Nicholson Joke Angers Keanu

Veteran star Jack Nicholson has disgusted his new co-star Keanu Reeves - by asking a beggar for money.

The Hollywood hell-raiser, who is currently shooting the as-yet-untitled Nancy Meyers project in Los Angeles, was walking with Keanu during a break in filming when the homeless person approached them - so Nicholson asked him for cash.

However, while the About Schmidt star found the episode hilarious, explaining he enjoyed "freaking out" people, Reeves fell out with him.

A on-set source explains, "Jack thought it was funny but Keanu didn't. Keanu believes performers have a duty to look after their fans.

"He also reckons that well-off people like himself should do their best to help the homeless.

"Things were a bit frosty between the pair on the set after that."

New Powered Generation

David Eimer

CINEMA evolves on its reliance that every generation will throw up, at the very least, one maverick mind willing to not only reflect the age but to redefine our perspective on it. One of the defining products of Sixties cinema was Dennis Hopper’s depiction of the intolerant void which existed between mainstream society and hippy culture in Easy Rider. All The President’s Men starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman encapsulated the public outrage at the political deception of the Watergate riddled Seventies, and Oliver Stone’s Wall Street gave us the spiralling descent of the yuppie culture of the Eighties.

Four years ago, The Matrix joined this premier league by swooping into the information age with enough leather to put Peter Fonda to shame and with it redefined the way action movies would be made for ever.

By Hollywood’s extravagant standards the film was released to little fanfare, but its ground-breaking combination of revolutionary special effects, philosophy, martial arts and sci-fi helped turn it into a runaway hit that made its competitors, like the Star Wars prequels, look tired by comparison. It inspired a level of devotion from its fans that verged on the religious.

Now the pressure is on the two brothers, Larry and Andy Wachowski, who wrote and directed the film, to do the same again as not one but two sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, are released later this year. Produced at the combined cost of $300m, they have been the subject of incessant rumour on the internet, with some overly ambitious fans even going so far as to write their own scripts for the sequels. There will, of course, be a tie-in computer game, ‘Enter The Matrix’, as well as 10 animated shorts, the Animatrix, that explain the pre-history of the story.

That the sequels are the most eagerly awaited cinematic event of the year is not in question. It’s not just that the original Matrix took more than $460m at box offices globally, it’s the fact that it was the first film to sell over a million copies on DVD.

With total sales now around the $300m mark, it is testimony to the addictive nature of the Wachowskis’ paranoid vision of a world where reality is a computer simulation and mankind is fighting for its freedom against an onslaught of super-sophisticated machines.

With its central, messianic figure of Neo, the former computer hacker played by Keanu Reeves, whose mission is to save humanity, The Matrix is more like a hi-tech parable for our times than just a movie. It’s that mix of philosophy and chunks of the bible, as well as special effects like ‘bullet-time’, where the camera appears to revolve 360 degrees around its subject, making the frequent kung fu-inspired fights look stunning, that have helped turn it into a global cult.

But if the pressure to make the sequels live up to their giant budget is huge, you wouldn’t guess that was the case from a visit to the soundstages at Fox Studios Sydney, Australia, where the films were shot back-to-back between March 2001 and September 2002. There’s an almost eerie lack of activity and the Wachowski brothers are nowhere to be seen. Avoiding the press like an Iraqi scientist would bodyswerve a UN arms inspector, the two thirtysomethings from Chicago prefer to leave the talking to their producer, the bearded Hollywood veteran Joel Silver.

“They’re great guys, they just don’t like this part,” explains Silver, who quaintly refers to the Wachowskis as ‘the boys’.

“They think the films should speak for themselves and that the audience should take from them what they want to take. They feel that if they’re precise about it, it’ll rob the audience of their enjoyment. But they’re great to work with and they haven’t really changed at all. They’re still really competitive and they want their movies to be better and more successful than other films.”

That’s part of the reason why they’ve broken with sequel convention and decided to put out the films within months of each other, with Reloaded appearing in May and Revolutions in November. “The boys have a story that they feel the audience won’t wait a year to see,” says Silver. “Look, I know that when I saw Two Towers, I wanted to see Return Of The King straight away.”

The original movie is more like a hi-tech parable for our times than just a film.

Reloaded and Revolutions though, aren’t really distinct films in the way that each instalment of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy is. Instead, and here is where the Wachowskis have been really clever, they are one giant movie that has been literally cut in half. Reloaded even ends in mid-frame, after a chase sequence along a walled motorway that makes all other cinematic car chases look like the Keystone Cops, and that alone should ensure that everyone is queuing up to see Revolutions.

All of which makes the vast budget even more staggering, dwarfing the relatively modest 66m cost of the original. “The numbers are enormous,” concedes Silver. “At 300m it’s probably the most money ever spent on a movie; it’s probably around the same amount of money that Peter Jackson spent on all three Lord Of The Rings movies. But for that price we’ve made two movies and it would probably have cost twice that if we hadn’t done them at the same time.”

Almost a third of that cash has gone to John Gaeta, the special effects genius who won an Oscar for the first Matrix, and his computer animators so that they can come up with some suitably eye-popping magic. That is one of the reasons why there appears to be so little going on at the Sydney studio because, with close on 2,500 special effects shots in the sequels, a significant amount of the work is done with computers.

In fact, this time around Gaeta has come up with a new technique, ‘virtual cinematography’, that may well signal the beginning of the end for the conventional process of shooting a film ‘live’. The process involves five digital cameras photographing the actors from various angles. The resulting images are then fed into a computer, which uses them to create ‘virtual’ actors who can be placed in any situation that the Wachowskis want them in.

“Once you have them in 3-D, you can compose shots and make directorial decisions just like you would with real actors in a real scene,” explains Gaeta. It sounds like another step towards the time when computer-generated ‘actors’ will take over from human ones, but Gaeta thinks that is still a while away yet.

“True performance will never be replaced,” he insists. “Impromptu human performance is something you can’t get from an animator. It’s an incredible amount of work for a start and the result is so much better when it’s an actor doing it.”

Despite that, whole sections of the sequels were solely created in the computer. “We almost enter animated movie mode at the end of Revolutions. A lot of material in those sequences is 100% computer-generated images (CGI), rather than integrated or virtual stuff,” confirms Gaeta. Nor is he trying to make those scenes look like they were shot conventionally. “We like to do effects that don’t look real. That’s one of the reasons we look at Japanese anime so often, because it’s so stylised and they do stuff purely for visual impact.”

