Minute 34: “Whoaa-Aaah!”

Transcript

Transcribed automatically from the audio, and imperfect for it — names and punchlines suffer worst. Useful for finding a moment, not for quoting one.

0:00The Matrix Minute, a podcast where we discuss the first film one minute at a time because this movie is wonderful. My name is Phil, and the Wachowskis said they were approached to direct a Batman movie, but they were busy on the Matrix sequels. My name is Jake, and that is, as usual, a very interesting fact. Yeah, and I'm Tim, and did you know that Neo actually shaved his eyebrows for that scene? It's not makeup, and people were weirded out, couldn't look him in the eyes when they talked to him. Really? They couldn't look him in the eyes? Apparently these are the trivias of the world. That is interesting. How many, the question is, the big question is how many weeks does it take

0:43for eyebrows to grow back? I don't know, but I know that this was the reason why he did shave his eyebrows was because it was the last stuff that they were filming so that he could shave them. That would suck if it was like, imagine this, they do it the first day? Oh, crap. The rest of the shoot, and then they have to give him fake eyebrows, and people go, have you seen the Matrix? Yeah, it's really good, but something about those eyebrows, it's just so weird. Something about that lack of mustache that Superman has, and some of the shots for the Justice League that's coming out, is kind of fishy. I haven't seen them, have you? I can't wait to see that. I'm going to look for every time we see Superman. I want to see the mustache, like, you know, mistracking, so it has trouble following him. Yeah, the mustache, like, appears for a second. No, no mustache, they're erasing the mustache. Sorry, erasing the mustache. But sometimes it appears for a second,

1:24or it appears on Batman for a second as well. I just don't understand that, like, it would have been a lot easier to have a fake mustache than have, than not shave it. But I know... These are the legal... But this is the contract, you know, they're like... I know they are. No! Wasn't that, what was it, there was a... And now, did you hear that Tom Cruise got a little injury? My favorite is 50 years in the future, when people talk about this, if they talk about this, they'll go, why was that? Legal contracts. Yeah. That's it. It was all worth it. Yeah, it was all worth it. It was all worth it for those stupid papers. It was all worth it for that deadline. Mm-hmm. Right? For that... Oh, for sure. For the rewrites. For that arbitrary

2:05release date that only matters once. That humans set up. Yeah. Yeah. Fiscally, yeah. But now, you know what's even funnier? Tom Cruise had a little leg sprain. I think he broke his leg, actually, just the other day for Mission Impossible 6, right? Oh, did you know what it was? Henry Cavill's in that one, right? That's why he can't shave his mustache, because he's in... Oh, it's Mission Impossible stopping him. Yeah. And now they're delaying the shoot for, like, five, like, I don't know, a month? Five years. Or so. And now Henry can easily shave his stache. We'll see what happens. The stache chronicles continue. Reshoot everything. I am John Johnson, a stache lawyer. I'm a stache lawyer. I only deal with complications

2:49and contracts of... Facial hair. Shaving facial hair or growing facial hair for actors in the business in Hollywood. Yeah. Welcome to Minute 34. Surprising a lot of clients I have. Men and women, too. Yes. All right, well, welcome to Minute 34. We're here at the power plant again, and it's pretty scary. So I'll tell you what happens just to give you a reference. In a dramatic voice, because that's how I do it. I mean, we can change it, and I can just go goofy and just say vague things. You mean, like, the first episode we did where I did the description? People go into the hallway

3:30and they look and they see... I forgot about that. And they have guns and they look and they walk... Did we redo those or we kept them? I think... No, we didn't redo it. No, we didn't. I think we did those. Amazing. The plan was watch the minute and describe it as you watch it. Yeah, each will take a turn, but that didn't... We're the only... I think we're the only ones that actually make such an elaborate description. Really? Yeah. Usually it's just people... You know, most of the minutes is just... We start with the power plant and we end with Neo Falling. Oh, okay. Well... I mean, we could do that, but I thought this was more fun. I think it's... More fluff. More minutes. More fluff and more minutes. More time wasting for you. And our dear listener can listen to the story. Yeah. Yeah, it's gonna be

