Mattis signed the Wachowskis shortly after reading Carnivore. The script's gnarly eat-the-rich storyline all but guaranteed it wouldn't get made, but it attracted enough interest in the siblings that their next effort—a dark tale of dueling contract killers titled Assassins—would sell for $1 million. At the time of the deal, the Wachowskis were renovating their parents' home. Not long after, they left the construction business for good.

Hollywood Bound

The big-screen version of Assassins—starring Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas, directed by Lethal Weapon's Richard Donner, and released by Warner Bros.—would be a shock to the Wachowskis. Their script was rewritten, prompting Lana to describe the film as "our abortion." The siblings took greater control of their next film, Bound, a pulse-racing thriller starring Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly as lovers who swindle a mob goon out of his millions. Bound would be the siblings' directorial debut, and they made it clear from the beginning who was in charge. On one version of the film's screenplay, they wrote the warning "This is the sex scene, and we're not cutting it."

After debuting at Sundance in January 1996, the lusty, grisly Bound was released that fall, becoming a minor hit—especially at the offices of Warner Bros. The studio had just watched its own erotic revenge thriller, an expensive remake of the '50s French stunner Diabolique, fail to turn on viewers. According to Lorenzo di Bonaventura, then a top development executive at the studio, Warner Bros. cochairman Terry Semel saw Bound and exclaimed, "Goddamnit—this thing probably cost a fraction of our picture, and it's so much more interesting."

The Wachowski's new story was so audacious, so future-forging, that all you could do was read it and wonder: What is the Matrix?

Di Bonaventura already knew what film the Wachowskis wanted to make as their follow-up. In fact, he'd already bought the screenplay— one that had stumped nearly everyone who encountered it. The Wachowskis' new story was so audacious, so future-forging, that all you could do was read it and wonder: What is the Matrix?

For much of the early '90s, when they weren't writing spec scripts or building elevator shafts, the Wachowskis fantasized about creating a sci-fi comic book that would allow them to sample all of their cultural obsessions. "We were interested in a lot of things," said Lilly, reeling off a list of the siblings' shared pursuits: "making mythology relevant in a modern context, relating quantum physics to Zen Buddhism, investigating your own life." They were also into Hong Kong action movies; early film fixations such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 French sci-fi noir Alphaville; the power of the still ascending internet; and Homer's The Odyssey, which each sibling had read multiple times.

Writing by hand, the Wachowskis filled up multiple notebooks with ideas for what they called The Matrix, their creative sessions soundtracked by the aggro-rock white noise of Rage Against the Machine and Ministry. Eventually they scrapped the comic book concept and decided to download years' worth of concepts and sketches into a screenplay. Their elaborate script for The Matrix follows a bored young office worker who moonlights as a hacker named Neo. One night, Neo meets Morpheus, a cryptic sage who reveals that we're all living in an evil computer-run simulation called the Matrix. Morpheus offers Neo a choice: He can swallow a blue pill and return to his dull office job, living happily (and obliviously) ever after in a fake reality. Or he can swallow a red pill and set off on a conscious-shifting transformation, acquiring all sorts of new powers before taking down the Matrix for good—and fulfilling his prophecy as "the One." Neo chooses the red pill, and as he begins his journey toward becoming a gun-wielding, kung fu–fighting supersoldier, his reaction is relatably real: "Whoa."

Mattis, who had studied philosophy in college, recognized similarities between The Matrix and the ideas of René Descartes, the 17th-century French thinker who wrote about man's inability to know what is truly reality. "When I first read the script, I called them and said, 'This is amazing! You wrote a script about Descartes! But how do I sell this thing?'" Mattis began circulating their script in 1995, right around the time that the internet—once the dial-up domain of academics, hackers, and military employees—was on its way to becoming a broadband phenomenon. Online, reality was becoming bendable. From the moment users picked a screen handle or even an email address, they were getting the chance to rewrite their own existence and create a whole new version of themselves—new name, new gender, new hometown, new anything. People were stepping into their own virtual worlds every day, and the Wachowskis' script for The Matrix had a question for them: Now that we can create as many realities as we want, how do we know which one is actually "real"?

People were stepping into their own virtual worlds every day, and the Wachowskis' script for The Matrix had a question for them: Now that we can create as many realities as we want, how do we know which one is actually "real"?

It was a timely query, one wrapped in an otherwise action-filled script, full of twists, chases, endless gunplay, and even a helicopter slamming into the side of a skyscraper. Yet there was no pill that could convince most studio execs to see The Matrix as a viable movie. The only company to show any real interest was Warner Bros., which had already bought the script for The Matrix years earlier, and then let it languish while the duo worked on Bound.