|
Valley Girl
~ This dialogue between Nicolas Cage and Deborah Foreman in Valley Girl---"Let's go." "Where?" "I don't care." "What will we do?" "Anything."---is virtually identical to an exchange between Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan in City of Angels (1998)
~ This is the first movie in which Nicolas Coppola is billed as Nicolas Cage.
~ Josie Cotton's backup band were members of the '80s group The Knack (famous for "My Sharona").
~ The film was made soon after the Frank Zappa made his hit single "Valley Girls" (released May 1982). Zappa later sued the producers of the film but lost the case.
~ The script was written in 10 days.
The Matrix
~ Ewan McGregor was offered, but turned down, the part of Neo.
~ Will Smith was approached to play Neo but turned it down in order make Wild Wild West (1999).
~ The main actors took four months of martial arts training before filming even began (from October 1997 to March 1998).
~ Carie-Ann Moss twisted her ankle while shooting but decided not to tell anyone until after filming, so they wouldn't re-cast her.
~ According to some crew members, Keanu Reeves was really vomiting as shown in the film when his character Neo leaves The Matrix for the first time. It was because of a chicken pot pie he ate, apparently.
~ The rooftops that Trinity runs across at the beginning of the film are the same ones that John Murdoch runs across in Dark City.
~ The scene in which Neo meets the gifted children in the Oracle's apartment is an homage to the similar scene at the end of Akira (1988). The Wachowski brothers acknowledged the influence of anime films in a brief USA Today interview a few days after the film's release.
~ When Tank is uploading the Martial Arts training to Neo, there is a shot of the computer screen as it scrolls through the various Martial Arts styles. The graphics have a computer image of a person and the title of the style below. The first one on the screen is entitled "Drunken Boxing". Woo-ping Yuen, the fight choreographer for this movie, was director and fight choreographer for Jackie Chan's early hit, Zui quan (1978) in which Jackie Chan's character masters the style of Zui Chuan, or Drunken Boxing.
~ When Neo is calling to get extracted from the Matrix, he says, "Mr. Wizard get me out of here." - a reference to the 1960s cartoon Tooter Turtle. Each episode, Tooter would yearn to be something he wasn't and have his friend Mr. Wizard (a lizard) wave his magic wand and make him an astronaut or a scientist or whatever. Inevitably, Tooter would quickly get himself into trouble and call out, "Help Mr Wizard," and the lizard would say, "Drizzle, drazzle, druzzle, drome, time for this one to come home." Tooter would be transported back to his old self and be chided by Mr Wizard to "be happy with what you are".
~ When Neo fights Morpheus in the construct, the three pieces of music that play on the score are termed the "Bow Whisk Orchestra" by composer Don Davis. It consists of a semi-improvisational piece with Asian instruments by Davis, the song "Leave You Far Behind" by Lunatic Calm, and another piece by Davis called "Switch or Break Show". Both "Bow Whisk Orchestra" & "Switch Or Break Show" are anagrams of "Wachowski Brothers". Also, when Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity return to the building after visiting the Oracle, the piece of music that plays is called "Threat Mix". Later, when in the same building Morpheus fights Agent Smith, the musical piece is called "Exit Mr. Hat". Both "Threat Mix" & "Exit Mr. Hat" are anagrams of "The Matrix".
~ When Neo is in the elevator on his way up to see the Oracle, to his right one can see "KYM" carved into the wall. This apparently refers to Kym Barrett, costume designer.
~ The glyphs on the computer screens, with the exception of the call traces, consists of reversed letters, numbers, and Japanese katakana characters.
~ All of the references to street corners (e.g. Wells and Lake) are real intersections in Chicago, USA, the Wachowski brothers' hometown. The subway train has signs for "Loop," another Chicago reference. The film however is quite obviously not set in Chicago or any other real city (though it was filmed in Sydney).
~ Trinity's room number is 303 ("trinity" 3). Neo is The One and number of his apartment is 101.
~ When Neo is meeting with the Oracle, the music playing in the background in her apartment is Duke Ellington's "I'm Beginning to See the Light".
~ The number of the phone Trinity was using at the beginning of the movie is 555-0690.
