It's a terrible cliche to say that a movie changed your life, but The Matrix kind of changed mine. I don't know that it altered my ultimate trajectory very much, but I do think it put me on that trajectory sooner. Its popularity proved to me that a lot of people must be worrying about how society turns the individual into a cog, and that knowledge gave me permission to start doing things differently. But this article isn't really about that, so let me switch gears.
When the Wachowski brothers were trying to get the studio execs to commit to a budget for the film, they began to realize that nobody really understood what they, the Wachowsakis, were proposing. It was a complicated film full of difficult ideas, and nobody really grasped the level of action that the brothers envisioned. So they hired comics illustrators Steve Skroce and Geoff Darrow to storyboard the film, producing, in effect, a several-hundred-page comic book. Those storyboards, along with the script and concept illustrations, have since been collected into a book called "The Art of the Matrix."
The interesting thing about these boards, to me, is that they were done under tight deadline pressure, so they are not slick, finished illustrations. That's interesting to an artist because, deprived of slick veneer, the scaffolding is clearly exposed, so you can see how these extremely talented artists construct action scenes. It's fascinating for anyone who has any interest in the art of visual storytelling. The concept drawings and paintings are gorgeous, and were done at a less breakneck pace. It's surprising how closely the film stuck to these drawings, in many cases reproducing them verbatim.
You can get used copies of this book fairly inexpensively. I recommend it if you're a fan of comics, or The Matrix, or both.
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Condition does not match expectation
Its condition is marked as very good, but I can only say it's ok good, definitely not very good... pictures attached
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Alex Kidd
Fett, guter Einblick in die Entstehung eines Filmklassikers/-Meilensteins!
Reviewed in Germany on September 5, 2021
