Trivia for
The Matrix (1999) More at IMDbPro »

• In the combat training program before Keanu Reeves starts his furious attacks on Morpheus, he rubs his nose with his thumb and finger, a similar mannerism of Bruce Lee before he attacks on his opponents. The move was improvised by Reeves.
  
  
• According to weapon provider John Bowring, guns for Keanu Reeves in the lobby sequence and the elevator sequence, were actually plastic lightweight weapons. They made a very faithful cast of MP5K, which weighs about 150-200 grams, so that Keanu could carry them quite easily without worrying about the weight. Heavy versions of the same thing were also made, if it gets dropped on the ground.
  
  
• Ewan McGregor was offered, but turned down, the part of Neo to work on Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999). Leonardo DiCaprio was also considered for the role of Neo.
  
  
• Nicolas Cage turned down the part of Neo because of family commitments.
  
  
• Tom Cruise was also considered for the role of Neo.
  
  
• Will Smith was approached to play Neo, but turned down the offer in order to star in Wild Wild West (1999). He later admitted in an interview with Wired magazine that, at the time, he "wasn't smart enough as an actor".
  
  
• Before filming, the principal actors spent four months with martial arts experts learning the fight moves, from October 1997 to March 1998. The actors had originally thought that it would take just a few weeks.
  
  
• Carrie-Anne Moss twisted her ankle while shooting one of her scenes but decided not to tell anyone until after filming, so they wouldn't re-cast her.
  
  
• Sets from the film Dark City (1998), including rooftops, buildings and others exteriors sets, were used in this film. The rooftops that Trinity runs across at the beginning of the film are the same ones that John Murdoch runs across in Dark City.
  
  
• There are many who might legitimately claim to have invented the time-freezing photographic technique used in the movie. It might have been French director Michel Gondry who used it for the first time in a commercial (for an insurance company) and then in a video clip for Björk. It might have been architectural graphics artist Matthew Bannister who, in his academic work, suggested that motion and time in video could be separated, and proposed an apparatus for doing it much like that used for the film (but who was unable to make it work with then-available technology). Or even artist Tim MacMillan who demonstrated the technique on British television in 1993. It may be that each of them, and others, invented it independently.
  
  
• 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). Larry Wachowski and Andy Wachowski acknowledged the influence of anime films in a brief USA Today interview a few days after the film's release.
  
  
• There are numerous references to the books "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There".
  
  
• 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 fifth 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, Jui kuen (1978) in which Jackie Chan's character masters the style of Zui Chuan, or Drunken Boxing. Some of the other Martial Arts fighting styles being downloaded are Ju Jitsu, Savate, Kempo, Tae Kwon Do, and, of course, Kung Fu.
  
  
• 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" and "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" and "Exit Mr. Hat" are anagrams of "The Matrix".
  
  
• After the encounter with Trinity in the nightclub, Neo awoke at 0918.
  
  
• According to Morpheus, the human body generates more bioelectricity than a 120V battery, and more than 25000 BTU's of body heat.
  
  
• In the military controlled building where Morpheus is being held, Neo stops the elevator on the 41st floor.
  
  
• To escape from the military building where Morpheus is being held, Trinity pilots a B212 helicopter.
  
  
• Neo's call to the Matrix at the end of the movie was logged at 14:32:21 on 18th September 2199.
  
  
• Wachowski Bros. approached Hugo Weaving to play Agent Smith after seeing his performance in the movie Proof (1991).
  
  
• According to Don Davis, Johnny Depp was Larry and Andy's first choice for Neo, but Warner Bros. wanted Brad Pitt or Val Kilmer. After Kilmer and Brad Pitt said no, Warner Bros. was willing to consider Johnny Depp, and then it came between Johnny Depp and Keanu Reeves, who Warner Bros. was pushing. Keanu was always really tuned in to the concept and made a big difference in the casting.
  
  
• Gary Oldman was considered as Morpheus at one point, as well as Samuel L. Jackson.
  
  
• For the cell phone conversation scene between Neo and Morpheus in the Meta Cortechs office Keanu Reeves actually climbed up the window without a stuntman, which was 34 floors up.
  
  
• Wachowski Bros. simply described Trinity as a woman in black leather in the script, but it was interpreted tremendously by costume designer Kym Barrett.
  
  
• According to Larry Wachowski, for the slow-mo bullet ripple effects, Sound Designer Dane A. Davis put bullets on strings and whirl them around his studio. Also he digitized raindrops against window panes to create the sound of the Matrix code.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• As Neo runs through the old lady's apartment near the end of the film, we see an image on the TV of a menacing man in a black suit coat. The image is that of one of the Number 2s from the TV show "The Prisoner" (1967).
  
  
• 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).
  
  
• The first trace program gives a view of the City's area code, but the camera zooms in before it can be completely determined, leaving the phone number as (3?2) 555-0690. Three locations exist in the United States with similar codes: Chicago (312), Delaware (302), and the northwestern Florida peninsula (352). Since the original script indicates that the number is #312-555-0690 and there are numerous other references to Chicago in the film, we can assume that the area code is 312.
  
