The Matrix Resurrections was directed by Lana Wachowski. At first, Lana felt that the story of the Matrix was finished and didn’t need to be revisited:
Lana Wachowski at ILB Berlin 2021:
And… you know, every year, Warner Brothers would ask us to make another one. And every year they would drive truckloads of money up to our house and say “You could have this!” and we said no no no, not interested, not interested. And… it never was interesting to me as an idea to continue it.
“It never was interesting to me as an idea to continue it,” she said. “Then something really hard happened: Both my parents got ill. My dad first got ill, and my wife and I went home to take care of them, and we were really close to them. And also a good friend died in this very short period… It was just this constant grief. My dad died, then this friend died, then my mom died. I didn’t really know how to process that kind of grief. I hadn’t experienced it that closely.”
Lana recalled crying one night she couldn’t fall asleep. “Suddenly,” she said, “my brain just exploded this whole story.”
“I couldn’t have my mom and dad… yet suddenly I had Neo and Trinity, arguably the two most important characters in my life,” she continued. “It was immediately comforting to have these two characters alive again, and it’s super-simple. You can look at it and say: ‘Okay, these two people die, and okay, bring these two people back to life, and oh, doesn’t that feel good?’ Yeah, it did! It’s simple, and this is what art does and this is what stories do. They comfort us and they’re important.”