u/amysteriousmystery

While browsing the A24 Shop last week to buy the "I Saw The TV Glow" screenplay book (I started getting into Jane Schoenbrun's films last month and consider me a fan!), I noticed the "Everything Everywhere All At Once" screenplay book had a written introduction by Lilly Wachowski (who I knew loved the film), so I knew I had to buy that one too!

A lot of people have noticed the influence of The Matrix in EEAAO (which has also been confirmed by the filmmakers themselves), and my take on Lilly's introduction is that she addresses this, at least indirectly:

>"When I was in grade school, a bunch of us made a radio play on my family's cassette recorder. A heavy, gray rectangular box with plasticized chrome detailing and big square buttons that depressed with satisfying ka-chunks. I distinctly remember the little slotted mic area where we would drum our fingernails for the horse-galloping sound effects (our radio play was a Western). It was replete with Ennio Morricone songs and other epic bangers ("Exodus," "The Magnificent Seven") from an album my parents had called Great Motion Picture Themes.

>I don't remember the plot or how long it was—the cassette was lost after too many moves and, in all honesty, was probably recorded over with some song like "99 Luftballons" or "The Safety Dance." (I hadn't yet made my inevitable turn toward metal and punk rock, okay?) But I do remember the story closed with a big shootout where the main character, some sort of edgy, anti-hero type, got gunned down in the end and scratched the words (very dramatically! in the desert sand), "I...shall...return."

>The story was an amalgamation of all the stuff we were watching, a slew of Westerns, swashbucklers, sword-and-sandalers, all glued together. But that ending, it was an unusual move, our first bit of genre-mashing with this weird, magic element.

>With our story editor hats on, the debate to include this strange ending went something like:

>"'I shall return?' How's that supposed to work? He thinks he can come back from the dead?"

>"Yeah... No... I dunno... It's cool!"

>No arguing with that. "It's cool" was the quod erat demonstrandum for our group. As I got older, I learned the names of the people who had made my favorite films and where the films themselves had come from, how the "Western" was this particular genre where all these different filmmakers were pinging off of each other from all over the world: Mexico, Japan, Italy, Spain, France, Hong Kong. You can see the book Red Harvest (or some facsimile) has been made and remade, from Akira Kurosawa to Sergio Leone to Walter Hill to the Coen Brothers to The Bullits. An echoing. All these different artists sort of "yodeling" to each other across vast expanses of not only space but time. This newfound knowledge not only altered my sense of the Western as a specifically American construct, but it also upended my idea of what a Western even is.

>That perspective only continued to widen for me as a film-maker. I began to have a sense of my own minisculeness, as well as my connectedness to a much larger thing; I was part of this human collective.

>I look back at the culmination of art I have personally watched, seen, read, heard — all the stories I've been told by friends and relatives, my mom and dad — and my mind reels. Then, imagining the countless paths of where all those stories and art came from, you begin to understand the lifeblood that storytelling is to human experience.

>We are our stories.

>I saw Everything Everywhere All At Once in the theater with my boyfriend, and about a third of the way through, the moment when the "Everything" title appeared on screen, I instantly choked up. We were in the hardest part of the pandemic, and my own sense of connectedness had atrophied to some extent. And that moment in the film? Hit me to my core. I wasn't just choked up, I started blubbering! It made me suddenly feel once again that I was connected to something bigger, and what unraveled before me was a marvel. Everything Everywhere All At Once is its title and so much more.

>The boundlessness of love in the heart of these two filmmakers, the Daniels, exploded off the screen. Their love for movies, the love for their craft, for the human collective — it staggered me. Their film took such an important stand against nihilism and hopelessness.

>I left the theater with a renewed sense that there is magic in the world. There is magic in all of us.

>Yodel on, Daniels! Yodel on!

>Lilly Wachowski

You may also be interested in:

The Wachowskis writing about their early contact and falling in love with comics

or Lana's writing about some other type of comics she also grew up with.

https://www.indiewire.com/features/interviews/lilly-wachowski-looks-back-bound-30-years-later-1235197426/

>It’s amazing that you and Lana continue to do that. You had this experience of stepping back while she went on to make “The Matrix Resurrections” without you. She’s said that was a very important story for her, given your parents’ situation. I wonder how the experience was seeing that film. You weren’t involved in it, but it’s still your sister; it’s still these people and worlds that you created.