4:11funny, like, because I write these down because I can't remember this. So there's a little behind the scenes trivia for you, which is obvious. But I keep all the things that I write. So by the time we finish, you can read a whole novel and I can give it to you and you can actually... Well, no, Phil, this is my idea. The Matrix by Phil. Yeah, The Matrix by me. Yeah, I'm telling you, we need to release this book. I know. When we're done, it'll be The Matrix by Phil Dragic. And it'll be the entire description. You can go edit some things just to, you know... Yeah, just make it flow better. Flow better. And there you go. 200 page novel. So, minute 34. And most of the novel is, Neo looks at Morpheus, Morpheus then gives him the pill, Neo takes the pill. Neo, Neo, Neo, Neo. Neo, Neo!

4:51Neo! So what does Neo do now? Well, the horror show of the human power plant continues as Neo looks in shock. Nothing would have prepared him for this. Absolutely nothing. But just then, a spider-like flying robot comes in with his arms outstretched. It grabs Neo by the neck and drills out that big plug in the back of his skull. And Neo is ejected from the pod into a tunnel as he plummets into dirty water. The end. Alrighty. Well, uh... Power plant, my friend. I would... Yeah, go ahead. The big power plant shot with the amazing music. You know what I love about David's music is that it's not particularly saying that you

5:36should be scared. It actually is actually giving off a sense of, um... Granger and wonder. Yeah, wide-eyed awe. Like, oh, ho, ho. And it's not going, dun, dun, dun. So that's what I love about it. I love this moment. Yeah. Ho, ho, ho, ho. And, uh, we're still here. We're in the power plant, like I said. And then, um... We are in the... Then there's the 90-angle drop-down shot, which you like. That's what I was going to say is my favorite shot in this minute, is the 90-angle. Because it looks like, um... It almost looks like stop motion. That's what I like about it. Right. Yeah, it is a... It's a composited shot, obviously. Is that also bullet-time style? I don't think so. Because Neo isn't moving at all. Which is interesting. I think it might be still images, you know?

6:17Still images? No way. Put together. Well, it looks great either way, because it's, again, very strange and... Yeah. Unnormal. And, uh, here we go. We've got our first creature in here. Um... The... The robot. And, uh, it's called DocBot. Is it officially called DocBot? Yeah, that's what they called it when they were... When they were filming the movie and they were developing the... Doing storyboards and concept art and stuff, they called it DocBot. That's just the... Well, what do you guys think about DocBot? I like him. He's, uh... He checks. He's... He's... Wait, so let's think about this. So how it works is they... Would it make him think the machines that he's dead or, like, he's... Well, here's the thing, right? I think there's two ways to look at this. Because the doctor's checking him out. Check him out.

6:58I have a very difficult time accepting this explanation if we don't take into consideration the sequels. This makes very little sense in terms of the machines. Yeah. The machines... Because the thing is, this is how I look at... They're still intelligent and they have a fluid... Well, this is what I think about... Consciousness that can be streamlined anywhere, I think. That's true as well, but... That's true. That's a good point. I think about that. But I was going to say, the way I see AI typically is that AI... If we're talking about, again, an artificial intelligence is not modeled after human behavior, but strictly sort of logic-based and task-based oriented, then I think that AI would basically always eliminate the gaps and always use methods that are streamlined and simple and that don't need any extra work or effort, right?

7:46So basically no area for, you know, like a grace sort of thing. It's just completely, you know, merciless. That's the way I see AI, because they have absolutely no sense of, you know... Yeah, it's all about being efficient. Exactly. Exactly. And so if we take that in consideration, I think that if we don't look at the sequels, really what the machines would do is something completely brutal like unplug the human and just like either annihilate them or, I don't know, cremate them on the spot. I don't know. Like they would just completely get rid of the excess waste, because that to them is now waste. That's it. So I don't know how to explain this in the world. If, like why in the world of machines dump the human alive?