~ In the Oracle's waiting room, the television is showing white rabbits (which, at the beginning of the film, Neo was instructed to follow) from Night of the Lepus (1972).
~ Some personal information can be seen on Thomas Anderson's "criminal record" that Agent Smith glances at when he interrogates Neo: - The last update to the file was July 22, 1998 - Neo's date of birth is "March 11, 1962" - Neo's place of birth is "Lower Downtown, Capitol City" - Neo's mother's maiden name is "Michelle McCahey" - Neo's father's name is "John Anderson" - Neo attended "Central West Junior High" and "Owen Paterson High" (named after the film's production designer).
~ The name of the company Neo works for is Metacortex. The roots of this word are meta-, which according to Webster's means "going beyond or higher, transcending," and -cortex, which is "the outer layer (boundary) of gray matter surrounding the brain." Thus, Metacortex is "transcending the boundaries of the brain," which is precisely what Neo proceeds to do.
~ "Know thyself", the phrase in the kitchen of the "oracle", was the inscription above the entrance of the Delphic Oracle.
~ The car used while inside the matrix is a black 1964 Lincoln Continental.
~ Neo's room number is 101. Room 101 was the place in George Orwell's book "1984" where people were sent to be tortured and would end up believing something that wasn't true.
~ The hallway where Trinity first runs from the agents is where Neo makes his last stand against the agents.
~ This is the second time that Laurence Fishburne plays a captain of a ship. He was Captain Miller in Event Horizon (1997).
~ The book Neo hides his computer discs in is called "Simulation and Simulacra". The chapter where they're hidden called Nihilism. Nihilism often involves a sense of despair coupled with the belief that life is devoid of meaning.
~ Reeves was recovering from neck surgery while training for the Matrix. During the four months of training, he had to wear a neck brace.
~ By the middle of 2002, the famous "Bullet Time" sequence had been spoofed in over 20 different movies.
~ In the early stages of developing what was to become the famous Bullet Time sequence, visual effects supervisor John Gaeta and director of photography Bill Pope constructed many gimbals and dollies in the hope of creating the effect the old fashioned way. The original dolly they created for the camera would be lead around the action at a tremendous speed, but after many failed tests and broken dollies, they opted for computer graphics, which meant writing an entirely new program for the effect. However, the Bullet Time sequence does still use one very old fashioned technique: still photography.
~ The windows that Trinity crashes the helicopter into are apparently those of the Columbia Pictures screening room in Sydney, Australia.
~ The date stamp on the phone trace program in the opening sequence reads "2/18/98". The date stamp on the phone trace program in the closing sequence reads "9/18/99". This means that the events in the movie take place over exactly 19 months.
~ Before his character's final speech at the end, Keanu Reeves never has more than five sentences in a row to speak.
~ When Morpheus is explaining "What the Matrix is" to Neo, he uses the phrase, "Welcome, to the desert of the real." This is a paraphrase from Jean Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation", the hollowed-out book where Neo keeps his illegal software. The quote can be found in Chapter One - The Precession of Simulacra, Page one, Paragraph 2, "It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself."
~ Numerous sets of actual identical twins (not CGI generated) were used as extras in the scene in which Morpheus takes Neo through a computer simulation of The Matrix.
~ Shot almost entirely in Sydney, Australia, the location scouts found it very difficult to find burned-out, American-ghetto-looking locations. Many of the urban-decay locations had to be created from scratch.
~ Carrie-Anne Moss was a cast member of the short-lived television show "Matrix" (1993).
The Matrix Reloaded
~ Actress/Singer Aaliyah was originally cast in the role of Zee.
~ Gloria Foster died before the end of shooting the second Matrix film. She did most of her scenes for Reloaded but had not done any for the third film.
~ A 17-minute battle sequence alone cost over $40 million.
~ The 1.4-mile, three-lane loop highway was built specifically for the chase scene on the decommissioned Alameda Point Navy Base. It was destroyed when filming was complete.
~ It was reported that Keanu Reeves volunteered to give up a claim to a share of ticket sales amounting to around $38 million when producers feared that the film would never recoup the cost of the special effects.
~ The special effects cost $100 million U.S.
