- Hello, Lilly Wachowski here.
(keyboard typing)
I'm glad that people are talking about the movies,
"The Matrix" movies with a trans narrative.
I love how meaningful those films are to trans people
and the way that they come up to me and say,
"These movies saved my life,"
because when you talk about transformation
specifically in the world of science fiction,
which is just about imagination,
it's like, and world-building,
and the idea of the seemingly impossible
becoming possible I think that's why
it speaks to them so much.
And I'm grateful that I can be a part
of throwing them a rope to help them along their journey.
(keyboard typing)
I'm glad that it has gotten out
that, you know, that was the original intention,
but the world wasn't quite ready yet,
at a corporate level,
the corporate world wasn't ready for it, so.
When you make movies and it's this public art form,
I think any kind of art that you put out into the universe,
there's a letting-go process,
because it's entering into public dialogue.
I like that, that there's an evolution process
that we as human beings engage in art
in a nonlinear way that we can always talk about something
in new ways and in new light.
(keyboard typing)
We had "The Matrix" stuff was all about the desire
for transformation but it was all coming from
a closeted point of view,
and so we had the character of Switch
who was like a character who would be
a man in the real world and then a woman in "The Matrix",
and you know that's, both were (laughs)
where our headspaces were.
(keyboard typing)
I don't know how present my transness was
in the background of my brain as we were writing it,
but it all came from the same sort of fire
that I'm talking about.
Because trans people exist in this,
especially for me and Lana,
we were existing in this space where the words didn't exist
so we were always living in a world of imagination.
It's why I gravitated towards science fiction
and fantasy and played "Dungeons & Dragons".
It was like, it was all about creating worlds,
and so I think it freed us up as filmmakers
because we were able to imagine stuff at that time
that you didn't necessarily see on screen,
or even the idea of how can we exist
in as many genres as possible?
One of our things that we really enjoyed doing
was sort of genre bending
where you would have stuff that felt like kung fu movies
and like anime and Westerns,
and then we always loved this scene
that Ned Beatty would do in this movie "Network"
where he would talk about the way the world was
and it was always from this corporate hierarchical,
you know, overlord structure.
And so I think in our transness
we were always trying to, and queerness,
incorporate as many things as possible.
It's just like trying to visualize within a much larger
infinite scope of the imagination.