The Matrix Resurrections Behind The Scenes
In early 2020 (before we knew what was coming) I answered a casting call for Project Ice Cream. Keanu Reeves was spotted in Alameda eating ice cream before this call went out so rumors theorized it was either for the next John Wick movie or it was for the yet-to-be-named The Matrix sequel. It turned out to be the latter, of course.
Hint: When you see it, keep an eye out for little easter eggs regarding ice cream speckled in. 🍦
This post is for supplementing my own memories of this experience as much as it is to brag about it to my friends. I don’t want to forget anything about it. I’ve been bottling this up for almost two years and am so happy with how it turned out!
I hope I gave enough time and respect to everyone by waiting to share all these stories and photos. I’m happy to remedy any wrongs I do with this post if I hear of a way to do so (comment or contact me).
Spoilers!
Go watch The Matrix Resurrections! It’s an excellent movie and I enjoyed every minute. This post is going to be full of spoilers for many parts of the Matrix universe, so don’t read any farther until you’ve seen it.
For the Uninitiated
I am possibly the biggest The Matrix fan on planet Earth. My dad took my brother and I to see it in theaters when it first came out and we had no idea what it was going to be. It completely blew teenage Corry away and changed my life in many ways.
It introduced me to philosophy. It led me down the road to figuring out my unique mental conditions. It opened my mind to imagining bigger and better things for myself than what the people around me could imagine for me.
Dissociation
The themes on the nature of reality and dissociation resonated with me in 1990’s America. I was certainly not the only one in my generation to feel this way.
It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. […]
Morpheus, The Matrix
That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage.
We had “Just Say No to Drugs”, abstinence-only sex education, pilgrims and Native Americans eating Thanksgiving dinner together, and illustrations of smiling slaves crammed down our throats just in school alone. In the wider sociological view we had eating disorder affected Kate Moss defining feminine beauty, a country openly debating if a blowjob counts as sex and/or cheating, and ignoring how many black and brown people were being killed in the streets by police. All this with Columbine and 9/11 on the horizon.
I walked the earth as an adolescent feeling detached from the social constructs around me: religion, miseducation, binary gender, compulsory heterosexual monogamy, and other forms of propaganda. The cognitive dissonance surrounding us has always been obvious to me, but at the time apparently not to anyone else — including adults society labeled intelligent. Even authority figures were either blind to it or actively taking part in what I saw as obvious deceptions. Later in life I’d learn the terms I’m using for this paragraph, but at the time I had nothing beyond the feeling I was alone.
Identity and Image
The Digital Self-Image (or Residual Self-Image as Morpheus calls it in the first movie) was my first bit of internal exploration into my gender identity and presentation. It started me on the path of asking questions of myself I hadn’t known were options before.
If I could look the way I wanted on the outside based on who I felt like on the inside, what would it be like?
Capitalism
I wouldn’t quite grasp the “born into bondage” bit for my own experience yet, because my first few jobs weren’t for base survival. They were to buy Magic cards, take my girlfriend to the movies, and save for my first car. Once I moved away from home, I started to feel locked into a hamster wheel when I realized how expensive it is just to exist and had the full burden of surviving capitalism as an adult.
I could go on forever about The Matrix universe, and I will upon request. Suffice to say, I would’ve done all of this for free.
Answering The Call
Before my first meeting of the day on a cold February morning, I arrive at a pair of large white tents behind a guarded security fence on the docks south of the Bay Bridge. I checked in for my appointment a little early because I was so excited.
After waiting around 30 minutes while other actors went in for fitting ahead of me — even late people and some who didn’t even have appointments — one of the costume team members came up to me. She said she was sorry for making me wait and they were waiting to hear back about something before she could fit me. I had no idea what she meant, but maintained my policy of being on my absolute best behavior to try and maximize my chances of being part of this movie.
A few minutes later, she came by and asked if I could make it to two daytime shoots in the next two days. Without hesitation I said “YES!” about as quietly as I could, but her grin told me I didn’t succeed in containing my childlike excitement. I later cleared it with my boss, who was also excited for me and agreed as long as I gave her some deets.
They didn’t tell me what the scene was going to be yet, but I’d soon learn my decade-long career in tech was finally about to amount to something. 🤣
They wanted me for the Deus Machina game studio scenes. When I saw this board, I was a bit confused about why they wanted me. Everyone looked very… not-gaming-industry in these shots. Perhaps they look like marketers and PMs, but certainly not the other 75% of a game studio. I suppose I was part of an effort to correct this.
Everything here is my own clothing I wore into the fitting. Exceptions only for the sneakers and I didn’t layer the black top over my hoodie this way (they needed to hide all logos). I found out later they sent Lana Wachowski a photo of me when they saw me walk up and she told them to get me for the other scene.