8:31I don't know. And be like, hey, let's plug you out. You're cool. So I'm saying that, unfortunately, that's like one of the weaker points, I think, in the first film, at least, because you can't explain it. I completely agree with you, Jake. Oh, thank you, Emma. Welcome to the Matrix Minute. Yeah. Do you want to get a drink? What kind of drink? So Tim wakes up in the real world and he's a woman. Yeah. Interesting. That is so true. A small blonde woman. So what's it feel like now? It's great. Cool. More free. Yeah, I can multitask now. Yeah, I was going to say, now you have the superpower of like talking to someone and listening to another conversation in the background.

9:17Exactly. And you can do both at the same time. I'm actually vacuuming right now at the moment. How's that going? Yeah. Baking a pie. What kind of pie? That's the question. A raspberry pie. Like, are we talking like raspberry pie? It's raspberry muffins. That sounds really good, though. Anyway, guys, I have to go. I just kind of came to remind Tim that he promised me a panini. Tim! Yeah. I'm pretty much hungry and no panini. Yeah. What do we know what paninis taste like? I just... It's just... Those are the things that I start thinking about whenever... Okay. Okay. Thanks, Emma, for dropping by. The first unofficial official guest.

9:59Yeah, that's right. That was good. Surprise guest. Well, let's continue with the Docbot. I just wanted to mention that he's like this huge... You know, he's a big guy. Big old Docbot. You probably think that when it comes down and finds Neo that it's going to like strangle him and then attack him and crack open his skull. You human, I hate you. But it actually disengages his plugs, right? And the Docbot apparently reads him as a dead body. So... But I mean, the machines... Not a good doctor. The machines... Not a good... Whoops, killed him. A human. Flush him. I was going to say, the machines are very benevolent creatures in this movie.

10:40I mean, if you think about it, they are very, just very nice machines. In fact, I think that one of the things about the machines in... When you watch the Animatrix and maybe you get some ideas about what the Wachowskis had in mind for it and how it works in the prehistory and the backstory of these things is that they try to be as little as the humans as they can. And that's why they changed their appearance to look as far away from humans as they possibly could. And I think that's a wonderful idea. I love that. Well, you know what's also interesting is that speaking of... I love that so much. Benevolent matrix. Because then they start looking like deep sea insects. It's so awesome. And, you know, there are a lot of theories on, you know, that the machines did this on purpose,

11:26like making the matrix and so forth and so on. Like they're actually doing humans a favor. Yeah, yeah. Because they could have just put them in some kind of weird homeostasis where people are unconscious, but they didn't actually give them the whole world. Homeostasis. Because they're like aware, like the humans need the sort of emotional journey. But not even that, but like, yeah, they actually are doing a nice thing, you know. So they're not completely absent of moral code. So Neo gets... Sorry. I just want to say to continue that. It's funny because you mentioned like, you know, they sort of designed the machines later on, you know, to look non-human and be just very utilitarian, you know, like you need four legs for this job.

12:07Yeah. Four legs, you know, not the classical sort of kind of evolution type, which is funny. I could just imagine them trying to code the NPCs within the matrix, like the agents, like, he's like, you coded it, done. And the machine's like, no, no, you have to give him like human stuff. He has a personality. He has to, I have to code all this fluff, all this junk. Oh, yeah. It's like years. The stupidity of him talking and then having emotions. Can we just, can we just do like a little version of it? Like give him some kind of, you know, like conscious or something. I don't know. Let's make a personality algorithm that'll learn for itself. And he's just copy paste, copy paste, copy paste, copy paste, copy paste. Except Agent Brown, they messed up. Bad copy paste.