So far ahead are Gaeta and his team that the rest of Hollywood is still trying to learn how to re-create the effects from the original Matrix. “It will take other people years to catch up because it’s so difficult to do and it costs so much money,” boasts Gaeta. He should know, as he’s been working on the sequels for over two years both in Australia and the States. “It’s exhausting and you have to pace yourself in an entirely different way. It’s like a mental marathon.”

For the cast, which includes the survivors of the first film: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne and Carrie-Anne Moss, as well as newcomers like Italian actress Monica Bellucci and Marvin Gaye’s daughter Nona, it’s been more like running a marathon. Much of the Wachowskis’ inspiration for The Matrix comes from martial arts movies and all the actors have been trained by Woo-ping Yuen, who choreographed the fights in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and directed Jackie Chan’s early films.

“After I made the first one, I took up alcoholism,” jokes Reeves when he appears in one of the empty soundstages, “but since then I’ve been on a very strict diet and a very rigorous training routine.”

It has paid off because Reeves, who is getting a reported 30m for the sequels, looks lean and fit, as well as younger than his 38 years, and judging by Reloaded, where he fights up to 100 people at a time, he could have a future in martial arts movies if he wanted one. Although some of those fight sequences are examples of ‘virtual cinematography’, many of them were shot ‘live’ and nearly all the cast have cuts and bruises to show off.

“I think a lot of people don’t realise how taxing all this work is,” says Fishburne, who plays Morpheus, Neo’s mentor. “The amount of training we did and the time it took is comparable to what professional athletes do.”

Reeves though, is just like the fans and seems more interested in the philosophical musings that underpin the Wachowskis’ vision than in the physical demands of the shoot. “I read some Baudrillard and I read about the notion of will,” he says. “In terms of how that relates to my character, I think it’s all synthesised into the way Neo views the world. But I don’t have the facilities to have an academic discussion about that. You know, contrast and compare the Nietzschean Superman to Neo, the reluctant hero or messiah. Larry Wachowski can do that but I can’t.”

Larry, like his brother, is somewhere around the Sydney studio but is staying out of sight of the press. So reclusive are they, that few people have ever seen a picture of them. “Little is known about the Wachowskis,” points out Fishburne. Despite having spent years working with them, he’s only half-joking. “They’re very bright people and they have like a secret code that exists between them: they’re not very verbal.”

When they are on the set however, they seem to function as one person. “It’s a mysterious kind of thing with Larry at the viewfinder and Andy standing by the monitor. It’s almost as if the movie is in their heads and it’s inconvenient that they have to do it physically,” claims Fishburne.

The amount of training we did is comparable to what professional athletes do

“They plan things out together and they come to the set knowing exactly what they want,” adds Silver.

Prior to The Matrix, they had done little to suggest that they would become cinematic pioneers. They wrote the Sylvester Stallone vehicle Assassins and had only directed one other film, 1996’s Bound, and that was just a test for the studio to see if they were up to directing The Matrix movies.

Even back then, they insisted on making a trilogy of films, a tactic that seems to have been partially inspired by their reading too many comics as kids. “They’re big fans of serial fiction,” notes Silver.

Unsurprisingly, not everyone in Hollywood understood just what the Wachowskis were trying to do and that is the main reason why the original film was, at least initially, released to a refreshing lack of media hype. In particular, older studio executives and critics had problems getting to grips with a concept that says reality is actually a computer simulation and where the villains are computer programs that can replicate themselves at will.

“There was one executive who kept saying, ‘The bad guy is a robot right?’ and I said, ‘No, he’s a program’ and he was, ‘Yeah but he’s a program inside a robot’,” smiles Silver. “If you know how to use a computer, then you understand very quickly how the ethos works. But if you’ve never used one and don’t know what an icon is, then you’re going to be confused.”

It was that feeling that you either got it or didn’t though, that helped turn the original into such a cult. Tapping into our obsession with the internet and the sense of paranoia engendered by an all-powerful, all-seeing state, The Matrix seemed like the perfect film for the zeitgeist. Four years on, that paranoia is only increasing as everything from security threats to the irrational fear of asylum-seekers makes us ever more wary. Once again, the Wachowskis seem to have got their timing right.

The Matrix Reloaded goes on general release on May 23, The Matrix Revolutions will follow on November 7

My nights as a Nobu hostess

Non relative Keanu contents.But He looks so much alike Chris Klein so much??

So do celebrities really get preferential treatment when they dine out ? Yes, says Emily Sheffield, working her first shift at Britain's starriest restaurant

[snipped for Keanu]

11.30pm

A suited wide-boy with two stunning model types, asks if we can settle a bet. He has bet both the girls £50 each that the actor (who is Chris Klein) in the corner is Keanu Reeves. He duly hands them a crisp, brand new £50 note each, laughing as he does so.

Once-shunned video games are now attracting top Hollywood talent

By Anthony Breznican
Associated Press

It was virtually "Game Over" from the start for designer Dave Perry's video game version of "The Terminator."

Neither Arnold Schwarzenegger nor co-star Linda Hamilton would allow him to use their images for the 1992 Sega Genesis title, which was ultimately forced to focus on a third character, who dies at the end of the film.

"They said, 'You can't have the Terminator in your game,'" Perry recalls. "The vision of what it could have been was so ruined."

More than a decade later, however, bigger budgets and an increasingly cinematic style are beginning to attract top Hollywood talent to computer versions of "The Matrix" and "The Lord of the Rings," as well as to original game projects such as "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City."

When Perry started work on "Enter the Matrix," a game version of the upcoming sequel "The Matrix Reloaded," the film's writer-directors, Andy and Larry Wachowski, promised unprecedented cooperation.

They created a new story that wove in and out of the movie plot, and shot an hour of footage exclusively for the game using the same cast, crew and sets as the film.

"This is where the page turns and the new chapter begins," Perry said. The game is set for release on all game consoles May 15 the same day the movie opens.

Jada Pinkett Smith, who co-stars as Niobe in the film, is the game's main character, while stars Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne and Carrie-Anne Moss take on supporting roles.

"There are scenes that start in the video game that will complete in the movie, and there are scenes that will start in the movie and happen at the same time in the game," said "The Matrix" film producer Joel Silver.

In addition to the game's added movie footage, Pinkett Smith spent months using motion-capture technology to help create her digital doppelganger's jumps, kicks, punches and facial expressions.