Aside: I want to mention how incredibly validating it is to have one of my absolute idols for style, creativity, and just general boss-ness look at my outfit and essentially give me a thumbs-up? 😆 Ugh!
They also had me try a second look to be a little more normie, but didn’t choose it.
First Day On Set
They had us put stickers over our smartphone cameras when we arrived each day and occasionally checked our phones to make sure they were still there. This was a bit annoying as I had just gotten my new iPhone that uses my face to unlock, but I made do.
As the shoots went on, these stickers turned out to be pretty crappy. They fell off on their own in people’s pockets and purses. It just became an honor system thing.
As you’ll see throughout this post, I snuck a few pictures whenever I could but never showed them to anyone until now to respect the movie and its creators. No matter how badly I wanted to.
We (about 40 of us) got dressed and made-up and took a bus from the port into the financial district and entered a large building that looks like pretty much any other in the area. We went up several floors in multiple elevator trips to a floor appearing like a startup company was just getting setup there but already using their conference rooms.
The day was full of a lot of waiting and pretending to work. We did mundane background stuff like type on laptops, have fake meetings, and chat by the water cooler. It was remarkably similar to a regular day in any office gig. 😂
I overheard Jude (the obnoxious game studio guy) walk into the office and say “Morning Bobbi. Morning, dude!” while I was standing in front of a whiteboard in the next room across the hall from them.
I was trying to figure out why he was calling Neo “Bobby” and I built up this idea of him not being Thomas Anderson anymore in this iteration of the Matrix. This turned out to be one of my thousands of silly overthinks during these scenes. I was constantly trying to piece stuff together, and it was super fun to be wrong about 90% of it.
I was never on camera in the final cuts from this sequence, but my position in the building was where I started from the next day.
Second Day on the Deus Machina Set
On day two there were hundreds of people lining the streets around the building waiting for us when our bus pulled up. Despite their disappointed faces that we weren’t Keanu, it was still mind-blowing to walk into this huge building lobby with barricades on either side of us while hundreds of screaming fans with their cameras out shouted questions at us. It was a trip.
Once inside, we had another day with a lot of waiting and I had a hard time resisting the urge to steal the awesome props. Instead I compromised and took some quick [unflattering] photos when no one was looking.
This is a good moment to mention how we were taken care of. Craft services were awesome. They followed us from set to set, sometimes fully across town and did their very best to keep us hydrated, caffeinated, and snacked up. When we broke for lunches (no matter what time it was, meal breaks were usually called lunch) the food was great. Catered by local companies, lots of options. It balanced out the constant snacking on chips, nuts, and Oreos pretty well.
And if anyone ever doubts the benefits of unionizing, I challenge them to do a movie and see the differences between how they treat SAG members versus non-union people. You’ll pay your membership fee immediately. They rounded me up to SAG for the Deus Machina days because I was one of the only non-members anyway, so I got paid more and I got the perks. I put in enough hours on this set to qualify for membership, but decided not to since I pretty much only want to do this for passion projects which don’t come to The Bay often.
SWAT Teams and Evacuation
This was the day shit went down in the game studio. We shot all the bits where the alarm was going off and we had to evacuate before the SWAT teams burst in and fought Morpheus and Neo inside.
We set up in our positions from the previous day, so I was in the conference room right across the hall from Anderson’s office. Then when the alarms went off we were instructed to follow an evacuation route toward the exit. We did a couple dry runs and they repositioned a few of us to get us evenly distributed and get the walking pace they wanted right.
And then when they started to set up for the first rolling take, I looked to my left and Keanu was less than 6 feet away. 🤩 We did five or six takes, each time he strode alongside me before asking the other actors what was going on as I turned a corner and couldn’t hear anything else.
We had no idea which direction the cameras were rolling from. We were surrounded from all directions by cameras, so we just had to act as naturally as we could without looking directly at any of them. I was terrified I’d be the extra who ruined a shot by looking straight at one, but I guess not!
One of the other background actors told me she saw me on the monitor and she thought I was definitely going to get into the shot. I figured she was just buttering me up because I was the least experienced and most enthusiastic extra there. Did I mention all the professional background actors there were incredibly nice?
The Swarm Night Shoots
They warned us we’d be standing on concrete in the cold for hours, so I bought layers of black comfortable flexible clothing and new running shoes. They were all incredibly worth it because we were still freezing out there.
I came prepared on night one pretty well, but I added an extra layer of socks and joggers for subsequent nights. Downtown SF is surprisingly windy and cold at 4am in February compared to what we Californians normally complain about during the day.
We were doing lots of running (up and downhill) repeatedly to get our blood pumping, but had long breaks between takes for our sweat to turn into ice on our skin.
