Lilly Wachowski, co-director of “The Matrix” trilogy, says Hollywood is freezing out his new film because every lead role is played by a transgender actor. Speaking on KCRW’s “The Business” podcast, Wachowski said financiers like the script for his $10 million thriller “The Hunted” but won’t back it because of its cast.
“People like it, but they really don’t want to make it because it’s [got a] wall-to-wall trans cast. I have to get creative and figure out different ways that I can get this in front of people,” he said.
“This is a script that was extremely important for me to write. It was a response to what is happening in the world for trans people, and it gave me a hugely cathartic receptacle to dump all of my anger and rage and frustration into.”
The film, co-written with his partner Mickey Ray Mahoney, follows two men pretending to be women uncovering a government conspiracy. It’s currently stuck in late-stage development through Wachowski’s Anarchists United banner alongside Natasha Lyonne’s Ariadne Collective. Unable to land a studio check, Wachowski staged a table read at Los Angeles’ Dynasty Typewriter theater earlier this month.
“I’m just going to go out and I’m going to grab that trans joy with all of my friends,” Wachowski said. “It’s not the thing that I had imagined it was going to be, but the end result is the same.”
Here’s the problem with the discrimination framing: Wachowski is not an outsider Hollywood has shut out. He is one half of the directing team behind a franchise that grossed nearly half a billion dollars, and he has spent two decades since being handed studio budgets for “Speed Racer,” “Cloud Atlas,” and “Jupiter Ascending,” three films with a combined budget north of $250 million and a combined box office that never came close to earning it back. That is not the résumé of a filmmaker the industry punishes for his politics or his identity. That is the résumé of a filmmaker whose name still opens doors most working directors never get near, no matter how the math turns out.
Wachowski himself has been open about how his transition reshaped the way he reads his own filmography.
I look back on all of my previous work and I see it because I’m like looking at it from this higher place. It just like creates this different perspective from this point of view up here and I can see like Bound the first shot of the movie is a closet. And it’s like, ‘Okay, it looks like we’re going to be working on some stuff.”
“And so it starts there and you go through Matrix and it’s about liberation and identity and like freedom,” he continued. “This is a thing that’s cool about making art is that you can will things into being that you need to see in the world to help pull yourself along.”
He has also talked about writing alongside his brother who goes by Lana, who transitioned years before him, as an act of building proof that love was possible for people like them.
“A lot of the things that me and [Larry] were also writing about was love. That we needed to create stories that gave us a grounding to see that love was possible. As a trans person, the dark question that I had as a trans person was, ‘Who will ever love this?’ It’s like an Edgar Allan Poe story where you’re just cementing yourself up in the closet longer and longer. And so here’s me and [Larry] and we’re like this story is about love. Love is possible. These two people found each other, Corky and Violet, Neo and Trinity. And it gave us this reminder that there was a future for us.”
“All of that is great. I wouldn’t not make a story or put that in a story because we all need to be reminded that there is love out there. That there is love in the world. And it doesn’t have to be like a romantic love between two people. It can be just [expletive] love,” he added.
None of his rants on love change what the work earned at the box office once the built-in “Matrix” audience stopped showing up.
The “wall-to-wall trans cast” line is doing a lot of work in this story, and outlets have run with it uncritically. But a studio passing on a $10 million political thriller with an all-trans lead cast is not evidence of an industry hostile to trans stories. It is evidence of an industry that, even now, still finances plenty of ideologically driven projects for creators with far less box office history than Wachowski’s, and simply decided this particular pitch was not the one worth the risk. Financiers pass on scripts constantly for reasons that have nothing to do with the identity of the cast: budget, marketability, a director’s recent track record. Wachowski’s recent track record is not strong.
None of that stops Wachowski from finishing the film independently, which he says he intends to do. But a filmmaker with a nine-figure franchise on his résumé still finding rooms willing to hear his pitch, and a live theater willing to host his table read, is not the portrait of an industry locking anyone out.
Does “The Hunted” get made because Wachowski keeps pushing, or does this become another case where the identity-first pitch gets more press than the film itself ever does?
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This dude looks like he escaped a mental asylum.