The Matrix Resurrections Interview: Jumping Off Buildings In The Name Of Emotional Climax

thegamer.com:

The Matrix is one of the most influential movies of all-time, both in terms of its innovations in special effects and its slick melding of action and sci-fi in the live action space, using techniques, ideas, and conventions that had previously only been explored in anime. Video games, as we wrote about when The Matrix Resurrections hit cinemas initially, also borrowed heavily from The Matrix.

With such wide reaching and iconic influence, going back to The Matrix was always going to bring extra pressure on production. Dan Glass, VFX supervisor on The Matrix Resurrections, explains what that pressure meant for the team. "Inevitably, you feel the pressure of expectations," he says. "Ultimately, you try to just focus on making a great movie and entertaining film and doing your work to the best it can be. We explored most of the latest technologies, including some of the cutting edge ones, but maybe not as overtly as people would expect or think. A lot of that is [because] the movie has a very different aesthetic and emotional quality to it than the earlier films. It's a homage in some ways to the first movie, but it's a much more emotional film. Both in terms of story, but also also for Lana as a director, so it wasn't as relevant to stuff it with lots of eye popping technology for its own sake."

Related: Movies Are Going Meta And They're Leaving Video Games BehindInstead of "eye popping" tech, a lot of the scenes you might imagine relied heavily on VFX were shot for real as closely as possible, with visual flourishes added in later. The scene where Anderson smashes the sink over Neo, for example, was done for real with a breakaway sink and perspex dome. Even the mirrors, a new entry to the Matrix mythos, were used with as