"I just thought it would be cool to see myself as a video game character," she said. "I was surprised to know how extensive it was going to be. ... This was much more difficult (than film)."

It is newcomers and supporting players like Pinkett Smith who will show A-list actors how to reach new fans through game acting, predicted LucasArts designer Jon Knoles.

For instance, his recent game "Star Wars: Bounty Hunter," about the masked mercenary Jango Fett from "Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones," was a chance for actor Temuera Morrison to expand on his character, a favorite among "Star Wars" fans.

"In the movie, he had four lines," Knoles said. "In the game, he's the star."

Sometimes, celebrities find it's just hip to do digital cameos.

The bad-boy designers of "Grand Theft Auto III" recruited the voices of actors Michael Madsen, Joe Pantoliano and Michael Rapaport for their wildly popular game about thievery, murder and mayhem. The spin-off, "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City," attracted even bigger names such as Dennis Hopper, Burt Reynolds, Ray Liotta and Fairuza Balk.

Designer Jim Wallace, who is developing the PlayStation 2 fighting title "Rise to Honor" with martial-arts star Jet Li, said celebrity involvement boosts the reputation of gaming in general.

"Video games used to have really poor acting, since the voice stuff was Joe the programmer in front of the microphone," he said. "The quality is being bumped up."

Another fusion of Hollywood and Silicon Valley was the recent Electronic Arts game "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," which used the film's stars Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen and John Rhys-Davies to provide dialogue for the action sequences.

As players fight their way through the levels of Middle-earth, they are also rewarded with documentaries about the movie and footage of the stars.

"The Two Towers" game producer Neil Young said that consulting with the movie's director, Peter Jackson, helped him "capture the core essence and language of the film," since both projects were being assembled simultaneously.

Filmmaker involvement is crucial to coordinating the release of game adaptations with the movies, said Activision executive Kathy Vrabeck, since games typically take at least a couple of years longer than films to create.

Filmmaker Sam Raimi's assistance on Activision's "Spider-Man" helped ensure that it was out two weeks before the movie last summer, and the company is already working with Raimi on the game version of the sequel due in 2004.

On Activision's recent "Minority Report," director Steven Spielberg consulted with game developers on the look of his futuristic world and on his crime-and-punishment themes. The game lacked the rights to star Tom Cruise's image, however, so designers had to make the main character tall and blond unlike Cruise which broke some of the continuity established by Spielberg's help.

"You're playing in the same world, with the same goals, same gadgets, same kind of plot but it's not ideal," Vrabeck said.

The makers of the new LucasArts "Indiana Jones" games have had a similar problem trying to render their character without the help of Harrison Ford. For "Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb," released in late February, they studied photos and film footage to assemble something close to his likeness including his signature chin scar.

Some gamemakers try to attract stars by minimizing the workload.

The team designing the recent James Bond game "Nightfire" persuaded actor Pierce Brosnan to undergo a few minutes of digital facial scanning, but did not push for him to do the voice recording and character movements, said Scot Bayless, who oversees the franchise for Electronic Arts.

Next time, Bayless said, they hope he'll agree to do more.

Silver applauds 'new golden age at Warner Bros.'

Mar. 05, 2003

By Martin A. Grove

Silver success: Hollywood differs from other manufacturing companies in that some of its most valuable assets get in their cars and drive home every night.

A case in point is Warner Bros.' relationship with blockbuster producer Joel Silver, whose hip-hop kung fu action thriller "Cradle 2 the Grave" just kicked off in first place to a solid $16.5 million. It was the eighth of Silver's last 10 films to claim top honors opening weekend. The Silver Pictures production reunites Silver with director Andrzej Bartkowiak, martial arts star Jet Li and hip-hop artist DMX, his team on the 2000 hit "Romeo Must Die." Written by John O'Brien and Channing Gibson, it was executive produced by Herbert w. Gains and Ray D. Copeland. Also starring are Anthony Anderson, Kelly Hu and Tom Arnold with Mark Dacascos and Gabrielle Union.

"It's a new golden age at Warner Bros. I've never felt the company run so well I've never felt the divisions work together so well," Silver told me. "There used to be a lot of divisiveness. In past managements it was sometimes very hard to get things done. Now these guys (Warner Bros. chairman and CEO Barry Meyer and president and chief operating officer Alan Horn) are just fantastic and they make it an incredible place." Besides Meyer and Horn, Silver also applauds domestic marketing president Dawn Taubin and distribution president Dan Fellman and their teams for the winning campaigns they've created and executed for his pictures.

There's equally strong enthusiasm for Silver on Warners' side of the fence. "It's a pleasure working with Joel for so many years," Fellman observed. "Not only does he consistently deliver the goods at the boxoffice, but he's truly the consummate producer. He's involved in every step of the process from day one for all of his movies -- from filmmaking to music to distribution to marketing to promotion to publicity. Everything runs through him. When Joel has a film in the marketplace, my first call in the morning and my last call at night is to Joel. His enthusiasm is contagious. His track record speaks for itself."

Of course, not every filmmaker can point to a string of movies that have grossed nearly $4 billion the way Silver's films have. Among his most spectacular successes at Warners are "Lethal Weapon" and its three sequels and the 1999 megablockbuster "The Matrix," which won four Oscars, grossed over $456 million worldwide, was the first DVD release to sell a million units and has now generated two upcoming sequels. Warners is opening "The Matrix Reloaded" May 15 and will follow it Nov. 7 with "The Matrix Revolutions," which continues the "Reloaded" story. Warners will distribute a nine-minute Silver-produced short, "Final Flight of the Osiris," which fuses CG-animated and Japanese anime, with the studio's March 21 release of Castle Rock Entertainment's sci-fi horror thriller "Dreamcatcher," directed by Lawrence Kasdan and based on the Stephen King book. "Osiris" is one of nine short films comprising Silver's "Matrix"-inspired production "The Animatrix."

Focusing with Silver on "Cradle," he explained, "This is the third we've done. It's our trilogy of these movies -- 'Romeo Must Die,' 'Exit Wounds' and now this one. They all come from a strong urban center even though some of them have played very well in suburban areas, as well. They have a lot of music built into the material and they have this really cool choreography. I kind of put the two together in a genre that seems fresh and unique."

