Page 2: Career-defining roles

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It took a while to assemble the cast. It was particularly hard to find the right actor for the lead role of "Neo": The Wachowskis wanted Johnny Depp, then Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio both said yes and then no; Will Smith decided to shoot "Wild Wild West" (1999) instead. Looking back, Keanu Reeves is the perfect casting for the doubting Thomas A. Anderson, who gradually transcends his limitations and becomes the superhuman Neo.

Laurence Fishburne, with his sublime bearing and sonorous voice, is also ideal as the wise mentor Morpheus. If Will Smith had said yes to Neo, Fishburn’s role might instead have been played by Val Kilmer or even Arnold Schwarzenegger.

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The Matrix – The actors (19 Bilder)

The role of the hacker Trinity was offered to Janet Jackson, Salma Hayek and Sandra Bullock, among others. After "The Matrix" came out, Carrie-Anne Moss was so strongly identified with her role that she could not wear sunglasses in public without being recognized.

Hugo Weaving developed a deliberately neutral pronunciation for his fearsome agent Smith, sounding neither like a machine nor any particular nationality. As a native Australian, Weaving was one of the few actors who did not have to relocate for filming.

It was originally intended that Switch, played by Belinda McClory, would be a woman within the Matrix, and a man in the real world. This was rejected by the studio, and all that remained of the idea was the name – and that she is dressed in white in the Matrix, while the others wear black.

Scheduling problems in Australia

The ambitious action sequences demanded hard training: Martial arts choreographers from Hong Kong spent six months teaching the lead actors the complex movements. For jumps and somersaults, the stars were suspended from steel ropes ("wire fu") – a long-established practice in Hong Kong cinema, but a novelty for Western productions.

The actors were also given various books to help them understand the philosophical foundations of the film. One of them even appears in the movie: Neo uses a hollowed-out copy of "Simulacres et Simulation" by Jean Baudrillard to store his hacking programs. The philosopher later complained in interviews that the Wachowski's had misunderstood his ideas.

Although the actors' tough stunt training paid off, it was not without consequences: Keanu Reeves had to have an operation because two vertebrae had grown together. On the second day of shooting, Hugo Weaving injured his leg and had to undergo hip surgery. During a rehearsal for the lobby scene, Carrie-Anne Moss twisted her ankle and was therefore unable to perform some stunts.

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The Matrix – Visual Effects and Stunts (8 Bilder)

Due to these injuries, the original shooting schedule had to be reshuffled and all action scenes with Reeves and Weaving were moved to the end of the shoot. The delays understandably made the studio a little nervous..

To calm things down, the Wachowskis assembled a rough cut of the first ten minutes: Trinity's nocturnal escape from the Matrix agents over the rooftops, including stunt shots and the first bullet-time sequence. This had the desired effect: Warner Bros was reassured of their crew’s competence and quickly came to terms with the fact that the shooting time increased from 90 to 118 days.

When time freezes

Meanwhile, the special effects studio "Manex Visual Effects" under the direction of John Gaeta perfected the famous bullet-time effect. The basic idea was not new: in the 1980s, British artist Tim Macmillan carried out his first experiments by exposing filmstrips in parallel, something he christened "time slices".

In 1985, the metal band "Accept" had themselves filmed simultaneously by 13 cameras for the music video "Midnight Mover", with dizzying results. In 1995, Michel Gondry morphed individual images shot side by side at short intervals into one another for the Rolling Stones cover of "Like A Rolling Stone", thus achieving smoother transitions.

Slow-flying bullets had also been shown before "The Matrix": As early as 1981, the hero of the South African martial arts film "Kill and Kill Again" blocks a bullet in extreme slow motion. In the 1998 comic adaptation "Blade", a vampire dodges a bullet trailing a vortex of air.

John Gaeta wanted to combine the approaches of Tim Macmillan and Michel Gondry to create something new. He used computer simulations to set up a circle of up to 120 SLR cameras positioned in ascending order within a green screen studio. These still cameras used uniformly calibrated lenses; with film cameras mounted at the beginning and end of the circle.

The camera shutters were triggered within millisecond intervals so that each captured a minimally shifted instant of the action. It should be noted that all cameras were analog and had to be positioned, rotated and triggered by hand following the specifications set by the simulation. To smooth and extend the slow-motion effect, the actors moved slightly faster than normal.

Next, Manex Visual Effects scanned the footage, interpolated additional frames via morphing and placed the result in a computer-generated background composed of photos from the location. If you look closely at the famous bullet time sequence on the skyscraper roof, you will notice how the pistols Neo has previously thrown away disappear from the ground, only to suddenly reappear.

Since then, "bullet time" has been imitated and parodied countless times, not only in films such as "Charlie’s Angels" (2000) and "Scary Movie" (2000), but also in TV series such as "Hustle" (2004-2012), computer games such as "Max Payne" (2001) and even graphics benchmarks. By now, the effect has degenerated into a cliché.

Blue, green, red and orange

Another hugely influential element was the movie’s color scheme. "The Matrix" consistently used different shades for the virtual and real worlds. The Matrix is green like its code; the color of the code is an allusion to early computer monitors. The real world, on the other hand, is filmed in cold shades of blue to emphasize the loss of sunlight. In addition, Neo and Morpheus train in a virtual dojo in which warm tones dominate – because it is not part of the Matrix.

The set and costume designers had already paid attention to these color accents. Behind-the-scenes footage shows that the suits of the agents generated by the Matrix are dark green and that the high-rise lobby walls were painted in greenish tones. Red was avoided wherever possible to emphasize the color in two crucial scenes. (Are you still reading this or are you thinking about the woman in the red dress?)

When "The Matrix" hit theaters, the greens and blues were much less prominent than in the versions that have since been released on DVD, Blu-ray and streaming services. When "The Matrix" was made, digital color grading wasn’t quite there yet; thus the colors were enhanced photochemically. As a result, the green/blue differences were more subtle in the cinema, only to become more pronounced with each digital release. This changed in 2018 with the Ultra HD Blu-ray, for which the original negative was rescanned. The current Blu-ray edition also uses the new scan. However, some streaming services still show the older master.

Various comparisons of the color shifts in the Matrix releases can be found on YouTube. Even the better attempts should be taken with a pinch of salt: When converting HDR material to the SDR color space, some color shifts are inevitable.