  
• The filming of the helicopter scene nearly caused the film to be shutdown because they flew the helicopter through restricted Sydney airspace. Laws in the state of New South Wales in Australia were changed to allow the film the Matrix to proceed.
  
  
• The powerful sidearm used by the Agents in all 3 Matrix films is the Magnum Research/Israeli Military Industries Desert Eagle .50 AE.
  
  
• The last thing shot was Neo getting flushed into the lake when he gets unplugged for the first time.
  
  
• 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). Seconds later a photocopy of his passport can be seen. There the place of his birth is CAPITAL CITY USA, his date of birth is the 13th of September 1971, the passport was issued on the 12th of September 1991 and will expire on the 11th of September 2001.
  
  
• The motorcycle Trinity rides is a jet black Triumph Speed Triple.
  
  
• "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 1965 Lincoln Continental.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• Principal photography wrapped at 1:01 AM with the scene where the characters are inside the wall, climbing down. Principal photography took 25 weeks/118 days.
  
  
• This is the second time that Laurence Fishburne plays a captain of a ship. He was Captain Miller in Event Horizon (1997).
  
  
• Neo is often referred to as the "One". One is an anagram of Neo.
  
  
• The book Neo hides his computer discs in is called "Simulacra and Simulation". 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.
  
  
• The blocking moves Neo uses against Agent Smith upon his realization of being "the One", are the exact same techniques Daniel LaRusso uses against Mr. Miyagi upon his realization that he has in fact been karate training in The Karate Kid (1984). Sand the floor, paint the fence, wax on, wax off...
  
  
• Keanu Reeves was recovering from neck surgery while training for this film. 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." NB: The American title of Baudrillard's book is Simulations. It was published by Semiotext(e) in 1983.
  
  
• Numerous sets of identical twins were cast as extras in the "Woman in Red" scene - in which Morpheus takes Neo through a computer simulation of The Matrix - to create the illusion of a repeating program. Example: the tall man with slicked-back hair and sunglasses in the opening shot is seen seconds later as a police officer writing a parking ticket.
  
  
• 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 climactic subway fight scene between Neo and Agent Smith went ten days over schedule.
  
  
• "Tastee Wheat", which is mentioned when Mouse is trying to describe the food in the real world, was replaced by "Sex Crispies" in the German version of the movie.
  
  
• Warner's gave the green light to the movie fairly late during preproduction. For a long time artists working on preproduction were not sure whether the film was ever going to be made.
  
  
• When Mouse is cornered by the SWAT team during the raid, the guns he pulls out are a pair of cam-operated, electrically-driven 12-gauge automatic shotguns with 25-round drum magazines, capable of firing at 900 RPM. They were built specially for the movie by John Bowring, the film's key armorer.
  
  
• The spring-loaded cell phones used in the film were Nokia Stilleto's or 8110's. These phones were produced in limited quantities and were only available in Europe and in Australia.
  
  
• The key of the beginning theme you hear at the beginning of every Matrix movie (rousing strings and horn blasts) ascends by one semitone with each movie. The Matrix starts in the key of E, Matrix Reloaded in F and Matrix Revolutions in the key of F-sharp.
  
  
• The first day of shooting was the scene where Neo receives the phone from Morpheus in the office and attempts to flee from the agents.
  
  
• All of the maps shown are of Chicago, where the Wachowski are from. Also, in the scene in the subway station the train features a sign that says "Loop", in Chicago Brown Line "L" trains have this sign.
  
  
• The name of the City's subway network is CityRail, which also happens to be the name of Sydney's suburban rail network.
  
  
• When Neo gets in the car with Trinity for the first time, Switch refers to him as "coppertop". Coppertop is a slang for the Duracell Battery, which is the battery Morpheus shows to Neo as he explains how the human race became an energy sources.
  
  
• Author Sophia Stewart had a case pending against the directors, producers, and studios behind the Matrix and Terminator movie series, claiming that they were all based on a 35 page screen play treatment she wrote in 1983 called The Third Eye. Although the case was rejected because of the litigant's failure to present evidence in a timely fashion, Stewart continues to discuss her version of events online. For example, the "John Connor" and "Neo" characters are (she claims) the same individual in her treatment.
  
  
• For the "Ultimate Matrix Collection" DVD re-release, the film was given a totally new, clean DVD transfer to replace the grainy one that had been on DVD since 1999, and give it the clear, sleek look of the sequels, which had not been seen since the theatrical release.
  
  
• Jean Reno was approached to play Agent Smith. He turned it down and took a role in Godzilla (1998) instead.
  
  
• According to costumer Gloria Bava, Neo's original coat was silver gray leather. It was changed because the directors wanted something that was able to billow and float. There is a reference in the script to "liquid sky"; a coat that would liquefy with the surroundings and billowy. Even putting a wind machine under the coat didn't move because leather was too heavy. Costumers finally changed the fabric.
  