~ The script for the movie (while in production) was code-named "The Burly Man". "The Burly Man" is the title of the script Barton Fink is working on in the film Barton Fink.
~ GM donated 300 cars for use in the production of the movie. All 300 were wrecked by the end.
~ There were several injuries on the set: Carrie-Anne Moss broke her leg training for a wire stunt, Laurence Fishburne fractured an arm in another training incident and Hugo Weaving put out a disc in his neck while being pulled back on a wire.
~ The film's highway chase sequence took almost three months to shoot (longer than many films' entire shooting schedule).
~ When Trinity hacks the Power Station's computer, the password she uses is "Z1ON0101".
~ Trinity uses a genuine hack to get into the Matrix. She uses Nmap version 2.54BETA25 (an actual port scanning tool) to find a vulnerable SSH server, and then proceeds to exploit it using the SSH1 CRC32 exploit from 2001.
~ Cameo: [Bill Pope] The director of photography makes an appearance as a security guard "who gets paid to count sheep".
~ Matrix Reloaded promotional material was in such high demand, that distributors were extremely worried about it being stolen. To combat this, standees and banners were sent out with the code names of "Caddyshack 2" and "The Replacements". Several cinemas thought they had not received the materials due to these names, and as such, did not display them until the last minute.
~ The Wachowski brothers' contract for doing the Matrix Reloaded, and Matrix Revolutions, included a stipulation that would not have to do any media interviews.
~ Only a few of the Agent Smith clones were actually played by Hugo Weaving. Open casting calls for males with similar body shapes and structures took place, and Weaving's head was superimposed on them later.
~ Professional Taekwondo instructors were used for some of the stunts, including WTF silver medalist Master Timothy Connelly.
~ The red chair Morpheus is sitting in when he is expounding his plan to access the source is the same red chair he was sitting in when he offered Neo the red and blue pills in Matrix, The (1999) and when he explained to Neo what the Matrix was.
~ The two freeways referenced in the movie were the "101" and the "303".
~ The tractor-trailer used in the freeway chase scene has "Big Endian Eggs" written on it's side. This is a reference to Swift's Gulliver's Travels: "The Lilliputians, being very small, had correspondingly small political problems. The Big-Endian and Little-Endian parties debated over whether soft-boiled eggs should be opened at the big end or the little end," ("Big-endian" has also been adopted as computer terminology.)
~ There are 1,943 names in the credits.
~ Historical reference: the Merovingians were the ruling class of France in the 7th Century A.D. It is also the name of a type of Gnostic Church (many elements of Gnosticism appear in the Matrix films).
~ Because the twins' Cadillac Escalade EXT was not in production at the time of the movie's filming, General Motors had to graft together fiberglass Cadillac parts with prototype Chevrolet Avalanche pickup trucks, to create the black truck seen in the freeway chase. The Lincoln Continental from Matrix, The (1999) makes a brief cameo appearance toward the beginning of the film. The underground garage where the characters select a car is populated with all Cadillacs, including a classic 1950s El Dorado and prototype of the 2004 XLR.
~ There are many references to number 101.
~ When Agent Smith pulls up in an Audi at the beginning of the film, his license plate is "IS 5416". In the King James Bible, Isaiah 54:16 says, "Behold, I have created the smith that bloweth the coals in the fire, and that bringeth forth an instrument for his work; and I have created the waster to destroy."
~ One of the freeway signs during the freeway says "Whipple Ave, Woodside Rd, Marsh Rd" - which are three real consecutive freeway exits on the 101 freeway south of San Francisco.
~ According to Oakland city officials who worked with the filmmakers on the downtown Oakland shots, all red and blue colors had to be removed, so sidewalk curbs were painted over. Also, there could be no greenery or other plant life, so filming was done over the winter before tree leaves sprouted in the spring.
~ Carrie-Ann Moss did some of her own driving on the motorcycle in the highway scene.
~ This is the highest grossing R-rated movie.
~ The role of "Seraph" was originally written specifically for Jet Li. When Li declined, the role was then changed to a female and offered to Michelle Yeoh, who turned it down due to scheduling conflicts.
The Matrix Revolutions
|