12:49They actually like, you know, they actually copy pasted a template of like one of the best people ever to live. The perfect citizen. Yeah. The perfect citizen. Like, you know, P-O, P-O, P-C, P-C-1. That was the file. And it said times use zero. And they're like, what? And they actually drag and drop that onto Agent Brown. Jump done. Well, there's a closeup of the drill going in, like, like undrilling itself from the back of his skull. Undrilling itself. That's, that's the dummy again. The dummy returns, the same shot. You know, it's interesting. With a black background.

13:29Yeah. So according to Phil Osterhaus, whom I quote a lot because he's pretty cool. Because he has such a cool name. There was a rumor on the internet that they made a fully animatronic Keanu Reeves. For pleasure. Yeah. But it was funny because, like, who writes these rumors? Like, who has the budget for that? I don't know. Yeah. Just completely. I don't know. And a little behind the scenes here. Like, one of the big concept designers for this was Tani Kunitake, who worked on stuff like, oh, he actually did Avengers and he did Blade. And he did that painting that you showed me, Tim.

14:10Oh, that's his? Yeah. Yeah. And he was doing key frames for these particular moments here, for this real world stuff. Because, you know, you've got to pre-plan as much as you can. What else can we say about this? Is that he's, you know. Not too much. Well, there's like a great flump sound that goes on where the. Oh, that is so true. The flump sound is amazing. As he becomes the poop. Yeah. As he becomes the poop and he's like, and the whole, all that liquid is thrown out with Neo. And it's great because, like, the Wachowskis, they're always kind of, they were always really vocal with their sound effect imitations.

14:51So many of the crew members commented about how they were always using, saying, this thing goes, and this goes. Oh. That's good. Yeah. And everybody liked it. Everybody loved that stuff. The, um. There's like little, little like, little pink balls around Neo's head as he's falling down. What is that? I thought those were just some of the sweat. Let me see that. I haven't seen those pink balls. Okay, so, so look at this. As he goes down the tube. You can see, you can see he has no crotch. He has nothing. No, no, in the slide. Oh, in the slide. And it's, yeah, in the slide. As he's coming out of the slide and there's like little, little balls around his neck. Oh, yeah, that's right. There's some kind of weird. Oh, that is so weird.

15:32So when he's flying out of the tube and he's falling down into the dirty water. Yeah. There's like some kind of creatures around him. Yeah, yeah. I don't know what that is. Maybe there's some kind of idea that they never finished. But I know that earlier in development, when he's going down the slide, he was supposed to be very crimson-like. He was supposed to look like he was very red. Like a little Bobby. Because of the residue of that red goop. That's not Keanu. Jacob, you really think that's going to be Keanu flying down that? Yes, look, this is not him at all. Yeah, he's, you're freeze-framing through the slide close-ups. Yeah, it's amazing. What is going on here? Why is it not him? It's probably Darko. This should be the screenshot for the episode.

16:15Look at this guy. It's some old dude. Look at this. It is. This is like, what's going on, Philip? I never knew this. Why is this Keanu Reeves? This is perfect. This is not him at all. Jacob, that's because you don't put this guy in a dangerous situation that could potentially ruin his life. This is an old man having a good time. This is a production. Okay, okay. Look at the screenshot. Okay, stop. It's Bruce Willis sliding down. I wanted a picture of the DocBot for the screenshot, but now I guess we're not doing that. Tim, Tim, I have a better one for you. Look at this old man. Speaking of an old man.

16:59Wait, Tim, I have a better one for you. Okay, I shall be here. Okay, guys. No one can see what you guys are doing. It's just a bunch of dinosaurs. Like, dude. Oh, the house rapper is going, yeah, I'll do it. Look at this. Oh, there's an actual close-up. That's beautiful. What is that? Some dwarf? This is like an album cover, you know, experimental. Jacob, you guys are talking. No one can see what you're looking at. Okay, sorry. We'll have to link these up. We're laughing at the screenshots that we found of Neo, supposedly, going through the tube, you know, getting spat out of the capsule.

