You don’t have to be an eagle-eyed “Matrix” fan to see that Lilly Wachowski, one half of the Wachowski directing pair that launched the original trilogy, isn’t part of the upcoming fourth installment, “The Matrix: Resurrections.” Those directing honors belong squarely to Lana Wachowski, who will re-team with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss for a return to the iconic techno-thriller property.
As for why Lana’s sister Lilly isn’t involved, Lilly herself recently opened during a Television Critics Association Summer Tour virtual panel for her Showtime series “Work in Progress” (via Entertainment Weekly).
“That’s a tough one,” Lilly Wachowski began. “I got out of my transition [in 2016] and was just completely exhausted because we had made ‘Cloud Atlas’ and ‘Jupiter Ascending,’ and the first season of ‘Sense8’ back-to-back-to-back. We were posting one, and prepping the other at the exact same time. So you’re talking about three 100-plus days of shooting for each project, and so, coming out and just being completely exhausted, my world was like, falling apart to some extent even while I was like, you know, cracking out of my egg. So I needed this time away from this industry. I needed to reconnect with myself as an artist and I did that by going back to school and painting and stuff.”
Lilly, who served as the showrunner, executive producer, writer, and director of “Work in Progress,” explained that she first stepped away before the second season of their Netflix series “Sense8.”
“[Lana] had come up with this idea for another ‘Matrix’ movie, and we had this talk, and it was actually — we started talking about it in between [our] dad dying and [our] mom dying, which was like five weeks apart,” Lilly said. “And there was something about the idea of going backward and being a part of something that I had done before that was expressly unappealing. And, like, I didn’t want to have gone through my transition and gone through this massive upheaval in my life, the sense of loss from my mom and dad, to want to go back to something that I had done before, and sort of [walk] over old paths that I had walked in, felt emotionally unfulfilling, and really the opposite — like I was going to go back and live in these old shoes, in a way. And I didn’t want to do that.”
Warner Bros. releases “The Matrix: Resurrections” in theaters and on HBO Max December 22.
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