In a recent appearance on the So True with Caleb Hearon podcast, filmmaker Lilly Wachowski was asked about co-directing 1999’s sci-fi classic “The Matrix” and how the film has been interpreted and re-interpreted over the years.
It is, after all, a film that questions a range of topics, from technology and artificial intelligence to gender identity, conformity, and control. The film has been immensely popular with a wide array of people across all political spectrums, with people taking away different interpretations.
In recent times, one scene has seen itself become the subject of minor controversy – the one in which Neo (Keanu Reeves) is offered the blue pill, which will return him to his mundane life, or the red pill that will awaken him to the ‘real world’ – one ruled by artificial intelligence.
The scene has become something of a symbol for the American MAGA movement. In times past, Wachowski took issue with this. In her new interview, she’s come around to separating herself from her work and accepting that it’s out there and how people and even whole movements will understand and even appropriate it how they may:
“You have to let go of your work. People are gonna interpret it however they interpret it. I look at all of the crazy, mutant theories around ‘The Matrix’ films and the crazy ideologies that those films helped create, and I just go, ‘What are you doing? No! That’s wrong!’ But I have to let it go to some extent … You’re never gonna be able to make absolutely every person believe what you initially intended.
Right-wing ideology appropriates absolutely everything. They appropriate left-wing points of view and they mutate them for their own propaganda, for their own to obfuscate what the real message is. This is what fascism does…They take these ideas that are generally acknowledged as questions or investigations or truisms about humanity and life and they turn them to something else so that they remove the weight of what those things represent.”
Wachowski stepped away from the franchise after the original trilogy, leaving sister Lana Wachowski to develop “The Matrix Resurrections” on her own. Drew Goddard is currently attached to develop a new instalment in the franchise with neither of the Wachowskis involved.
Lilly Wachowski most recently was involved the upcoming comedy “Trash Mountain” from a script by Rubey Caster and Hearon. That project was directed by Kris Swanberg (“I Used to Go Here”).
Hearon reveals in this interview that Wachowski was originally slated to direct, but then “we lost windows and things shifted, and it was circumstances” that prevented it, but Wachowski remained aboard as executive producer.