What accounts for Silver's success? "We try to give the audience what they want to see," he replied. "We have tremendous promotional partners. On this movie, particularly, we had two great specials on TV with DMX. We had a soundtrack album to work with here and we had a single. We're just trying to get the movie into the public's eye and (always) get the trailer out early enough so that they're aware of it. It started playing around Christmastime. It played very well. Wherever it played, it got a good response, so we just had to get it up in as many theaters as we could. We had great TV spots. We were (looking to reach young males) in some of the basketball games and sporting events. We know what these movies are. They're targeted to the young male urban audience and we try to go after that audience."

Asked how "Cradle" came about, Silver said, "When I did 'Romeo Must Die' there was a small part in there that had to go to a guy that we thought had great street credibility. We met DMX, and we thought he'd be perfect for it. We put him that picture. There was a scene in that movie where his character gets shot and killed and the audience was not very happy with that. They were very disturbed. Alan Horn turned to me and said, 'We should find a movie to make with this guy where he doesn't die.' We had a piece of material we thought we'd make with him and Steven Segal, which was 'Exit Wounds,' which also did very well. He was a supporting role to Steven, but (in 'Cradle') this is almost like a two-hander. It's not really a buddy movie, but you're following simultaneous stories. He really is a kind of equal player to Jet. It worked very well because we were able to build him from being a small part to a larger part to a starring role."

The strong working relationship between Warners and Silver was a major factor in getting "Cradle" done right. "Alan is a great leader for us at Warner Bros.," Silver observed. "He's an incredible guy to work with -- really smart and intuitive and really is open to so many different ideas and so many different kinds of projects. He and Jeff Robinov, who is the head of production, and myself sat down and started talking about how we could make a movie like this that would put X in a situation that the audience would accept him in. It's more or less an original story that we just came up with. The idea was to (put together a movie) that might have some international appeal because we didn't think they were that conscious of DMX overseas. So we wanted to find someone that could bring in the international component, which was Jet Li. So the idea was including the international component with a (big) potential domestic grossing movie. Jet helps us domestically, too, but he's stronger internationally than X is. The package then seemed to be a kind of exciting package and Alan said, 'Let's go make the picture.' (That was) last year around this time. 'Exit Wounds' was two years ago and 'Romeo Must Die' was two years before that. We like to pretty much make one every other year of these kind of urban pictures. And we make these Dark Castle (horror thriller) movies every year. The plan is to have one of those every Halloween. We start (the next one, 'Gothika') in April with Halle Berry, Robert Downey and Penelope Cruz for me and Bob Zemeckis (Silver's high profile partner in Dark Castle, which they launched with the Halloween 1999 hit 'House on Haunted Hill.')"

Silver puts the production cost for "Cradle," which was shot entirely in Los Angeles, "in the $40 million-$50 million range. Unfortunately, that's a midrange picture (today). The Dark Castle movies are about half that. They're in the low-$20 millions, those movies. And that, unfortunately, is a low budget in our world today. But ('Cradle') is a midrange picture and we think that with all the different sequencing of the movie -- with domestic, international and home video -- we'll come out very well."

Silver frequently casts his movies with actors who aren't mainstream names we're familiar with. They become recognizable names, however, by being in one of Silver's hits. "I try to keep my head above ground and find out what's going on. I try to keep aware of what's happening around me," he said. "And I'm always aware of the fact that we are living in a great multiethnic society and our movies should reflect that -- not only in front of the camera, but behind the camera, too. I feel it's our responsibility as filmmakers to have a multiethnic sense of our pictures and I work very hard to do that."

Looking ahead, Silver will be making boxoffice news both in mid-May and in early November with his two "Matrix" sequels. "It really is an incredible journey," he said, explaining that the two films actually are one movie that's been sliced in half. "We really thought our audience would not want to wait a year to see the rest of the story because it really stops right in the middle of the movie. We would have loved to come out (with them both in) the same summer, but both of those movies couldn't get done in time. So we went to the fall because we felt that was the best way to do it.

"The movies are spectacular. It's all based on this incredible story the Wachowski Brothers have created. It's a story that's being told in multiple mediums. We have this video game. We have animated shorts. We have a short film ('Osiris') opening with 'Dreamcatcher' in three weeks that sets up both sequels. If you see this short film, it kind of jumps you into the movie. If you don't see it, you'll still enjoy the picture, but it will be enhanced a little bit if you see the short."

"The Wachowski Brothers really had one film in mind," Fellman added. "Only we're going to distribute it in two parts. No. 1 really will be a cliffhanger and No. 2 will pick it up. We intend to show footage or some indication of what's down the road at the end of the (first) movie so the audience will have a good idea of what to look for in November. The Wachowski Brothers have established themselves as the cutting edge filmmakers in today's generation. They've raised the bar when it's come to visual effects with everything that they've done with the first 'Matrix.' And even though I haven't seen the second one, I've seen footage and from my conversation with both the brothers and Joel, it looks like they've taken filmmaking to another place. And we will see it soon. So will the public. We're very excited about it. I think the team of the Wachowski Brothers and Joel Silver are going to make movie history when the (next) 'Matrix' opens in May."

Bottom line, Silver says he's still having fun: "I love it. I love making movies. I love the process. What makes it so much fun is working with a great place (like Warners). It's a pleasure when we work together. Particularly with 'The Matrix,' all these divisions are working together and I think that's the key. If we work together, we can really get success."

Martin Grove is seen Mondays at 9 a.m., 5 and 8 p.m., PT on CNNfn's "The Biz" and is heard weekdays at 1:55 p.m. on KNX 1070 AM in Los Angeles.

Warner Bros. Halts 'Matrix' Special Edition DVD

HOLLYWOOD (Zap2it.com) - Fans anticipating the release of "The Matrix Special Edition" double-disc DVD are out of luck.

Warner Home Video has decided not to release the DVD due to a shift in strategy in how to market the film's upcoming sequel, "The Matrix Reloaded."

In order to broaden the sci fi film's fan base before "The Matrix Reloaded's" May 15 release date, Warner will instead reduce the price of "The Matrix" standard DVD to $19.99 starting April 29, which will include a mail-in ticket offer for the sequel.

In order to receive the mail-in ticket, the rebate must be sent in by June 6, 2003.

In addition, Warner will package the standard DVD with the two-hour behind-the-scenes documentary, "The Matrix Revisted," for a new low price of $34.99, which will also include the ticket offer.

It is uncertain whether Warner Bros. is delaying the double-disk special edition, or putting a halt to the project altogether.