17:41Yeah. And now he's getting the sewer tubes, and I cannot believe my entire life I thought that was Keanu Reeves. They shot him, but they didn't. They shot a stunt double. Of course they shot a stunt double. And this stunt double looks nothing like him. It's nothing like Chad. I think it's Chad. It's not Chad Stachelski. Chad Stachelski looks close. He looks kind of like Keanu as well. Yeah. But this guy doesn't. This guy is just a random dude. I think that's Darko. What is that, Phil? Darko. Remember Darko? Darko. He's another stunt double. On the show? Yeah. I can't remember Darko. I guess they needed a bald stunt double. It's so weird looking at him because this is nothing. This is like a different movie. So we're going to link these two screenshots. Yeah. They're perfect. We have to. This is a revelation.

18:21The Matrix revelations. Right here, right now. You knew about Darko. I didn't, but I assumed that it wasn't. I didn't think it would look that hilarious, but I assumed it wasn't Keanu sliding down there. Well, you know what else happened? Oh my goodness. When they're going down the water slide, they broke three waterproof camera housings. What? While doing the slide one. Oh, because it just slid the camera with him down there? Yeah. No, someone was holding it, but he always would bump up on the roof of some of the edges and it would just break the... How is this dangerous going down? It's pretty cool. I wonder... It's just crusty stuff in there. It's a stunt. You don't put actors in...

19:01Philip. Some actors do their own stunts. Yeah, like Tom Cruise. Keanu did. What? Well, Keanu did all the karate stuff. He did a lot of martial arts. Yeah, but that's not the stunt. That's fight choreography. Well, some don't even do that. But I can understand, let's say, for instance, like being in a suit on fire. Okay, that's bad. Those are extreme situations where you obviously don't want actors and want to train professionals. Why are you criticizing the fact that they're not criticizing the movie? I'm just wondering. I'm wondering. I'm just curious. Okay. I'm curious because I spent the last 17 years thinking it was Keanu Reeves, so I would just like to know a little bit. How come it wasn't? What's going on? Okay, there's one more little thing I want to tell you, and that in the 1996 draft, I'm

19:46not going to read anything from that, but I can tell you basically that what happens is... Oh, by the way, Tim, where's the jingle? No! Boop! No jingling yet. Jingle next time. Next time. It's okay. We're not reading from the script, so it's fine. Oh, okay. So, what's the... That's good. That's nice. Template. Placeholder. Placeholder one. So, what about the 96 script that you can mention, Philip, without reading from it? Did they mention a strange, bald, foreign man sliding down a... Well, you know what? You're very close. Because Neo looks down below him, okay?

20:28And he sees one of the pods detaching, and he sees an old man in it. Oh, my goodness. And they throw the old man... Oh, and he died. Yes. And when he's looking at this... Just falls down into the fog? Just like that? Yes, I think so. It says... I think you're really sad. I think you're really sad. Does that mean there's this whole decomposing bunch of these old people down there? That's gross. See, the entire thing, this stuff gets very super... Super... Like, when you think of what machines would do without any understanding or, you know, way of thinking. Yeah. Like, we think it's just... Oh, my goodness. It just goes to extremes. Yeah. Below Neo, a pedal detaches from the stem, bearing away the body of an old man like an automated

21:13barge. Even as a new pod rises up and plugs itself into the empty space. And on that is a little baby. Yeah. That's a very sad... That is a very sad image. What do you mean? You have these old people on slides having a time of their life. Yeah. They don't care. They don't know. They don't know what the real world is. But, yeah. Maybe that's the... They shot that scene and then they deleted it and they utilized the old man sliding down the slide. Oh, yeah. That makes sense now. That makes sense. That was the part of the sequence. They're like, ah, it's just gonna do that for Neo. Oh, boy. The balls, both of them. That guy, though. Well, that's about it. That's all we got. I think that's all I can say.

