The Matrix Co-Creator Lilly Wachowski Explains Why She Left Hollywood

The Matrix co-creator Lilly Wachowski is sitting out the return to the tech-controlled world with Keanu Reeves and the original trilogy’s cast with The Matrix 4. She has taken leave from Hollywood after helming The Matrix in 1999, returning later for 2012’s Cloud Atlas and 2015’s Sense8 on Netflix. Now, Wachowski is finally opening up about why she has left, in the first place, promising she has “one for out the door,” as she stands right now. “I have a resentment toward the industry because I feel like I wasted personal time,” Wachowski said. “[Filmmaking] is really a time machine that you get in and you get jostled around and then you come out of it a year and a half later, per film in some cases.”

Wachowski remembers the older times “I got in when film was at its peak, before boards and marketers found a way to wrangle movies,” she told THR. “Eventually, all those people and institutions ended up in the room with you and specifically behind the typewriter and behind the lens and behind the Avid. It created a bit of tension for me personally. I got to this breaking point and I had to walk away,” which lead to her departure from Sense8, almost six years ago. Wachowski says she needed to do “some personal world building,”

Still, Wachowski recognizes the impact her films have on her fans — especially the trans community. “Now that I’m out and a living example of someone who can grow old being a trans woman, [trans people] can see those films through the lens of my transness and their transness,” she says. “They’re able to go, ‘Oh my God, these films were such an important part of my coming out and my own journey.’ I’m extraordinarily grateful that I could offer that to people.”

In fact, much of The Matrix itself was “born out of a lot of anger and a lot of rage, and it’s rage at capitalism and corporatized structure and forms of oppression.” Wachowski explains that the “bubbling, seething rage within me was about my own oppression, that I [was forcing] myself to remain in the closet.” Taking a look at the film, it is not difficult to spot the subtext layered into it.

Wachowski’s sister Lana will be helming The Matrix 4, which is due in theaters in 2021. While Lilly won’t be directing this one, a return to TV and film remains on her mind. “I’m getting more queer and trans folks on the screen to show what we’re capable of and what amazing artists we are,” she says. “That’s a hard thing to give up.”