Winner of four Academy Awardsｮ, "The Matrix" has sold more than 15 million DVDs worldwide since its release. The film was also the first DVD to break the 1 million unit sales mark and has ranked as one of the top 100 selling DVDs since its initial release.

It's Monica Mania

A gorgeous, gifted Italian actress brings the lost art of sensuality back to Hollywood

Tuesday, Mar. 04, 2003

The Navy Seals' mission is simple, if next to impossible: rescue an Italian doctor from a Roman Catholic outpost in the besieged jungle of Nigeria. Just the doctor, none of the African patients. But even a tough guy like Lieut. A.K. Waters (Bruce Willis) can't resist a plea to take the wounded on a perilous trek — because the doctor is idealistic, the doctor is passionate, and the doctor is played by Monica Bellucci.

Granted, the plot of Tears of the Sun requires that Willis' military mission become a humanitarian one. But Bellucci, 34, tends to have a mesmerizing effect on men, onscreen and off. Despite herself, she's a sublime succubus: Monica demonica. With her voluptuous figure, majestically sullen face and exquisite eyelashes, she projects a quality sadly absent in most Hollywood star-babes: a knowing, passionate womanhood. That could be why in so many of her European films she plays the sort of woman who brings out the obsessive in men just by walking past them.

One glance at her in Malena (a darker, hornier Summer of '42), and an Italian kid skyrockets into puberty. One glimpse of her legs as she scampers out of sight, and the hero of the superb French thriller The Apartment jettisons his fiance and a good job to stalk her. Vincent Cassel, the star of The Apartment, must have felt similar stirrings. He has appeared in six more films with Bellucci. And in 1999 he married her.

Monica mania is no longer a secret hoarded by European cinephiles. In this year's avidly awaited sequels to The Matrix, she plays Persephone, Queen of the Virtual World. She will be Mary Magdalene in Mel Gibson's Jesus film, The Passion. But why wait? Tears, a smart, sturdy war film with a lot of heart and a little cleavage, opens this week. And in the art houses there's more, much more of Bellucci in Gaspar Noe's defiantly lurid Irreversible, in which, for nine minutes, her character endures the most brutal rape scene in movie history.

Doctor, biblical strumpet, cyberroyalty, rape victim — she plays them all, with ferocious conviction. "It's important for me to find different things and prove I can do them," she says. "Someone told me that inside all actors are many sleeping princesses, and each time we do a role, one of those princesses wakes up. Inside us there is everything. We just have to look for it."

Born in Umbria, Bellucci began modeling to support her law studies at the University of Perugia. Her work as a model got her a small, revealing role as a vampire bride opposite Keanu Reeves (her Matrix co-star) in Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. Soon the actress-model was a model actress in French and Italian films and one American suspense drama, Under Suspicion, as Gene Hackman's wife.

Serious actress, sex goddess. Movies haven't seen that combo since the era of Sophia Loren and Claudia Cardinale, when European stars commuted between homegrown and Hollywood films. A later generation had less luck: Isabelle Huppert's first big U.S. film was Heaven's Gate, and Isabelle Adjani's was Ishtar — two signal flops of the '80s. Penelope Cruz has yet to look comfortable in a U.S. film. Bellucci knows the odds, and she has the ambition. "It's so difficult for a European actress to have the chance to work internationally," she says. "But if you want to make it as an international actress, you have to work in America."

She will do fine if she has even half the impact on U.S. filmgoers that she did on the men in the Tears crew. "They were going crazy for her," director Antoine Fuqua says with a laugh. "I had guys coming in — just nutty. Their hormones were going nuts. What are you going to do? I had to keep them focused. Hey, I had to look through that lens every day myself. Sometimes I'd just look at her and go, 'Wow.'"

Monica Bellucci's conquest of America begins this week at a theater near you

Loss of films is a blip, not a crash

March 6 2003

Fast lane ... Producer Andrew Mason, here with Geoffrey Rush on the set of Swimming Upstream, has another four films out this year. Photo: Vince Valitutti

The prolific producer Andrew Mason talks about the realities of film-making with Garry Maddox.

It's a crucial question for the producer who has brought more Hollywood films to this country than anyone else - is Australia losing its shine as a location for international production?

Consider the evidence. Since the Brad Pitt film The Fountain collapsed before shooting in Sydney, the sci-fi films I, Robot and Gothika have been lost to Canada. The Canadians have also boosted their tax incentives to attract more foreign production and the value of the Australia dollar has continued to rise.

Producer Andrew Mason, who was the Australian connection for the three Matrix films, Red Planet, Scooby-Doo, Queen of the Damned and Kangaroo Jack, says another major film was also lost when the Canadians increased their incentives last month.

"Overnight the decision was made to go to Canada," he says. "That's indicative of how tough this game is being played. Governments all over the place are recognising the benefit of film production to local economies and are prepared to fight it out with incentives."

Mason says the rising value of the dollar has added 20 per cent to foreign filmmaking costs. But given the next Star Wars episode is moving into Fox Studios, he believes the loss of these films is a blip rather than a bust.

"There is still plenty of production going on and Australia is still a great place to make films. The economic equation just got a little tougher. But I don't think we can ease up on the hard work of trying to attract production. It's pretty easy for it to slip away if the attention isn't kept on it."

For an Australian producer, Mason has been almost freakishly busy lately. The drama Swimming Upstream has just opened in cinemas and on the way are Kangaroo Jack in April, The Matrix Reloaded in May, Danny Deckchair in June and The Matrix Revolutions in November.

He is also planning to make two "digital films" this year. This initiative is intended to deliver up to four edgy films year - all made for about $1.2 million using digital filmmaking technology.

Once casting is finalised, director Daniel Krige will shoot West in western Sydney. Mason describes it as a "tough and very honest story" from a director with "astonishing levels of passion".

In July, Stuart McDonald is to shoot Power Surge. It's a thriller with three lead cast members in a confined environment - an isolated house.

"That's pretty much the best recipe for these sorts of projects. Bound, the Wachowskis' film, is pretty much that. [So is] Blood Simple. There's a reasonable history of these sorts of films."

While he has yet to see all the assembled footage of the Matrix sequels, Mason says the Wachowski brothers, Larry and Andy, are demonstrating the long-promised synergies within media empires for AOL Time Warner.

"Probably every one of the major media companies in the world had their chief executives standing up at board meetings touting the great advantages of the synergy between their various divisions," he says.

"It's fascinating that it ends up being a couple of creative people who show them how that's really going to work."

