'The Matrix' Creator Andrew Wachowski Explains How Living A Disordered Transgender Life Changed How He Makes Art

The Matrix creator Andrew Wachowski, who lives a disordered lifestyle where he pretends to be a woman named Lilly Wachowski, shared how living the disordered lifestyle changed how he makes art.

In an interview with Caleb Hearon, Wachowski revealed he channels his rage into his scripts and pursues making caricatures of right wing people.

First, he explained how he looks at his old projects differently, “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 continued, “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.

Next, he addressed how embracing the sinful and disordered lifestyle he’s chosen changed the way he makes art, “The things that I’m working on in my subconscious are probably a little bit different than the things that I was working on with my subconscious 20 years ago. Now, I just wrote this script with Mickey and it was just a way for us to process all of our trans rage that we have about the world.”

“This project started before even Work In Progress for me, where he wanted to make something with me and I was like completely done with movies and he was like, ‘Come on, we can make a story and put some kickass trans people in it and they can kick a lot of ass.’ And I was like, ‘Well, that does sound kind of good.’”

From there, Wachowski shared that this script began in 2017, and that he and Mickey had written around 30 pages. He also described writing it “became like this way to just like, ‘I’m purging all this rage and horror out of the world and onto this page.’”

He then picked it back up in 2021 where he claimed “the world was like way [expletive] for trans people.”

“For me that kind of catharsis out of fighting back, about completely creating caricature buffoons of the right wing to create an idealized family, a network, a Weather Underground of trans people coming together and supporting each other and holding each other up, trying to create a story that is the best of us,” Wachowski concluded. “It gave me a new way to think about what I wanted to put on the page now. So I try to be a bit more conscious as opposed to unconscious when I’m making work.”

NEXT: ‘Matrix’ Creator Andrew Wachowski Reacts To The Film Being Right Wing: “This Is What Fascism Does”