I wanted so badly to get more photos of all the incredible fake ads they made for the street sets, but it was a lot harder to hide taking a photo when I was looking around or up at things than when I could take a selfie or a downward shot. Suffice to say, there were many fun references and in-jokes all around us.
Several shots were done by these huge super-advanced drones hovering over us. The helicopter flying over us as we chased the heroes down my San Francisco streets was so thrilling.
The Action on the Street
We saw Neo do the “fly away” motion and fail, so we figured out he couldn’t fly in The Matrix Resurrections for some reason. The fact that we were there to chase him escaping on a motorcycle should’ve been a greater indication of course.
There was a line of stunt people between us and the action in each scene, and we had to carefully step over them on the ground as they were shot or knocked away by vehicles or Neo’s powers.
It was so hard to not smile and laugh gleefully at being in the middle of this amazing action scene, but I had to stay robotic and angry. We couldn’t show how tired we were from running at full speed for multiple city blocks! It was tough to be all Terminator after multiple takes, especially on the uphill portions in Chinatown.
The Cars
Before I showed up for my fitting, I walked by a temporary bus terminal in downtown SF almost every day as I commuted into work. My coworkers and I noticed the terminal was fenced off and slowly filling up with cars in January. SFPD cars, random commuter style vehicles, and multiples of a few specific ones like identical black Mercedes SUVs and blue Ford Broncos.
As days went by, the vehicles would be moved around and some of them would even be smashed up in scary ways. Later, we’d figure out this was the holding area for the vehicles they were using for The Matrix Resurrections! When we arrived on the streets to do our night shoots, we’d see these vehicles in action.
We had no idea who the mysterious Sheperd character was while filming, but he looked badass smashing a black Mercedes SUV into police cars and other vehicles.
The blue Ford Bronco Lexy was driving almost killed some reckless extras on a few takes before they were sent home by [very smart and hard-working] production assistants. They were booting dumbasses off the set every night, and we were all safer for it.
The Stunts
They built these incredible rope rigs for the stunt teams to jump from while we ran madly down the streets after the motorcycle and cars. No one does stunts like these with practical effects anymore, and it looks so great in the final edit.
There’s a shot where almost a dozen people jump off a tractor trailer and Neo blasts them back into the side of that trailer. I was running on the opposite side of the street for this part, so I got to see it up close. When we shot this, two of the stunt people’s ropes got caught up and they bumped each other. They ended up being fine, but we were all worried for a little bit when the medics came out to check them. But it made the shot look incredibly real in the final cut.
For the part where Neo blasts a car head-on and Trinity ramps off it to jump over, we spent an entire night in Chinatown getting the shot. When Crystal Hooks (Carrie-Ann Moss’s motorcycle stunt double, who is fucking amazing) did this jump I was about a dozen feet away on her left running downhill next to the Bronco. The whole street burst out cheering after she landed it because she got incredible air.
The Kill Zone
We saw Sequoia (the operator “Seeq”) standing in the middle of the street as we all huddled around him. We tried to figure out who he was between takes. He wasn’t dressed like anyone else in the Matrix world. I wondered if he was a half-machine half-human hybrid who perhaps represented some cooperation between the two worlds. When I saw him appear as a projection within the Matrix in the first scene it made it all finally make sense.
Sadly, I got cropped off the edge for the part right before this when they show a bunch of our faces with the “Swarm eyes” but I can’t complain too much.
Wrapping Up
The final nights were mostly us getting all the big car crashes and explosions. The locals especially loved the shot of the Powell Street streetcar slamming into one of the cars. They had multiples of each car to destroy, but these were still pretty much one-take must-be-perfect moments. Luckily, we weeded out most of the extras who were either being careless or couldn’t handle the exertion in the previous nights.
At the end, we were completely exhausted and incredibly proud of ourselves for surviving. It’s fun to remember how punch drunk and tired we all were at the end of each of these shoots. Once we were officially released, we could finally take a few selfies together.
I didn’t get selfies with many others, especially people I worked with in the Deus Machina scenes because they weren’t at the night scenes. Some of us exchanged information and kept in touch, but most of our bonding was in the moment. They were definitely all really nice people.
Seeing The Matrix Resurrections in the Theater
I had no idea what was making the final cut for The Matrix Resurrections until I saw it myself, of course. Friends would tell me they were sure I’d be in it, but I was trying not to have elevated expectations. For the entire year and a half leading here, I was practicing gratitude for the experience and not staking my emotions on whether or not I would appear on screen.
I took the 22nd off from work, and I booked the first IMAX tickets available at my local theater for myself and a handful of friends who wanted in too. I dressed for the occasion.