Along with the sequels, the Wachowskis have had Japanese animators make a series of nine films called The Animatrix that are being progressively released on the Matrix website and DVD. There is a also computer game that includes material from the film.

"There will be things in the game that you can't get to if you didn't find the bit on the website," says Mason. "When you've found the bit on the game, you'll understand that bit in the movie. And when you see that bit in the movie, you'll go back to The Animatrix on DVD and go 'now I understand'. That's sort of what all these chief executives were talking about but they didn't understand how it would happen."

So has all this activity given Mason that rarity in the industry - a profitable business making films in Australia?

"It's possible to have a comfortable lifestyle," he says. "But unless you have a mega-hit, it ain't a profitable business. And if the mega-hit is a studio picture, even if you have some sort of profit share, you're never going to see it. It's the studio system. It's adept at maintaining its unfortunate lack of profitability."

Most Australian producers are involved because they love films, he says. "If they make any money, they put it all back into developing movies. Every new project involves another pile of risk because the development process is so lengthy."

Movie Money: Cradle 2 big bucks

Action film's No. 1 opening continues Silver's strong relationship with Warner Bros.
March 3, 2003: 9:45 AM EST
By Martin Grove, contributing columnist

LOS ANGELES - There were champagne corks to pop at AOL Time Warner's Warner Bros. Pictures as "Cradle 2 the Grave," a fusion of Eastern martial arts and Western street culture, kicked off to $17.1 million. It was Warner's biggest three day February weekend opening ever.

Meanwhile, Walt Disney-owned Miramax Films saw its highly acclaimed musical "Chicago" crack $100 million and win the Directors Guild of America award Saturday and the Producers Guild of America award Sunday. Only five times since 1949 has the DGA winner not wound up winning the best director Oscar. Of 13 past Producers Guild winners, nine have gone on to win the best picture Oscar.

Cradle's sizzle reflects Warner's solid marketing and its very productive relationship with blockbuster producer Joel Silver, whose films to date have grossed over $3.9 billion worldwide. Through Warner-based Silver Pictures, Silver has brought the studio a string of hits, including "Lethal Weapon" and three sequels and "The Matrix," which grossed over $456 million worldwide in 1999 and spawned two sequels for release via Warners later this year.

"Joel Silver continues to deliver number one openings for Warner Bros.," said Dan Fellman, president of Warner Bros. Distribution. "This the eighth number one opening for Joel out of his last 10 pictures for the studio. With 'Matrix Reloaded' (May 15) and 'Matrix Revolutions'(Nov. 7) both going this year, he'll definitely extend that impressive record."

"I love making movies," Silver told me. "What makes it so much fun is working with a great place. Besides Alan and Barry (Warner Bros. president and chief operating officer Alan Horn and chairman and CEO Barry Meyer), who are fantastic guys, and (domestic marketing president) Dawn Taubin and Dan Fellman, it's a new golden age at Warner Bros."

"I've never felt the company run so well. I've never felt the divisions work together so well," Silver added. "These guys really are inspirational leaders. They really have built a fantastic organization. There used to be a lot of divisiveness. In past managements it was sometimes very hard to get things done. Now these guys are just fantastic and they make it an incredible place."

"Cradle," whose budget Silver calls a mid-range $40-50 million, reunites the producer with his "Romeo Must Die" team of director Andrej Bartkowiak, martial arts star Jet Li and hip-hop artist DMX. Silver first blended hip-hop with kung fu in "Romeo," which reportedly cost $25 million. Opening to $18 million in March 2000, it grossed $56 million domestically.

"The exit polls (for 'Cradle') were really excellent with a very strong definite recommend category," Fellman said, noting its audience was 55 percent male and 45 percent female.

Was it an advantage having no other wide openings this weekend? "It always helps," Fellman replied. "But you know what? There's a lot of movies fighting for the same (young) audience. 'Old School' had a very good weekend. 'Daredevil' and 'How to Lose a Guy' are (also) fighting for young, hip moviegoers." AOL Time Warner is the parent of CNN/Money.

Oscar's kind of town?

Miramax saw "Chicago's" best picture Oscar prospects soar Saturday night with director Rob Marshall winning the DGA award. The film's PGA win Sunday night makes it a solid favorite now to win the best picture Oscar.

"Chicago's" $8.1 million weekend gross sent its cume to $105.2 million for 10 weeks, validating Miramax's slow roll out distribution plan geared to the Oscar timetable. "Chicago's" 13 nominations are more than any other film this year. Insiders say it should gross at least $125 million, but could crack $150 million if it wins best picture.

With "Chicago" breathing new life into Hollywood's long dormant musical genre, Miramax is already negotiating to do another, a remake of 1955's "Guys and Dolls."

DVDs on hold

Bowling for Columbine and Matrix: SE are MIA.

March 03, 2003 - Just a quick update on two upcoming discs for you. MGM has removed Bowling for Columbine from their upcoming release schedule, most likely waiting for Oscar results.

Also, Warner has removed The Matrix: SE from their press site without explanation. The disc may be postponed or cancelled.

We'll keep you posted on both discs as soon as more news is available.

So did Amanda collar Keanu?

I know I know .... But I'm so glad that he looks so fine.

HOLLYWOOD hunk KEANU REEVES clearly has a weakness for the pale, delicate types.

And you have to admit girlfriend AMANDA DE CADENET is not bad either.

Keanu, Amanda and their mystery companion — an excuse for a dog that looked more like a shaved blond rat — were snapped after flying in to Los Angeles.

And Amanda wasn’t letting go of the pointy-eared beast as they strolled off the plane from New York.

Matrix star Keanu has had an on-off relationship with former wild child Amanda for years.

Perhaps it’s time she let that freaky four-legged friend of hers off the leash and collared pedigree chum Keanu instead. After all, she wouldn’t want him to stray.

Reloaded and ready for action

As fans across the globe wait eagerly for the release of two sequels to The Matrix, Peter Conrad finds that the original film's futuristic world now seems weirdly prescient

Sunday March 2, 2003
The Observer

'What,' asked the teaser trailers, posters and website headlines four years ago, 'is the matrix?' The puzzled tone was disarmingly honest. The Matrix was a film of a crankily eclectic kind: a merger of cybernetics and kung fu, set in a world where robots engage in aerial fisticuffs with a few remaining members of the human race. No one had ever heard of the two obsessive brothers, Larry and Andy Wachowski, who wrote and directed it. Nevertheless, their nutty invention totted up $171 million in the United States alone, became the first DVD to sell a million copies, and generated lucrative video games. Two cinematic sequels are to be released this year, and a Newsweek journalist, over-oxygenated after a brief preview, has pronounced them '2003's hottest flicks'. Today, The Matrix is a universally recognisable, globally franchised brand. But do we really know what the matrix itself is?