21:55That's the power plant. It's mighty and scary and shocking and big and amazing and I love that power plant. Too bad. I was hoping in Matrix Revolutions that they would go back to the power plant, actually. I thought they would probably do that. Yeah, they never went back. Fly across like X-Wing. Yeah, I thought actually they would walk around it. To be honest, I thought the power plant was probably the decomposing old people. Yeah. No, they do something with that. They like, they put it somewhere. They grind it and feed them intravenously. Feed them through the tubes. Back. Them, them, them, them, them. Anyway. What? All right. I think that's about it. Yeah. By the way, by the way, that 90 degree whatever shot, that's totally a still image. Just being zoomed on. That's great. Nothing is moving at all.

22:37Well, the lightning gives the effect, though. Well, and also the fact that they, you know, they composited this in three dimensions. Also, can someone explain to me, I see these pods are different people, different ages. Yeah, I didn't notice that. That's why it looked weird. In the shot before when he's looking around, I think there's some nice still shots you can look at people. They're in a fetal position, which is kind of cool to see. They're like, just like on, sort of like on their back, on their, kind of like, all struggling. How is that possible? They're supposed to be just lying on their backs. Yeah, I thought they all supposed to lie on their backs. You think like vampires, but if you look at the, if you look at the minute previous, there's a shot. There's a shot.

23:18When he's looking around and you can see the detail, they're sort of like all crumbled, crumbled together. Oh, interesting. No, I didn't notice that at all. Let me see really quick. Oh, no. I was, I was, mistake, mistake, mistake. Were you wrong? No, yep, they're laying on their backs. See, I think they're all, I think the whole thing was, the whole idea was that they're laying on their backs. They're chillaxing. My mistake. I retconned in the same episode. Didn't have to wait for another one. Perfect. Alrighty, well, I think we covered everything we could. Yeah, just a bit of begging, I guess. Begging's back on the menu, boys. The important part. We covered like. What? Sliding down the tube and stuff. Chinging its way down the tube. But no, Tim, it's not begging, we're just announcing our, where we are.

24:00Where, what locations. Oh, where we are. We are at the Twitters. We are there. Yeah, Tim, you've not plugged yet. Your turn. Okay, so we have these things in the Twitter. You can follow and get updates and pictures from Phil of himself posing in trench coats and glasses. Yeah. Facebook, you have videos of Phil in trench coats and glasses as well. Good stuff there. We have our own personal Twitters, but we don't pose in trench coats and glasses except Phil. And then we have a survey we talked about last episode. We'll link that too. And we have a website. It's pretty cool.

24:41It's pretty cool. It's pretty good. Yeah, Jake did most of that. Looks pretty good. Thanks. Yeah, good job, Jake. And I don't know. Do we have anything else? I think that's about it, honestly. Yeah. If you look at your phone right now, and you're on your podcast, if you use your finger to swipe down on the picture, Or no, I think it's tapping. Is it tapped? Let's say the iPhone. I don't know about the Android. Yeah. You can actually see the description. Everything is there, like right there. It's like the links and everything. It's like a revelation, like Matrix revelations. The Matrix revelations. Remember that one when Neo said that? Neo. Keanu. Keanu said in the making of the second and third film. In the making of documentaries. He was talking to the makeup artist.

25:21Peter Rob King. Thank you for being my name, man, because I forget. And he tells Peter Rob King, he's like, I think this one's for Matrix revelations. Revelations? And now forever for me, I like to call Matrix revolutions, Matrix revelations. Exactly. And that can be your own personal revelation. Thank you for listening, everyone. And we hope you're having a great day. We hope you have a great, I suppose, week, depending on when it's coming out. Yeah. Yeah. We're in September already, guys. No more summer. We're in September right now? Yeah. Oh, nice. Beautiful. Don't listen to this in school while in class. No. Unless you don't get caught. Unless the teacher's like free time.

26:02Then you can listen. Do that. If they're allowed. Follow the rules. And have a great... September. September. And we will continue to speak into our ears in September. If you'd follow us on the journey. Goodbye, everybody. Goodbye. Bye. Bye. Thank you.