The blockbuster-film producer Dino De Laurentiis optioned the Wachowskis’ next screenplay, “Assassins,” while they were renovating their parents’ house. De Laurentiis entertained them with champagne and lascivious stories about beautiful actresses, and then sold the script to Warner Bros. for five times what he’d paid. According to Lana, substantial revisions by a hired writer removed “all the subtext, the visual metaphors . . . the idea that within our world there are moral pocket universes that operate differently.” When the movie was made, in 1995 (directed by Richard Donner, of “Lethal Weapon” fame, and starring Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Banderas, and Julianne Moore), the Wachowskis tried to get their names taken off the credits but failed. Still, the script earned them a deal with Warner Bros. They finished the work on their parents’ house, quit construction, and became full-time filmmakers.
By 1994, the Wachowskis had completed the first script for the “Matrix” trilogy. They’d had the idea while working on a comic-book proposal. They were thinking, Lana recalled, “about ‘real worlds’ and ‘worlds within worlds’ and the problem of virtual reality in movies, and then it hit us: What if this world was the virtual world?” The trilogy is set in a dystopian future where machines exploit human energy by keeping people perpetually comatose in pods, while placating their minds with a continuous simulated reality called the Matrix. A small group of liberated humans—Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity—fight back, through confrontations with the virtual Agent Smith, and the stark darkness of the machine-controlled world is countered by the feeble light of human solidarity. “When I first read ‘The Matrix,’ ” Mattis told me, “I called them all excited because they’d written a script about Descartes.”
According to Mattis, the Wachowskis were “the hot flavor of the month” when he sent the “Matrix” screenplay out, in 1994. “But then everyone read the script and passed. Nobody got it,” he said. “To this day, I think Warner Bros. bought it half out of the relationship with them and half because they thought something was there.” The brothers had spent two years writing the script, and they insisted on directing the movie. To prove themselves, they took on a smaller project first: “Bound,” with Gina Gershon, Jennifer Tilly, and Joe Pantoliano, a lesbian thriller with a happy ending. “Bound” convinced Warner Bros.
