by Anthony Frajman

Looking back on the 25th anniversary of the seminal science-fiction.

While the Matrix production team faced myriad challenges getting the film up, preparing and shooting was equally difficult. One of the most challenging aspects of production was that stars, Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss and Hugo Weaving, famously had to endure months of meticulous martial arts training, on wires, for the film.

Another Australian crew member who made a major contribution on the film was location manager, Peter Lawless. Due to his efforts, and help from political consultants, The Matrix was able to gain unprecedented permission to shoot across Sydney.

Among the Sydney locales used in the film are the Hickson Road Underpass in The Rocks (where Trinity escapes), a Margaret St skyscraper (which doubled for Neo’s workplace), The Westin Hotel in Sydney’s CBD (now The Fullerton Hotel), the Maritime Trade Towers in Kent St (the Bullet Time rooftop), Martin Place, and the area around Central Station.

“Peter Lawless is a wonderfully complex human being who has some weird-ass hypnotism thing that he does. He can basically convince anybody in the entire world to let a film crew use any location,” says producer Andrew Mason.

“Everyone just said, ‘yes, yes. Okay’.

“I (also) thought we were really going to need some high-level support. So, I asked my big brother (a lawyer at a large Sydney firm), ‘who’s got amazing connections in government?’ And he said, ‘you need a bloke by the name of Bruce Hawker’. Bruce Hawker and David Britton had both been working with Bob Carr (NSW State Premier), and they’d recently decided to go out and set up their own consultancy,” Mason adds.

“So, they had an office down in the Rocks. I met them with a simple message: ‘We need every arm of government to say yes to things they wouldn’t normally permit, so we’ll need total cut-through’. The production engaged them for about a year, and they were really, really great with being able to find the right person in every department to help us, and to bring some trickier issues directly to the Premier’s attention.”

In one of the film’s key scenes, the helicopter chase sequence, the crew were able to fly a chopper across the CBD of Sydney with a stuntman suspended underneath on a wire, and a second chopper filming that. “That had not happened before. No one would even ask it,” Mason recalls today.

“The second unit team doing that was led by Bruce Hunt, who had worked with us on Dark City, great director of action and miniatures. Ross Emery, DOP, had worked with Bruce before, and they were having the time of their lives shooting so many cool shots,” Mason says.

The high-profile production had great political impact in New South Wales. There’d been some criticism of Bob Carr for the deal made with Fox for the RAS Showground site, which became the Fox Studios (now Disney Studios).

In fact, Fox had to spend serious money remediating the site, which had been somewhat unregulated for decades. Mason recalls an incident filming on the site in the days before Fox took over, where set painters had washed brushes outside one of the buildings… only to have that paint turn up in the duck pond of Centennial Park… because that’s where the drainage led. The new studios were completed just in time to be used for construction and filming of The Matrix, and when the film was a global success, it provided the ultimate justification for the studio deal.

Click here to read The Matrix at 25: Part 1

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