The answer lies in the word itself, which splits into a pun. There are two matrices in the film. A matrix, first of all, is a womb. The Wachowskis conjure up a future in which the planet is a parched, ravaged desert. Machines have assumed control, enslaving men and reducing them to a food source. Human beings doze in uterine vats of goo while a master race of artificially intelligent robots sucks life-giving heat from them. To keep their victims occupied while they feed on this vital warmth, they wire them to a main-frame of dreams, a cerebral cinema, whose illusory delights are known as 'the matrix'.

But there is another kind of matrix, less physical than the womb, a mathematical grid, with numbers arranged in rows and columns. The film begins by studying such a galaxy of digits, glimmering on a computer screen. The camera closes in on a zero and travels through its welcoming vacancy. The numerical matrix, like the maternal pods in which we see human beings drowsing while the machines graze on them, is a means of multiplying and reproducing. At the start of the film, we stare at the gaping O; we soon encounter the complementary 1 in the slim, upright personage of Keanu Reeves, a hacker who lives in Room 101 of an apartment block. His alias, during his nocturnal bouts of electronic mischief, is Neo, which turns to be an ana gram. 'You are the One, Neo,' remarks the guerrilla leader, Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne).

Morpheus means that Neo is the Messiah, a Christ for the cybernetic age. This saviour has been born, somehow or other, from an immaculate union between Morpheus, who represents God the Father, and a nurturing mother called Trinity, an unholy spirit in PVC bondage gear, played by Carrie-Anne Moss. The One has a mission, which is to demolish the matrix. We are all, Morpheus tells him, slumbering inside 'a computer-generated dream world'.

The matrix fills us with intoxicating illusions through wires and electrodes, and this 'neural, interactive simulation' persuades us that we are alive; in fact, our existence is merely virtual, a brightly coloured fantasy of sex and shopping. 'We're inside a computer programme?' asks Neo when Morpheus gives him this desolating information: Keanu Reeves, as a bosomy oracle remarks, is cute but not too bright.

Anyone baffled by this heady blend of theology and electronics should not panic. The idea, projected into the future by the Wachowskis, is very old. The matrix is another name for Plato's cave, where men huddle in the half-light and turn their backs on the scorching, truthful sun. More recently, the notion was paraphrased by Albert Camus, who argued that our supposed reality is nothing more than crude, painted scenery on a flimsy stage.

The film's story is equally familiar. Neo, following a woman with a white rabbit tattooed on her shoulder, goes on the same journey as Lewis Carroll's Alice, who discovers a land of mad wonderment on the other side of a looking-glass. Morpheus invites his protégé to discover 'how deep the rabbit hole really is'.

The nerdy acolytes and besotted cultists who chat about The Matrix in cyberspace believe they are dealing with something dizzily profound. For them, the film resembles the grand unified theory that astrophysicists are straining to propound. On the internet, you can find learned essays by doctoral geeks who explicate the metaphysics of The Matrix, analyse its indebtedness to the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, or relate its religious allegory to Gnosticism or Zen. The Wachowskis, predictably, relish the reputation for cosmic wisdom that has been wished on to them. A viewer, ushered into their spectral presence during an online conference, once noted: 'Your movie has connections to Judaeo-Christian, Egyptian, Arthurian and Platonic myths, just to name those I've mentioned. How much of that was intentional?' The invisible Wachowskis replied from limbo: 'All of it.'

The brothers have cultivated their mystique with care, pretending to be absent, disinterested gods, creating a world for the rest of us to live in. Their biography states merely that they 'have been working together for 30 years' and then shrugs: 'Little else is known about them.' Glimpsed in a DVD featurette, they turn out to be scruffy slackers, more or less indistinguishable from each other because of their shared uniform of jeans, sneakers, sweatshirts and zip-up jackets; both wear baseball caps, though, to reassure you that you're not suffering from double vision, one of them will have the cap on back to front.

Positive identification is possible when you notice that Andy is bearded and chubby, while Larry wears specs and has a couple of earrings depending from his lobes. In their overlapping utterances, they babble abstrusely: Larry, for instance, remarks that when you take religion and maths 'to the infinity point, you wind up at the same place - these unanswerable mysteries really become about personal perception'. I especially love that 'really'. I suppose we get the magi we deserve, but can these be the inventors of a new heaven and earth?

Let me attempt my own decipherment of The Matrix, which is not quite as windily lofty or obscure as it might seem. Science fiction's futures are always modifications of the present. 1984 (from which the Wachowskis purloined Neo's Room 101) was Orwell's commentary on the regimented society of 1948. 'You believe it's 1999,' Morpheus says to Neo, 'when it's closer to 2199.' Actually, the reverse is the case. The Matrix is a parable of our own time, a period when, thanks to biotechnology, Homo sapiens may be evolving into a race of beings who are at once more and less than human.

Although Morpheus dismisses reality as 'electrical signals interpreted by the brain', the film is grounded in a real place. It was made on the streets and rooftops of Sydney, and anyone who knows the city will spot the towers of the financial district, the open-air food court of Australia Square, or the grimy alleys of Glebe. The Wachowskis mystified the location by superimposing street names from their own hometown, Chicago; the purpose was to suggest placelessness, that disoriented modern condition, inherent in a world where geographical distance and difference have imploded.

When the Wachowskis needed a warped and kinky setting for the scene in which Neo is recruited by Morpheus, they simply took over a Sydney S&M club and invited the members to come along in their fetishistic costumes. If you want to see the future, just look around you.

The predicament the film investigates - the showdown between organism and engineering, between a life based on carbon and one that derives, like the computer's intelligence, from silicon - catches the paradox of the way we live now. Take, for instance, the fashion accessories of the characters, so keenly imitated by fans. Dark glasses are compulsory in The Matrix. They block the sun, from which Plato's cave-dwellers recoil, but they also serve to occlude the eyes of the wearer. They prohibit engagement with the world beyond the lenses and frustrate any exchange of glances with another person; to put on shades is to solipsise yourself. Neo gazes at Morpheus, and sees only the dual reflection of his own face in those black, opaque windows.

