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The Matrix came out of nowhere. Before its release, nobody appeared to be covering it. No one visited the set when the film was shot back in 1998. No one seemed to care about who these Wachowski Brothers were. The story sounded confusing. It didn’t seem to be on anyone’s radar… except for mine.

Something intrigued me when I first read a synopsis about it back in January 1999. In a world run by artificial intelligence, humans are used as a source of energy to keep the machines going. A small group led by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) recruit computer hacker Thomas "Neo" Anderson (Keanu Reeves) in their fight to free humankind. It sounded strangely ambitious and cool. Even the title sounded cool.

It was later on March 20th that I first viewed that 60-second teaser trailer. Mysterious and wordless; it meshed together a lot of strange yet intriguing images, most of them involving guns, and telling us, “In 1999 The Matrix Has You.” I was sold as soon as I saw a character run along a wall (oddly, something I’d always wanted to see in an action film). It ended with a website address – www.whatisthematrix.com. Now, by this time, trailers were already in the habit of including website addresses, often slotted at the bottom at the end. This teaser (and the equally brilliant theatrical trailer) placed it right in the middle of the screen and highlighted each word to make sure audiences didn’t miss it. It was cleverly suggesting that if you go there, you might find the answer.

After viewing the teaser, I tried to explain to fellow students at my school that there was a film coming out called The Matrix, and that it looked like it could be the best film of the summer. I was dismissed pretty quickly. It was considered somewhat sacrilegious even bringing up the possibility that there could be a film on the horizon that was going to better than Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

After a 16-year wait after the end of the Star Wars trilogy, The Phantom Menace was hyped up to be the must see film of 1999. Every other film was overshadowed by George Lucas’ beard, lightsabers, and a line of people that had not heard of advance booking.

Being such a unique proposition, how The Matrix came about was a little unconventional. Written and directed by The Wachowskis, The Matrix was originally conceived as a comic book story. They submitted their script to producer Joel Silver, who set the film up at Warner Bros. back in 1994. According to The Wachowskis, during their first story meeting with Warner, the studio’s response to the script was, “We know we’ve bought something cool. We don’t know what it is. Can you take us through it?” So they brought in comic book artists Steve Skroce and Geof Darrow to help storyboard the film. Also, after having been burnt on their script for Assassins, (they tried to get their names removed from the film after it was rewritten), The Wachowskis explained that they also wanted to direct.

Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the head of Warner Bros. at the time, responded to their request by saying, “I’m going to have a hard enough time explaining to people what it is we’re trying to make here.” He couldn’t justify giving two first time directors a multi-million dollar budget for something that some Warner execs were still struggling to understand. So The Wachowskis went off to write and direct Bound with Dino De Laurentiis, almost as a test to show that they knew where to point a camera. The film came in at a cost of a little under $5 million. A limited release in the US had it earn $3.8 million, with an additional $2.4 million overseas. It proved to be a critical hit and also convinced Warner that The Wachowskis could direct.

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