We Spoke To Keanu Reeves About ‘The Matrix: Resurrections’ And The Beautiful Cage Of Nostalgia
"We want you to yearn for what you don't have, but fear losing what you do have," Reeves says, crunching his hands in front of his face.
I am warned ahead of time by his The Matrix: Resurrections co-stars, Priyanka Chopra and Jessica Henwick, that Keanu Reeves does not take anything — anything — lightly. “There’s no small talk with Keanu,” Chopra says. “He’s always like, ‘Do aliens exist?'”
That’s alright. It is hard to imagine how anyone could generate small talk around Resurrections, the wormy, almost overwhelmingly dense fourth instalment in the sci-fi franchise that shaped modern populist cinema. Indeed, in its sheer ambition — its swing-for-the-fences philosophising, which covers everything from free will to the nature of desire and fear — it more resembles the unfairly maligned sequels, Reloaded and Revolutions, than the original.
While the first film had one thing on its mind, Resurrections doesn’t sit still for a single second, blasting through sit-down discussions about war, nostalgia, and the possibility of human beings living in peace with the technology that they have made.
That method of approach has become the mainstay of Lana Wachowski, Resurrections‘ director, in recent years. Even her most ill-regarded projects — the thrillingly sappy Jupiter Ascending, the deliberately dizzying Cloud Atlas — have in them an ambition that puts an entire decade of mainstream directors to shame. There is no such thing as “too much” when it comes to Wachowski. And though that makes for structurally messy, sometimes confounding projects, it means that she does not have it in her to make a boring film. Which other filmmaker could you say that about?
Following The Natural Light
According to her actors, that free-wheeling, endlessly reconstructive approach is reflected in Wachowski’s behaviour on set. “I’d never really worked with a director like her,” Henwick, one of the standout performers in Resurrection‘s stacked cast, explains. “Lana’s style is very specific … It’s very fluid. She does not like you to rehearse, she does not want to talk through the character with you. She wants you to come in a state of readiness, but she doesn’t want you to know what to do.”
This working method, is, apparently, new for the director. According to Jonathan Groff, who plays a rebooted Agent Smith, she used to be more rigid; more structured. “She’s become obsessed with discovering organic things in the moment. And this is in every department. You are always in a constant state of not knowing exactly what she wants. It creates this kind of adrenaline and anticipation. And so for me the process was very body-first, rather than head-first, when you plan out everything you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it.”
Now, when Wachowski is trying to feed her actors their inspiration, she uses references to music; to architecture. She works with natural light, and when that natural light changes, she switches the set-up on the whim, following a creative force that she does not understand or attempt to control.
“She makes her work for an audience of one,” explains Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who (sort of) plays a new take on the Morpheus character. “Which is herself, and her own sensibilities; her own artistic desires. She wants to tell the stories that she wants to tell, with the idea of, ‘if you build it, they will come.’ I think Lana sleeps very good at night.”
Groff agrees. “We were never on solid ground,” he says, smiling. “She’s really interested in this idea of keeping people off her centre.”
The Matrix Is Dead: Long Live The Matrix
And more than that, Wachowski wears her heart on her sleeve, openly. Resurrections is, at its heart, a love story. But not just a love story between Neo and Trinity, whose desires for each other have not waned over the years. It is also a story about the love — complex, messy love — between the audience and the franchise. Without giving the game away, Resurrections is a meta take on the Matrix story, that folds fictional worlds into real ones.
That means it’s that rare prospect in our modern age: a film explicitly about nostalgia, rather than one that just trots out soothing reminders of the past in the name of fan service. Exactly what it has to be say about our obsession with the past is complex; it is never clear whether Wachowski considers it a cage, designed to keep us as docile as the human batteries in the franchise, or a thrilling way of taking back control of our own pasts.
Is the world I’m in real or not real? Are my memories real or not real?
Keanu Reeves has thoughts. Or, at first, just one. When I ask him what he thinks about the film’s approach to nostalgia, he has a single word: “Perspective,” he says, simply. There is a pause, and for a moment, I think that might be his entire answer. But then he draws breath, and continues.
“I think that it explores the comfort of nostalgia and the anxiety of nostalgia, in the sense of the past, fiction, reality… Especially for my character. Is the world I’m in real or not real? Are my memories real or not real? Is that what memory is? And then what is nostalgia? That not-knowing places you in a moment of, ‘that was then, and this is now.’ And that can put you in a place of anxiety. But it might be a beautiful prison.”
Carrie-Anne Moss, who returns as Trinity, thinks similarly. “I think the interesting thing about nostalgia — when I think of the people I know who are most nostalgic, they tend to be a little stuck in the past. I know that when I get nostalgic, usually about my children when they were little, I’m not seeing where I am now. So it takes work to not be too nostalgic. But it’s human nature to want to do that; to want to define ourselves by our past.”
Fear And Desire
Resurrections never explains itself — it’s hard to imagine what that would even look like in a case of a film this overstuffed; this resistant to binary notions of what art should do. But there is a moment, towards the mid-point, when a surprise nefarious presence explains the core of what drives The Matrix itself. It is, he says, fear and desire, being pulled towards a future that we hope will be better, while being terrified that the past will repeat itself; that we will be trapped in the endless loops that Neo spends the movie’s first twenty minutes designing.
When I pose this thesis statement to Reeves, he seems ultimately to find that words fail him. “That’s a big conversation,” he says. “Seduction, reality, simulation, creation. Yeah, the line, right? ‘We want you to yearn for what you don’t have, but fear losing what you do have.'” He takes a breath, and then crunches his hands in front of his face.
That’s a big conversation.
“But that’s what makes The Matrix so cool. That you have a line in a story like that, one you can sink your teeth into, and then go out in the world and see it reflected there. What’s our place in creating that? What’s our place in receiving that?”
He looks away. He is for a moment lost, lost in the way that Neo is for much of The Matrix: Resurrection‘s running time, contemplating possible futures that have not yet come to pass, and trapped in thought patterns that are as human as they are strict. “Anyway,” he says, turning back, smiling. “Cool.”
Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @JosephOEarp.