The film merely mimics a contemporary habit: in a New York blizzard two weeks ago, I saw dozens of people - mutants? replicants? digitalised phantoms? - trudging through snowdrifts beneath a grey, woolly sky, all wearing sunglasses. Their eyes were turned back into their heads; our collective existence had become a private film screened in what Morpheus calls our 'primitive cerebrum'.

Telephones, which are lifelines for Neo and his companions, serve the same purpose. The hackers escape from the matrix by beaming themselves down the twisting, fibre-optic cables of a phone line; at the other end, they re-occupy the bodies they have temporarily quit. Once again, the fable dramatises the way we live now, conducting animated conversations with absent partners as we walk through the streets. And since the screens on mobile phones have learnt to transmit images, we can direct and perform in the films of our own lives, communicating across an aerial distance that never needs to be abridged by the contact of bodies.

If you want to do something as old-fashioned as having sex, that, too, can be arranged without the messy, infectious commingling of flesh. When Neo ogles a woman in a red dress, Morpheus explains that she, too, is nothing more than a neural projection. Still, acting as a 'digital pimp', another charcter offers to arrange a date. Why not talk yourself to a solitary climax on the phone, or have virtual intercourse on the internet? Plugs make contact more snugly than our concave and convex genitals ever could. Afterwards, the mouthpiece can be wiped clean, and the computer screen is tougher and more impenetrable than any condom.

As the scene in the S&M club intimates, the merger of bodies matters less than the approximation of fantasies. Death, presumably, is as phantasmal as sex, which is why in 1999 two teenagers at Columbine High School in Denver, addicted to the film and mimicking Neo's dark glasses, floor-length coat, and the armoury of weapons he straps to his body, opened fire in the library and canteen and massacred their friends before killing themselves. What harm could they be doing, if life was only a movie?

When not hacking, Neo sells illicit floppy disks to his clubbing friends. He programmes the clubbers with sensations: electronics are their designer drugs. He keeps the cash from these deals in a hollowed-out book, whose title is 'Simulacra and Simulation'. The volume opens at a chapter on nihilism, to remind us that the film itself is an exercise in annihilation. One of Neo's customers takes mescaline or, rather, connects his nervous system to a disk that delivers the appropriate hallucinations, and calls it 'the only way to fly'.

Flying comes easily to these people, who are yanked into the air by invisible wires. They skip across gulfs between skyscrapers, and kick-box while defying gravity. Such feats are made possible by the lightness of their being; because they live inside technological cocoons, nothing tethers them to the old, shared, solid earth.

This is a world of substitutes that must surely be more satisfactory than the authentic commodities they replace. A character called Cypher relishes a steak that he knows is just another illusion fed into his head by the matrix. Again, the film tells a contemporary truth. Meals, in a consumerist society, are about feelings, not nutrition, so we eat the sizzle, not the sirloin. Morpheus's crew subsist on snot-coloured gruel dished up in sardine cans. This foul porridge, someone tells Neo, contains 'a single cell protein combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins and minerals'; the formula is chemical.

Have you read the labels on the cans or packets at the supermarket recently? If the artificial flavouring is unpersuasive, your own imagination does the rest. One hacker believes that the slop resembles a breakfast cereal called Tasty Wheat. He then concedes that he has no idea what wheat tastes like: his suggestible taste buds are simply following the instructions of that capitalised adjective.

The agents hunting Morpheus call him a 'terrorist' or 'the most dangerous man alive', though his only crime is to have exposed the fragility of the fiction that houses us. When, two years after the film's release, more brutally fanatical political terrorists did the same, our guardians responded by telling us to go back to sleep, to curl up contentedly in our matrix of commercialised dreams. Bush, immediately after 9/11, eloquently rallied Americans to continue shopping, and during the security alert in New York in mid-February, when rumours circulated about cyanide attacks and dirty bombs, and fighter jets screeched on patrol above the city, mayor Bloomberg urged Manhattanites to go the movies.

The Matrix analyses our malady, though, of course, it dare not prescribe a cure, since that would mean an end to the sale of cinema tickets, DVDs and video games. The terrorism of Morpheus is merely conceptual. The Wachowskis, in ways that might now embarrass them, behaved like the genuine article when making the film. They took fiendish aesthetic delight in organising a helicopter crash, showing how its propellers buckle as it lunges sideways and shatters the glass wall of a skyscraper.

Fussing over the apocalyptic spectacle, Larry Wachowski said: 'We wanted the glass to explode in a kinda ever-expanding circle. It took three months of heavy-duty planning to figure out how to do that.' 9/11, after all, was an action movie whose pyrotechnics were not faked. It is creepily appropriate that the special effects for this year's two sequels, Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions, were filmed at a naval base in California, decommissioned during the presidency of Bush père. Here, a full-size freeway was built so that Cadillacs and 18-wheel trucks could burn up on it, bombarded by guided missiles. The lot resounded to playful blasts followed by storms of fractured glass, and the FX supervisor John Gaeta greeted visitors by saying: 'Welcome to the war zone.' Was America here rehearsing its own extinction?

Hyping The Matrix in 1999, the producer Joel Silver said: 'This is the first film of Y2K.' Back then, we were all nervous about New Year's Eve, though the worst scenario we could imagine was that our computers would lose their memories. Now that we are older, wiser and more scared, The Matrix looks truly prescient. Geneticists, cloning babies and tinkering with DNA, have begun to render humanity obsolete; Bush and his cronies hanker for a war so their machines can play lethal games.

No wonder that the two sequels are anticipated with such excitement. If there is a soporific, pacifying matrix, we all urgently need a connection to it.

· Matrix Reloaded is set for release in May; Matrix Revolutions will follow in November.

Magic bullets

· The two sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, have cost more than $300 million.

· Trailers for the sequels, first posted on the internet last May, were downloaded 2 million times in the first 72 hours.

· The 2,500 different special effects in the new films cost £40 million.

· 'Bullet time,' the trademark special effects trick in The Matrix, in which the camera appears to spin 360 degrees around a central image, has since featured in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Charlie's Angels and been parodied in Shrek and Scary Movie.

· In June, the Wachowski brothers will release a DVD called The Animatrix , a companion collection of nine short films that help explain the mythology behind the trilogy.

· In the film, the Matrix is a 'megacity', 10 times the size of New York.

· R&B star Aaliyah, who had been cast in a supporting role, died in a plane crash last August. She was replaced by Nona Gaye (Ali), Marvin Gaye's daughter.