After his transhumanist science fiction series Sense8, broadcast on Netflix from 2015 to 2018, Lana Wachowski had decided to stop filming. Her sister Lilly, two years her junior, co-creator of the series, agreed. The Wachowski tandem wanted to take a break, after having marked the film industry with Matrix, their cult film released in 1999, extended by two episodes (Matrix Reloaded, Matrix Revolutions). At the time, the trilogy was signed by the Wachowski brothers, Larry and Andy. Since then, the two directors have made their gender transition. In 2010, Larry became Lana; in 2016, Andy became Lilly.
The break didn’t last long. Lana Wachowski releases the fourth opus of the saga on December 22, Matrix Resurrections. Lilly, who since her transition has been less interested in science fiction, has not associated with the film.
The director explained to the cinema site Reel Chicago (her hometown) what motivated her to bring back from nothing Leo (Keanu Reeves), the rebel of the machine civilization, and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss ), twenty-two years after the first Matrix. “ Our parents got sick, she says. My wife and I returned to Chicago to accompany them during the last months of their existence. “ The filmmaker wanted to recreate a climate that would appease her pain. “One night my brain resuscitated these two characters who had died. I went downstairs and started to write. ” Result: the nostalgic story of the return of the heroes of Matrix. “Something tragic made me want to go back”, she explains.
Wachowski’s parents – Ron, a businessman and Lynn a nurse – were avid moviegoers. In Chicago, they took the four children to the movies, sometimes for several screenings in a row… without considering the warnings to the parents. Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001, a space odyssey, released in 1968, marked Lana. She first hated the black monolith which allows one of the primates to dominate its congeners. When his father explained to him the symbolic dimension of the work, “Something started in me, she told the New Yorker in a portrait published in September 2012. 2001 is one of the reasons I make movies ”.
In elementary school, another feeling was revealed to her. In his Catholic establishment, girls and boys wore different uniforms and occupied separate rows. The day of the start of the school year, in 9e (equivalent to 3e in France) she walked towards the row of girls, aware at the same time that she did not have the proper outfit. Unable to join the boys, she positioned herself in the middle, at the intersection of the genders, under the forbidden gaze of the nun and the other students. “After that, I went into hiding and found great solace in the books, preferring fantasy worlds to this one. “
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