25 years ago Lilly and Lana Wachowski changed cinema and the world forever. The Matrix was a cultural phenomenon that reinvented action movies, science-fiction, and our culture’s view of developing technology. It arrived at the end of one century as a beacon of warning and hope for the century to come.

In the years immediately following its success, the Wachowskis’ made two wonderful, often misunderstood sequels, followed by a body of work of increasing ambition: Speed Racer, Cloud Atlas, Jupiter Ascending, and Sense8. Throughout these years Lana and then Lilly came out as trans women, causing their work — especially Bound and The Matrix — to be viewed through a new lens.

But in recent years, the duo has split to work on separate projects. Lana made The Matrix Resurrections while Lilly worked on the Showtime series Work in Progress. This seemed to mark a shift for Lilly away from her usual big budget sci-fi toward smaller projects about explicitly queer characters.

In anticipation of Newfest’s 25th anniversary screening of The Matrix, I spoke to Lilly about her experience making the film, as well as her hopes for cinema’s future.

Photo by Christa Holka

Drew: I wanted to start by talking about style. Bound is a very ambitious first film and The Matrix is an ambitious film for, well, any point in a career. In terms of camera movement and cinematic language, how did you and Lana develop your style?

Lilly: With art, it’s always about what gets your motor running. The types of films we watched back then were super influential on us. We were partnering with Bill Pope (DP on Bound and The Matrix trilogy) who had done a bunch with Sam Raimi. But I’d say it came equally from the types of comic books we were reading like Frank Miller and Alan Moore.

Drew: Was it a situation where you had an idea for what the image would look like and then you worked it out with Bill Pope and his team? I feel like some people — especially if coming from being writers — would use their first films to get used to directing, but Bound and The Matrix both feel fully formed in their voice.

Lilly: I think it’s just that in the types of films we liked the camera moved. We didn’t want to be observers in our stories. We wanted the audience to feel by way of camera and design and lighting and sound. On Bound, we were learning while we were earning. And so we were informed by the folks we had surrounded ourselves with in those days like Bill Pope, like our editor Zach Staenberg, like our sound designer Dane Davis. They all had equal parts in helping us form our vocabulary of how we express ourselves in our movies. But a lot of it came from the types of movies we were enjoying at the time like Cronenberg and David Lynch and Steven Soderbergh and older filmmakers like Hitchcock and Billy Wilder and Kurosawa. It’s endless. The well from where our creative voice comes from is as vast as the human experience! We’re grabbing it from all over. And nowadays, for me, going and looking at the MCA and the Art Institute informs the way I work as well.

We had an art background from my mom who was a painter, so on Bound we tried to draw some of the images ourselves and storyboard. The two women touching the wall was an image we knew we wanted to achieve. Then on The Matrix, when we  had the resources to get proper artists, it became a document where you could sit down and page by page watch the entire movie. That’s an approach that we probably relied on too heavily in those days. You can see it in those moments of pure graphic quality like the slow to the fast or the two figures jumping and colliding in the air and falling toward camera. All of those things look great when you’re putting them in these storyboards. But I think there’s also a limiting quality to it sometimes. Now I would rely less on storyboards and focus more on what the actors are doing and an organic quality the performers can bring.

Drew: Speaking of actors, what was the casting process like for The Matrix?

Lilly: The casting process was arduous. It’s worse nowadays, but even back then you couldn’t greenlight a movie without certain names preordained by the studio. We went through this huge list of folks who Warner Bros. wanted and saw as the only way the movie could go forward. They were all these A-list big names and they all passed. We got to this moment where they were like, well maaaybe Keanu could be a guy who could get it going. He wasn’t enough for Warner Bros., but we’d gone through all the other names on their list. We went to Keanu and after having sat in meeting after meeting with all these other A-list celebrities, Keanu was the first person who wanted to have deep, in the weeds conversations about what the story and the script were about. He was the only one who really understood it. All of our ideas of who we thought Keanu was were completely shattered and we were like this guy is going to be GREAT. And he was.