I was nearly certain I wouldn’t be in any of the backgrounds until the alarms went off at Deus Machina, because I didn’t see a single camera aiming our way in the conference rooms. I kept scanning the background whenever they were at the game studio anyway, but much of it was out of focus. Once the alarm went off around 30 minutes in, I went on high alert though and saw a quick motion blur of my head go by.
I bounced in my seat happily, thinking a small bit of the side of my head made it in and being ecstatic for just that purple blur! I struggled not to disturb the others around me watching the movie, but I wanted to squeal with delight.
After the scene with Morpheus in his awesome yellow suit I knew we weren’t returning back to Deus Machina, so I just watched the movie normally until we got to the Swarm scenes. I wasn’t clearly pictured in any of those, but I was happy that our work made it into the final cut. There were so many takes and retakes those nights and even some questions about whether what we were trying to do with real humans instead of post-produced CG was even possible. I’m so happy my and the other background actors’ experiences running around the SF streets weren’t for naught.
As I got home that night, a friend posted a screen shot of the scene and it showed my face! No blurs or anything!
I quickly went to HBO Max and grabbed my own screenshots with timestamps. For days after, I floated around on a cloud of ego and geeky super-fan bliss. Friends shared that I was in the movie, and I got my 15 minutes of itty-bitty background “fame”. I indulged.
My Critiques
Honestly, I knew I was going to love this movie before I went in. It could’ve been worse than The Matrix Revolutions, and I’d still have enjoyed it. Luckily it wasn’t worse, and it makes the originals even better. Call me a fangirl or fanboy; whichever really. 🤣
Related Reading: Too many movies right now are “about trauma.” The Matrix Resurrections actually does the work. – Vox
I want to balance my enthusiasm out a bit and touch on the few less-than-perfect portions of The Matrix Resurrections. I may be incredibly biased, but I’m not blind. 😉
The music was less impactful and dynamic than the previous movies. We re-watched all the other movies in the week leading up to this release, and all of them had incredible soundtracks integrated beautifully into the cinematography and storytelling. This one’s music felt less so. Not bad; just not as good as the high expectations set by their predecessors.
The martial arts scenes are weak. We can’t expect everything with martial arts in it to be The Raid or John Wick, but The Matrix was a huge part of why those movies exist today. They didn’t necessarily need to break new boundaries, but this iteration didn’t even measure up to the weakest fighting sequences in the previous ones. The camera work and fight choreography were blurry and had a lot of quick cuts, which made some of the action confusing.
More importantly, individual characters weren’t communicating with their fighting styles. When Neo fought Smith in the bathroom, their history or personalities weren’t clearly contrasted with how they fought. Smith had some great moves like the spinning elbow smashing Neo through the pillar and his homage to the hundred punches to the ribs from their original subway scene. But Neo didn’t feel like he had his own style, except for the double roundhouse off the wall.
In every previous iteration of The Matrix movies, each character had their own distinct fighting style. Even the less prominent ones like Ghost and Niobe were given individuality in their fighting styles, which are most evident in the [rushed, unpolished, and buggy] Enter The Matrix video game. The concept in general felt deprioritized for this movie.
The Matrix Resurrections was much more about the metaphysics of the Matrix universe and the changes the factions and characters have gone through over sixty years. At those things, it did a great job and I obviously still enjoyed the hell out of it.
Take-Aways
Even if I never got to see myself on screen, this would still have been one of the coolest experiences of my entire life. Before I narrowed my education path down to computer science and graphic design, I was into theater and multimedia production as well. I wanted to make movies almost as much as I wanted to make video games.
Having a chance to see thousands of people all working together in a chaotic environment using the latest technology to film a few seconds of incredible action was… I’ve run out of adjectives. I felt incredibly lucky to witness it, and I have even more respect than I already did for everyone who dedicates themselves to this craft.
I want more movies where we use real practical effects like these. I’m not satisfied with hundreds of expendable CG humans running around like in Marvel movies. This felt so much realer, and I hope audiences notice the difference and enjoy it.
Thank You
Thank you Dad for taking me to the movies all the time as a kid. You helped build up my love and appreciation for the arts for my entire life, and though I never got into classical music or some of the bands you like I definitely got a lot out of where you started me off. 💖
Thank you Daisy for being so encouraging and supportive. When I doubted if I could do it, you encouraged me. You understood how much this meant. You picked me up from the camp at 5am several times so I could get home, shower, change and go into the office again at 9. You even let me reschedule our Valentines Day plans for this. You are awesome.
Thank you Jenn for being an understanding boss while I was sending you short-notice PTO requests and showing up as a zombie fueled entirely by caffeine. It was great working for someone who understood how much this meant to me and who could share some of my excitement about it.
Thank you Dwyer Casting and everyone else on the production for letting me be part of this awesome adventure and creating an excellent new entry into the universe I love so much. I will never forget it.