun side-mounted to it, which was set to cycle at half its regular (3,000 rounds per minute) firing rate. To prepare for the scene in which Neo wakes up in a pod, Reeves lost and shaved his whole body to give Neo an emaciated look. The scene in which Neo fell into the sewer system concluded the principal photography.
Sound effects and music Dane A. Davis was responsible for creating the sound effects for the film. The fight scene sound effects, such as the whipping sounds of punches, were created using thin metal rods and recording them, then editing the sounds. The sound of the pod containing a human body closing required almost fifty sounds put together. The film's
score,
The Matrix: Original Motion Picture Score, was composed by
Don Davis. He noted that mirrors appear frequently in the film: reflections of the blue and red pills are seen in Morpheus's glasses; Neo's capture by Agents is viewed through the rear-view mirror of Trinity's motorcycle; Neo observes a broken mirror mending itself; reflections warp as a spoon is bent; the reflection of a helicopter is visible as it approaches a skyscraper. Davis focused on this theme of reflections when creating his score, alternating between sections of the orchestra and attempting to incorporate
contrapuntal ideas. Davis' score combines orchestral, choral, and synthesizer elements; the balance between these elements varies depending on whether humans or machines are the dominant subject of a given scene. In addition to Davis' score,
The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture also features music from acts such as
Rammstein,
Rob Dougan,
Rage Against the Machine,
Propellerheads,
Ministry,
Lunatic Calm,
Deftones,
Monster Magnet,
The Prodigy,
Rob Zombie,
Meat Beat Manifesto and
Marilyn Manson.
Production design In the film, the code that composes the Matrix itself is frequently represented as downward-flowing green characters. This code uses a custom typeface designed by Simon Whiteley, In a 2017 interview at
CNET, he attributed the design to his wife, who is from Japan, and added, "I like to tell everybody that The Matrix's code is made out of Japanese sushi recipes". "The color green reflects the green tint commonly used on early
monochrome computer monitors". Lynne Cartwright, the Visual Effects Supervisor at
Animal Logic, supervised the creation of the film's opening title sequence, as well as the general look of the Matrix code throughout the film, in collaboration with Lindsay Fleay and Justen Marshall. For the scene when Neo wakes up in the pod connected to the Matrix, the pod was constructed to look dirty, used and sinister. During the testing of a breathing mechanism in the pod, the tester suffered hypothermia in under eight minutes, so the pod had to be heated.
Kym Barrett, costume designer, said that she defined the characters and their environment by their costume. For example, Reeves's office costume was designed for Thomas Anderson to look uncomfortable, disheveled and out of place. Barrett sometimes used three types of fabric for each costume, and also had to consider the practicality of the acting. The actors needed to perform martial arts actions in their costumes, hang upside-down without people seeing up their clothing, and be able to work the wires while strapped into the harnesses.
Visual effects " effect was created for the film. A scene would be computer-modeled to decide the positioning of the physical cameras. The actor then provided their performance in a
chroma key setup, while the cameras were fired in rapid succession, with fractions of a second delay between each shot. The result was combined with CGI backgrounds to create the final effect at (0:33).|alt=Video sample of the film The film is known for popularizing a
visual effect Bullet time has been described as "a visual analogy for privileged moments of consciousness within the Matrix", and throughout the film, the effect is used to illustrate characters' exertion of control over time and space. The Wachowskis first imagined an action sequence that slowed time while the camera pivoted rapidly around the subjects, and proposed the effect in their screenplay for the film. When
John Gaeta read the script, he pleaded with an effects producer at
Mass.Illusion to let him work on the project, and created a prototype that led to him becoming the film's visual effects supervisor. The method used for creating these effects involved a technically expanded version of an old art photography technique known as time-slice photography, in which an array of cameras is placed around an object and triggered simultaneously. Each camera captures a still picture, contributing one frame to the video sequence, which creates the effect of "virtual camera movement"; the illusion of a viewpoint moving around an object that appears frozen in time. the computer-generated "lead in" and "lead out" slides were filled in between frames in sequence to get an illusion of orbiting the scene. Manex Visual Effects used a
cluster farm running the
Unix-like operating system FreeBSD to render many of the film's visual effects. Manex also handled creature effects, such as Sentinels and machines in real-world scenes;
Animal Logic created the code hallway and the exploding Agent at the end of the film. DFilm managed scenes that required heavy use of digital compositing, such as Neo's jump off a skyscraper and the helicopter's crash into a building. The ripple effect in the latter scene was created digitally, but the shot also included practical elements, and months of extensive research were needed to find the correct kind of glass and explosives to use. The scene was shot by colliding a quarter-scale helicopter mock-up into a glass wall wired to concentric rings of explosives; the explosives were then triggered in sequence from the center outward, to create a wave of exploding glass. The
photogrammetric and image-based
computer-generated background approaches in
The Matrixs bullet time evolved into innovations unveiled in the sequels
The Matrix Reloaded and
The Matrix Revolutions. The method of using real photographs of buildings as texture for 3D models eventually led the visual effect team to digitize all data, such as scenes, characters' motions, and expressions. It also led to the development of "Universal Capture", a process that samples and stores facial details and expressions at high resolution. With these highly detailed collected data, the team was able to create virtual cinematography in which characters, locations, and events can all be created digitally and viewed through virtual cameras, eliminating the restrictions of real cameras. == Release ==