If anybody else had been in that part, we aren’t here I don’t think. All of those films that came after The Matrix where suddenly you have celebrities training and doing these fight sequences. I don’t think that happens. It’s all because of this guy. He said, yes, I want to do this and I want to do it the way that you want it to be done. He took months out of his schedule to prep and learn how to do kung fu. And you have to think about Keanu back then. You can’t see The Matrix again the way you saw it back then. Because now he’s fucking John Wick.

Drew: (laughs)

Lilly: He’s a destroyer of worlds. But back then he wasn’t. So there’s this shock to suddenly see this guy doing all this shit. It’s magic.

Drew: Did the rest of the cast fall into place after that? Or was the rest of the process as arduous?

Lilly: There was a relative scaling down of the movie after we got Keanu. But we still had to go through another list of dudes who Warner Bros. wanted for Morpheus. We didn’t want those guys, we wanted Laurence. But they said no, we weren’t going to get Laurence. We went through all of the other guys, and they all said no, so then we said, well what about Laurence? And then they said, yes, but you have to make it for even less, and you have to go to Australia, and all of this other shit. But we were just like, okay, yeah, we’ll do it. We’ll go to Australia. We’ll do whatever we have to do. It was just fighting and wrangling over the budget constantly, constantly. We were a week from production and they brought us back to America to have a one day meeting to try and cut money out of the budget. They wanted to cut the helicopter sequence at the end.

Drew: No.

Lilly: We were like this is your trailer! And you want to cut it? Then they were like well what about these other moments? Can we cut out this chase sequence? They called them carrot items. Eventually we just went back to Australia and were like we’ll just figure out a way to do it. And we got it done somehow. (laughs)

Drew: The last actor I want to ask about is Carrie-Anne Moss. Because I wonder how those same studio executives felt about who would play this female action hero and whether they had ideas about that character that were counter to what you wanted. Was that ever an issue?

Lilly: No. Trinity was not a character they were as invested in.

Drew: (laughs) Wow. Well, I guess it worked out that they didn’t care about her.

Lilly: I mean, they did. I’d say Warner Bros. was medium interested. And when we brought in Carrie they were like well she’s relatively unknown but has some experience and could be good. And then we did a whole round of chemistry and movement tests.

Drew: So once you were shooting, did you feel the budget restraints? How long was the shoot?

Lilly: 119 days.

Drew: Did you generally feel like you were getting what you needed?

Lilly: Generally, yes. I think those early days were most difficult in terms of being in another country and so far from home. But because we had done so much prep and drawn the entire movie, we had this road map to getting the movie made. The biggest hurdles were in terms of the visual effects which were more toward the back end of our schedule.

Once we were in Australia, we started building sets and started scouting. There was a whole complicated thing of what buildings we would use and were we going to shoot in Sydney or were we going to shoot in the Gold Coast. The Gold Coast was like you can do anything, you can fly a helicopter wherever you want, just come to our city. But they just didn’t quite have the resources we needed. The offer to fly a helicopter wherever we wanted was tempting but we wanted a Chicago look and it was definitely not Chicago.

Drew: I know sometimes filmmaking duos have clearly delineated tasks. Did you and Lana have different areas you focused on or were you more in tandem?

Lilly: We were mostly in tandem. Back then I was way more introverted, but we both were. And the extent of our directing was Bound which was only 33 days of shooting. Luckily, we had an established rapport with Bill and we had an established rapport with the visual effects team because we’d been working with them for so long. We had this clip we made with them as a proof of concept for bullet time. So all of that felt pretty good. It allowed us to feel comfortable enough on-set to share responsibilities in different ways.

Drew: Did you feel a noticeable difference in how you were treated in Hollywood after transitioning? First, as a duo after Lana transitioned publicly and then personally after you transitioned publicly.