  
• According to costume designer Kym Barrett, Trinity's costume was made with cheap PVC because of much tighter budget. Similarly, Neo's coat wasn't actually a very expensive fabric. It was a wool blend got for three dollars a yard.
  
  
• According to Wachowski Bros, all animals in the Matrix universe are computer generated images.
  
  
• The idea for the movie was created when Wachowski Bros were thinking for some new story for a comic book series. They wrote the entire script before their first directorial venture Bound (1996), and worked on it up until the time of production.
  
  
• According to producer Barrie M. Osborne, Wachowski Bros originally wanted the Trinity chase on real rooftops rather than on a stage.
  
  
• The Wachowski Brothers approached Warner with the idea of the Matrix and Warner balked at the budget they had submitted. Over eighty million dollars. Warner instead agreed to give them ten million. The Wachowski Brothers took the money and filmed the first ten minutes of the movie (the opening scene with Carrie Ann Moss) using the entire ten million. They then showed the executives at Warner the opening scene, and Warner was so impressed, they green lighted the entire asking budget.
  
  
• Body count: 39
  
  
• Sean Connery was originally offered the role of Morpheus. He turned down the role saying he couldn't understand the script.
  
  
• During the Trinity rooftop chase at the film's beginning, two distinctive city skylines are noticeable. Nashville, Tennessee's BellSouth Building and L & C Tower are visible behind the agents. San Francisco's TransAmerica and Coit Towers can be seen behind Trinity after she jumps past the Guns & Ammo billboard.
  
  
• The iconic sunglasses worn by the Matrix characters are from the cult-ish label Blinde, which prides itself on producing handmade glasses. The company's founder, 'Richard Walker' (IV), had to tender against large companies such as Ray-Ban and Arnette to win the film's sunglasses contract, and set himself apart by scratch-designing pairs of glasses based purely on the characters' unusual names. When his tender was successful, Walker was flown into Sydney where he spent the duration of the Matrix shoot custom-designing sunglasses for the cast in the back of an Oxford Street optometrist.
  
  
• When Neo is meeting with the Oracle, the music playing in the background in her apartment is Django Reinhardt's "Minor Swing". Following this tune can be heard Duke Ellington's "I'm Beginning to See the Light".
  
  
• All scenes that take place within the Matrix have a green tint, as if watching them through a computer monitor, while scenes in the real world have normal coloring.
  
  
• The Wachowski Brothers harbored their vision for five and a half years, working through 14 drafts of the screenplay. The final concepts took up 500 storyboards.
  
  
• The film pays a huge homage to Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland", although there are also references to Marx, Kafka, Zen and Homer's Odyssey. One of the main featured works of literature is "Simulcra and Simulation" by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillaud. The book can be seen lying open in Neo's apartment and was required reading for all the principal cast and crew.
  
  
• By filming in Australia, the film-makers were able to keep the budget down to $60 million. It would have cost three times as much as that if it had been made in the States.
  
  
• The studio insisted on a great deal of explanatory dialog as they described the screenplay as "the script that nobody understands".
  
  
• All the color blue was sucked out of the exterior shots to convey how grim the world of the Matrix actually is.
  
  
• The opening action scene took six months of training and four days to shoot.
  
  
• The visual effects comprise roughly 20% of the entire film.
  
  
• The first film to be shot in the then just-opened Fox Studios in Sydney.
  
  
• When Larry and Andy Wachowski's screenplay for Assassins (1995) was being made for producer Joel Silver, the brothers brought Silver the script to "The Matrix". The producer was bowled over by their screenplay but not by the brothers' insistence that they direct the film themselves. He told them to cut their teeth by directing something else instead, hence the reason why they made Bound (1996). The success of that lesbian crime thriller proved to be the calling card that the Wachowskis needed to earn the trust from Warner Brothers to direct "The Matrix" themselves.
  
  
• According to the inscription on the Nebuchadnezzar's core, the ship was "Made in the USA" in the year 2069. It also states that it is a "Mark III, No. 11" model, which is a possible reference to Mark 3:11, which reads "And whenever those possessed by evil spirits caught sight of him, they would fall down in front of him shrieking, 'You are the Son of God!'"
  
  
• The hotel and room number where Neo has to pick up the phone to get out of the Matrix (at the end) are the same where Trinity awaits the police in the beginning of the movie.
  
  

• SPOILER: The name of Morpheus' ship, the Nebuchadnezzar, is a Biblical reference to King Nebuchadrezzar II of Babylon, from the biblical Book of Daniel. King Nebuchadnezzar ('the Great') was famous for his conquests of Israel in Biblical times (specifically Judah and Jerusalem). He also built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (one of the lost Seven Wonders of the Ancient World) for his wife. He has a dream he can't remember but keeps searching for an answer.Morpheus makes reference to this in The Matrix Reloaded (2003) after the Nebuchadnezzar is destroyed, with the line "I have dreamed a dream; but now that dream is gone from me". Nebuchadnezzar's dream is found in Daniel 2:1-49.
  
  

Related Links