The Matrix Makers

The freeway chase was the first sequence the Wachowskis tackled for the sequels, and they spent months searching for the perfect location. The brothers wanted their free-way to have a sense of doom about it; not surprisingly, most urban planners try to avoid that. So the search came up empty. The brothers' solution was a tad uncon-ventional: they dumped the idea of shoot-ing on an existing freeway and built their own. In February 2001, they hired a construction crew to erect a two-mile loop--complete with exit signs, dividers, an on ramp and an overpass--on an old U.S. naval base in Alameda, Calif. When they first heard the idea, the construction guys nearly keeled over. "They actually said to us, 'We're not doing this'," recalls executive producer Grant Hill. "They couldn't believe it was for a movie. They said, 'Do you realize how much this costs?' " Correct answer: $300,000 per quarter mile. "We just looked at each other and said, 'OK, we can do that'."

After a seven-week shoot on the freeway, filming shifted to Sydney for the 270-day marathon--and, almost immediately, everything went to hell. On Aug. 25, 2001, 22-year-old pop star Aaliyah, who had been cast in a supporting role, was killed in a plane crash. (She was replaced by "Ali" costar Nona Gaye, Marvin Gaye's daughter.) Then, a month later, 64-year-old Gloria Foster, who played the Oracle in the original film and had shot her scenes in "Reloaded," died of diabetes. "Our oldest and our youngest," says Fishburne. "We lost our youth and our wisdom." Foster was particularly beloved by the cast and crew. A revered stage actress, she had finally earned a dose of recognition thanks to "The Matrix." "If she was British, she would've been a Dame," Fishburne says. In between the losses, of course, was September 11. Did anyone wonder if the movies were jinxed? "It was definitely something you thought about," Keanu Reeves admits. The actor had heartbreak of his own: while he was in Australia, his sister suffered a relapse of leukemia and endured lengthy treatment. Asked about her, Reeves, sipping a Jack-and-coke at a Manhattan hotel bar, glances away and goes silent for several seconds. Then he looks back and smiles. The clear implication: "next question." "Making this movie," says Silver, "was like the Crusades."

It's far from over. Between now and next November, Gaeta's visual-effects company, Esc (as in the "escape" button on a keyboard), and six other FX houses will have to deliver more than 2,500 separate shots, many of which will have taken nearly three years to complete. (By comparison, the first "Matrix" had 412 FX shots.) The price tag: a whopping $100 million, a figure that includes a new facility for Esc on the base in Alameda. Gaeta's previous company, Manix, won a visual-effects Oscar for the first "Matrix"--an upset victory over George Lucas's "The Phantom Menace." But Manix was far too small to handle what the Wachowskis wanted for the sequels. "Reloaded" and "Revolutions" required technology that, at the time, hadn't been invented yet.

Gaeta's office at Esc is on the balcony of a monstrous, 250,000-square-foot hangar, located directly above the pyrotechnics department. The base itself was decommissioned in the late 1980s by the Bush administration, and these days, Gaeta is its commander in chief. A naval officer would probably take one look at him and order a court-martial: he wears tinted rectangular glasses and dresses like a rave DJ, and he loves racing across the base in his Lexus two-seater at speeds close to 100mph. The effects whiz is especially giddy today, because he finally gets to tell an outsider about "virtual cinematography," his team's big invention for the sequels, which will make bullet time look like finger painting. Welcoming his guest inside, he begins by apologizing for any ruckus that might occur downstairs. "We're blowing up sentinels today," he says. Twenty minutes later, a distant voice cries out, "Fire in the hole!" Gaeta pauses for a few seconds. Silence. So he resumes talking. The next instant, a deafening blast sends him (and his interviewer) ducking for cover. A tinkling sound showers the outer wall of his office. "Did you hear that?" he asks, delighted. "I think that was debris!" Gaeta laughs. "Welcome to the war zone."

Virtual cinematography wipes out the line in the sand between what is real and what looks like the work of a computer. "Anyone who watches movies or TV or just lives their life is the ultimate expert in realism," Gaeta says. "You know when things are fake. You can just sense it." But not anymore. Remember that fight scene in "Reloaded" between Neo and the 100 Agent Smiths? Obviously, only one of those Agent Smiths is the real actor, Hugo Weaving--but you won't be able to tell which one. The other 99, all digital creations, are three-dimensional, photo-realistic copies. They're not just close approximations. They're perfect. Their hair ripples, their faces contort, their bodies twist and fight. Now, if Gaeta and his team can create virtual humans, then they can create virtual anything: rooms, vehicles, you name it. And they have. And you'll never know.

The refreshing thing about virtual cinematography is that it starts out with the genuine article. "We try to base everything on real actors and real objects," says Gaeta. "It's a very strong philosophical view that Larry and Andy and all of us share." Here's a gross oversimplification of how it works. Using five high-resolution digital cameras strong enough to pick up details like pores and follicles, Gaeta's team will record an actor's performance. This process is called universal capture, or u-cap. The team then feeds the information from all five cameras into a computer, and a complex algorithm calculates the actor's appearance from every single angle the cameras missed. "Once we have the master performance captured," Gaeta explains, "we can actually use it to create an event, like a martial-arts fight. But it could be anything." Like, for example, a scene in which Neo flies at 2,000mph through a metropolis--which is what you're looking at on the cover of this magazine.