You always told me to stay off the freeway. You told me it was suicide.

Like the film’s groundbreaking virtual effects, the daring and innovative stunt work in The Matrix Reloaded transcends the extraordinary feats performed in the first film. One of the most astonishing sequences in Reloaded is the fourteen-minute breakneck Freeway Chase involving spectacular car crashes, a life-and-death struggle in a speeding Cadillac, a Kung Fu battle atop a barreling big rig, and Trinity flying against traffic on a Ducati motorcycle with the imperiled Key Maker on the back. It took seven weeks to film the chase on a mile-and-a-half-long freeway loop constructed specifically for the film at the Alameda Naval Base.

“It’s relentless,” says Fishburne of the chase. “The cars start going on the freeway, the cops are following us, there’s the communication with Link on the phone, there’s the Twins, they’re firing, they’re morphing, the Agents show up, Trinity gets on a bike, she goes the wrong way, then you look up and Morpheus is riding on the truck like he’s surfing. After I saw what happens on the freeway, I realized how crazy Morpheus truly is.”

The freeway sequence demanded a massive amount of planning from supervising stunt coordinator R.A. Rondell. “I would sit down with the brothers for an hour and just talk about speed; let’s start with something generic, 55 miles an hour for a traffic pattern. The chase vehicles are doing 80, so they’re overtaking the cars by 20 miles an hour. How fast does that look when it’s going by? I would literally take out my little toy cars and we’d position them to see how the vehicles could be placed.”

Computer generated “pre-visualization” was an indispensable tool employed by the filmmakers to map out the complex shots they needed to achieve, taking into account the logistics of the stunts going on amidst the barrage of flying vehicles. Pre-visualization is the process of blocking out a sequence on computer, applying camera moves to it, then animating the scene for a detailed preview of what the final product could look like.

“In the Freeway Chase, the camera is in places where it hasn’t been before in car chases,” says director of photography Bill Pope. “The brothers made up their dream shots and put them into a computer and spit out a synthetic version of what they could look like onscreen. Then we had to figure out how to come up with those same shots in the real world.”

The high-tech pre-planning then merged with a more tangible, hands-on approach. “We literally walked the freeway with a little rolling measuring stick,” Rondell explains, “and precisely marked the pattern that Trinity’s motorcycle and the motorcycle-mounted camera would be following, with specific marks were they would make their passes and swerves. We calculated how long it takes this vehicle to travel, how long it takes to stop. Then we’d arrange the cars accordingly in the proper positions.”

An important concern for the stunt team was achieving a sense of realism that could mask their careful planning. “We didn’t want to make the traffic patterns generic or repetitious,” Rondell points out. “What do you see every day on the freeway? Everybody isn’t exactly placed at one distance or another for a weaving pattern. We took into account camera lenses, lengths from cameras to subjects and put all those factors into motion using the most unique angles and presentation. The challenge is then to make it happen in real time – and at that point, you have to take the human factor into consideration.”

“I have a major fear of the motorbike,” Carrie-Anne Moss admits. “And it was very challenging for me to get on the bike every day and practice. I started off with a tiny little bike. Mastered my tiny little bike. Got on a little bigger bike. Mastered it. That went on for months, until I got up to the Ducati. My biggest fear about it was, I guess, dying.”

Moss’s trepidation was understandable. She would be riding a powerful motorcycle at considerable speed straight into oncoming traffic, carrying extremely precious cargo: Randall Duk Kim, who plays the Key Maker, rode behind her – and neither actor would be wearing a helmet. The actress took her responsibilities very seriously. “Right up until the day we shot the motorcycle sequence, I said to R.A., ‘I can’t promise you that I’m going to do this.’ Because it wasn’t just about me – I have Randall on the back of the bike with no helmet on, and if you fall off a bike at 50 or 60 miles an hour, you don’t just get hurt. You get really hurt, or you die. So on that day, I knew that I could not allow myself to question for one split second whether or not I could do it. Negative thinking was not allowed.”

The stunt coordinator’s expertise was a deciding factor in Moss’s decision to go ahead with the stunt. “I absolutely love R.A. and trust him,” she says. “He is very patient and encouraging. If it weren’t for him, I would never have been able to even get on the motorcycle.”

“There’s a comfort level that’s involved now,” says Rondell. “This time around, the actors came in feeling that they can trust us completely, and that’s half the battle. It was just about acting from then on.”

While Moss was considering life and death, Randall Duk Kim hung on and enjoyed the ride. “It was utterly thrilling to work with Carrie-Anne on the motorcycle,” he says. “I never dreamed I would be part of such a fantastic project as this – I felt like a little kid having a great, big, joyous adventure.”

“Doing these films teaches me so much about myself,” Moss muses. “To face a fear like that and to overcome it is quite remarkable.”

Moss’s Freeway duties also included stunt driving for the Chase sequence, in which she pilots a Cadillac through a hail of bullets as a full-scale fight erupts between her passengers. “I went to motion picture driving school twice. I have a diploma, and I framed it, and I put it on my wall. I really, really appreciated the skills that I learned there, because I was able to do some very cool stuff when it came time to shoot.”

Fishburne was impressed with Moss’s skills. “Carrie-Anne can drive her ass off. We trained to do 180 and 90 degree turns, and within two hours she was whipping the car around like she’d been doing it all her life.”

“One of my favorite things that I did in the film was my sliding 90 into the camera,” says Moss. “It’s all about the foot brake and hand brake and sliding, and hitting your mark – coming at a camera crew in a small space, if I don’t hit the right mark, I could do some serious damage. I hit it in one take, which was also awesome because it was one of the only times that I got a real hoot and holler from the brothers. There’s nothing quite like a hooray from my two boys. It feels pretty great.”