>Yeah, it was funny; it was a weird experience. But I think it was necessary. Warner Bros., they’re going to do this a lot. Because the industry is about regurgitation, you can expect to see more “Matrix” films come out. For me, seeing somebody else make it — even though it’s my sister — I was able to tear that Band-Aid off. I mean, we went through our… what’s the terminology? What’s the phrase? We exhibited our grief in our different ways. A lot of my grief is in “Work in Progress.” In the second season, where I’m a bit more involved because Abby lost her mom as well, there are these conversations that we’re both having with our mom. The character Abby is sitting with her mom, who is a box of ashes on this couch; the protests around the murder of George Floyd are happening around her, the character, and she’s feeling alone and lost, and she conjures her mom to come and sit with her and take her to bed. While that scene is happening, there’s a painting that is my mom’s painting that is behind the character Abby. So we’re both, like, having these cathartic moments in our art that is giving us exactly the same feeling that the character is getting in the show.

>You know, Lana’s doing similar stuff, genre-wise, with “The Matrix,” and this idea of holding on and resurrection — all of that’s about my mom and dad. So she needed to go make that film, and I did not. So we kind of just diverged; I said, “Go and do it.” You know, it was hard and weird to watch and… yeah. I mean, it’s all good. Everybody got what they needed. [Laughs]

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/emile-hirsch-speed-racer-legacy-1236601946/

>In 2007, there must have been a great deal of frenzy around the Wachowskis first movie after wrapping the Matrix Trilogy. Did you have to scratch and claw for the role of Speed?

>Oh yeah. I auditioned for “The Kid” in Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions when I was 15. I didn’t get the part, but I remember meeting the Wachowskis and just thinking they were so amazing. I was such a huge fan of The Matrix.

>Fast forward to when I’m 21 and auditioning for Speed Racer, I had just finished Into the Wild a month before. No one had seen that movie yet, so I was still auditioning. I worked very hard on the audition. Lora Kennedy was the casting director. It was one of those audition casting calls where if you were an able-bodied male from around the world, you were putting yourself on tape for it. They were like, “Anybody can come on in for Speed.” It wasn’t like, “Can I get an audition?” It was more like, “Who hasn’t auditioned for this movie?”

>So it took probably four auditions. I’m guessing they had an idea that they liked me early on, but then it becomes about consistency. More and more high-pressure auditions probably gave them an idea of what it might be like to work with me.

https://www.thewrap.com/creative-content/movies/speed-racer-emile-hirsch-interview/

>After Hirsch had wrapped “Into the Wild,” he had to prepare for “Speed Racer” auditions. Hirsch had auditioned unsuccessfully for the two “Matrix” sequels (we’re assuming for the role of The Kid, eventually played by Clayton Watson). Hirsch was only 15 or 16 at the time.

>“I wasn’t really experienced enough to handle them as filmmakers in a certain sense. I don’t think I quite got the direction in the right way and I was just new to the game,” Hirsch said. But he had just been through the wringer on “Into the Wild,” directed by a filmmaker who also happened to be one of the greatest performers of his generation. This time, he was ready for the Wachowskis.

>“I remember really working a lot on the auditions and putting in the time to really figure out exactly what the right tone for the scenes was and whose Speed was. From the beginning, it felt like it went well,” Hirsh said. “It was a series of auditions that culminated in getting the part.”

>Hirsch said that at the time he remembered news articles about the worldwide casting call that the producers of “Speed Racer” had put out.

>“It wasn’t like they just saw a few people, they saw everyone. And part of me was like, what are the odds I get it, just like numerically, I mean, there’s like 10,000 people submitting? But it worked out and I was beyond excited and thrilled and a little intimidated, even just because of the size of the of the production.”

Fun to think about!

Excerpt from the "Speed Racer Revisited" featurette found in the new 4K release. Look up the disc on Amazon or whatever your favorite store for disc releases is.

https://deadline.com/2026/05/halsey-star-psycho-sexual-horror-replacer-avan-jogia-1236902065/

U.S. pop star and budding actress Halsey is set to star in Replacer, a “psycho-sexual horror” written by the singer and actor-director Avan Jogia, with Jogia directing, and Lilly Wachowski exec-producing.

>The synopsis reads: “Stranded in Montreal, Proxy (Halsey), a troubled DJ, meets an alluring artist and his group of friends who run an underground radio station. The station’s broadcast becomes warped by a mysterious signal hidden deep beneath the city’s subway system. Proxy must escape before the sound turns her, and her new friends, into something raw, primal, and unrecognizable.”

>Lilly Wachowski commented: “Avan and Halsey’s script is a surreal hyper-dive into a twitchy, conspiratorial genre mashing snarl of horror/thriller/comedy, set against the grit and grime of a rarely glimpsed Montreal subculture. This thing is packed! I have the sense that Avan’s eyeballs have gulped down a steady diet of the films I grew up on — David Cronenberg, Alex Cox, Tony Scott, John Carpenter. Anarchists United is beyond excited to join the Replacer team and bring this super cool story to the screen!”

>Jogia commented: “Replacer is a bright and electric club horror mashed together with a vulnerable romantic story about belonging and community. Come together. Leave as one.”