Lilly: There’s part of me that would answer it in a slightly blunt way. Which is when you make the amount of money we made for Warner Bros. via the franchise it obfuscates most transphobia. I think that’s probably pretty accurate. After those films came out, we had a lot of control over what we wanted to do. And, you know, we used it! (laughs) I don’t know if it was our undoing, but we made what we wanted to make and that’s not undoing to me. I’m pretty happy with the stuff we made after.

But all of the problems we have today in terms of the right wing and the class struggle all of that was bubbling under the surface back then. So you have a film like Speed Racer which is extremely anti-capitalist and it’s being cooked up in a very capitalist system where you’re creating consumer art. The people who came out to really rail against that film were, in my opinion, the same folks who are part of propaganda campaigns nowadays. They’re the predecessors of these movements. So is there a level of transphobia in people bashing some of our work? I’d say sure, it’s bubbling under.

When I came out, I wasn’t interested in staying in the business anymore. The only reason I came back was because I felt compelled to add my shoulder to the idea of not just representation but centering queerness and transness in art. I felt like it was important to get the art out and it was super important to get trans and queer artists working. And my experiences on-set of Work in Progress really changed my perspective in the industry.

I mean, transphobia is everywhere. The first picture of me that anybody saw beyond the selfie that came out in The Windy City Times is this hideous photo that somebody took at the GLAAD Media Awards when I was there for Sense8. It’s this 150mm lens super close up of my big head and I’m scowling or something. (laughs) This was the picture that popped up when you googled me. It was everywhere! And the reason it’s out there is because some transphobic editor or photographer said, oh let’s use this one.

Nowadays when I go into these meetings — and I’m taking a lot of meetings these days because I’m trying to make queer shit, I’m trying to make trans shit — I go in and I talk about representation, I talk about the GLAAD Index and how there were only two trans characters in all of the mainstream movies produced last year. I’m saying all of this. I’m saying there is a problem that is happening politically and legislatively that is targeting trans people and what is happening in our industry is part and parcel of that and we have to do something about it. I go in these meetings and I don’t know if they’re transphobes or not. (laughs) But I have my combat boots on and I’m ready to start mixing it up.

Drew: (laughs) Yeah I’m interested in the shift that seems to have taken place in your recent work. You seem to be more focused on grounded queer stories as opposed to big budget sci-fi action. I imagine it’s easier to get the money to make something like Work in Progress than to get the money to make something like Sense8. In your ultimate, wildest dreams, if you could run Hollywood and all of our lives were amazing because you were running Hollywood, would you want to combine those? Would your dream be to have big budget sci-fi action that is super explicitly queer and trans? Or are you now more interested in these other genres as an artist?

Lilly: I’m interested in all of it! One of the things I’m doing is trying to create a company with some partners called Anarchist United. It will be a studio wholly owned by a foundation. It’s owned by this 501c3, the 501c3 provides grants for artists and young filmmakers with marginalized points of view, hopefully those people will create stuff, bring it over to the studio, the studio can make it, and then fund the foundation. So you create this evergreen operation that can hopefully exist outside of the studio system if necessary.

And within that I have my fingers in a lot of different projects. Some of the projects are big, some of the projects are small, but they’re all queer and trans. I’ve just written a script with my partner called The Hunted which is sort of a response to all of the horrible anti-trans stuff that’s going on in the world. What if trans people could form this almost weather underground level of resistance? It becomes a murder mystery that goes up the ladder into the furthest reaches of government. So I have that. I’m involved in the adaptations of a couple of different trans books: Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt and Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox. I’m trying to do an adaption of this wonderful comic book called Cosmoknights with Emily Andras, the woman behind Wynonna Earp. It’s lesbians in space! It’s fantastic!

So I’m all over the place! I’m trying to do all of it at the same time.

Drew: That’s amazing. I’m so excited for this era of yours. I’m really happy to have you in the industry that can so often feel hopeless. It feels really good to have you there with those combat boots on.

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