Fishburne faced the considerable challenge of fighting an upgraded Agent atop a speeding eighteen-wheeler. “In rehearsal it’s cool because the truck’s not moving,” he says. “It’s challenging enough to be in a wire harness, trying to hit your mark up in the air. But when they turn on the hydraulics and start shooting, it’s a whole different deal.”

Though the actor had initial reservations about performing the stunt, Rondell’s reassurance and professionalism made all things seem possible. “R.A. is incredible,” says Fishburne. “When I first realized what kind of stunts were going to be involved on the freeway, I went up to him and said, ‘I’m scared.’ And he said, ‘I know. I’m gonna take care of you.’ His primary concern is always that everybody involved is absolutely one hundred percent safe. There are so many fail-safes built into his stunts that you feel as if you’re just having a stroll through the park – he makes you feel like nothing can happen to you.”

Producer Joel Silver was bowled over by what the stunt team was able to create. “There’s a sequence where an Agent jumps from car to car to car, which sets off a bunch of collisions in the background,” relates Silver, who selected the Cadillac CTS and the EXT to play major roles in the Freeway Chase because he believed the innovative vehicles could handle rigorous production demands while fitting seamlessly into the hyper-stylized world of the Matrix. “The incredible thing is that the team orchestrated sixty cars flying through the air at three hundred frames a second in the same fantastic way that they designed the fights – it’s brilliant choreography.”

Events that would be featured as the main action in any other movie are simply another layer in the landscape of Reloaded. “The brothers wanted the residual action of all those cars flying around to trigger crashes in the background,” says Rondell. “We designed this image of cars bouqueting out in the background, and it really looked great on the pre-visualization. Then when we made it happen in real time, it all unfolded like a symphony.”

Another key event in that rivals the Freeway Chase in both complexity and exhilaration is the Burly Brawl, a furious battle between Neo and an army of one hundred relentless Agent Smith replicas. The meticulously choreographed fight took 27 days to shoot. “We were doing 18-second takes with a 180-degree Steadicam, where I have over twenty-five moves,” says Reeves of the painstaking work that went into perfecting the brutal ballet. “I worked every day for six weeks with twelve incredible stunt men.”

“Keanu beats himself up on set and he has very high expectations of what the standard of work should be, but he never pressures me or the other actors,” says Hugo Weaving. “He’s a great listener – I really love working with him.”

Rondell, martial arts stunt coordinator Chad Stahelski, and fight choreographer Yuen Wo Ping auditioned around fifty stunt actors, acrobats, gymnasts and martial artists to play the core group of twelve Agent Smith doubles. “We put them through about four months of training to mimic Hugo Weaving, learn the fight choreography and develop the skills we were gonna need for this sequence,” recounts Stahelski, who also served as Keanu Reeves’ stunt double. “They had to be capable of doing everything from gymnastics, to acrobatics, to wire work, to what we call ‘Hong Kong reactions,’ big fight reactions that are gymnastic in origin.”

During the Brawl, Weaving was put in the novel and somewhat perplexing position of only being able to play one one-hundredth of his character at a time. “While they could teach Keanu the Burly Brawl choreography like a dance, they couldn’t teach it to me in its entirety because it involves at least ten of me at any given time,” he explains. “So I learned the fight as they would in Hong Kong, where the choreographer comes in on the day of filming and teaches you the moves on the spot.”

“We’ve had Hugo do more things than we ever could have hoped,” Stahelski says. “He’s fallen down stairs, he’s wrapped himself over poles, he’s been hit by the staff, he’s done a twenty-foot descender. Hugo’s all over the place in this fight.”

All of the stunt Smiths had to undergo the process of transforming themselves into replicas of the deadpan Agent as played by Weaving. “They all wanted to ape me, and I kept saying, ‘No, no, no, I’m the one who looks useless, I wanna look like you,’” recalls Weaving. “But they needed to learn to move in the way that I do and to have a sort of Smithian quality about them. He’s not particularly graceful, he’s fairly brutal.”

The closer the production got to filming, the stranger things became for the prototype actor. “They slowly started to resemble me,” says Weaving. “The shorter ones had lifts put in their shoes, and they all had their hair cut, and then the suits and ties and glasses started coming in, and then everyone had a wig, so by the time we began shooting there were twelve semi-me’s running round.”

The experience led to all sorts of self-reflection on Weaving’s part. “Well, I realize now how far my hairline’s receded,” he says. “Normally I look at myself in the mirror and I think it’s alright. But when I was looking at everyone from the side, aaagh!”

There was much more spontaneity allowed for in the fight choreography for Reloaded than there was during the shooting of The Matrix. “The first time, the fights were choreographed and we learned them like dances,” says Weaving, “and they hardly changed at all when we shot them. This time round there were quite major changes made on the day while we were fighting and we had to swing with that.”

“Wo Ping was amenable to me making some in-the-moment floor choices,” Reeves says. “Which isn’t at all to say that I disagreed with the choreography, but just in terms of having the flexibility to express my own style.”

From initial vision through preparation and execution, the level of innovation and talent put into stunt work on the Matrix films is unparalleled. “We’re all ruined,” Rondell concludes. “We’ve hit such a tremendous benchmark with these films that working on anything else is going to be a bit of a letdown. The ability and expertise of this crew makes what we are able to achieve pretty unlimited. We’ve done as many as 70 takes in one day to make it perfect, to find a magic moment. We’ve become such hyper-perfectionists now that it will be a letdown when we’re not allowed to go that extra distance.”