ASSISTANT ART DIRECTOR, AUSTRALIA

THE MATRIX STREET & CRATER

MATRIX: The Matrix City Street must have been a challenge to accomplish with the rain and the Smiths.

DAMIEN: There were a lot of different requirements there again, and yes the water was a big problem. It was difficult to try and ensure that our set would hold up to the amount of water that we were putting onto it over a long period of time. Our shoot started before the Christmas hiatus and resumed again afterwards and during that time the set was damp, so we were a bit fearful about how the set would physically stand up through the shoot, through the Christmas hiatus, and when we came back. But it all went well.

We used a lot of waterproofing products that we would use in real building installations to make sure that our flats and our road surface, as far as possible, would look like the real thing. We needed the set to remain waterproof to the amount of water because there were thousands and thousands of liters dumped onto that set over a number of weeks. The road was difficult because it did get a lot of water on it, and a lot of foot traffic from crew and cast. It was difficult to make sure that road looked like a road, and continued to look like a road through the shoot with the amount of water.

The road was made of a mixture of different products. It was a mixture of vermiculite, which is a mineral, some rubber chips, some bitumen products - it needed to have the texture of the road - and then we finished it we painted it to make it look as far as possible like a road. We had to keep painting it throughout the shoot to keep the color and tone in it because of the amount of water and foot traffic on it.

We couldn’t put a real bitumen road down because we were dealing with a space where you couldn’t get conventional road laying equipment into the Sound Stage and up onto the rostrums that we have the set on. It may have been the best solution to have a real road, but we couldn’t put down a real three or four lane road in our studio.

MATRIX: Why was the decision made to have the set on a rostrum?

DAMIEN: Largely for drainage reasons so the Special Effects Department could get water away from the set. There was so much water coming down from the rain rigs that we had to dispose of that water through drains and fairly elaborate plumbing away from the stage and the set.

The most challenging sets so far for Jules Cook [Art Director] and I as a team have probably been the Matrix City Street and the Matrix Crater because they’ve both been very Effects intensive. There was a lot of water, a lot of mud, and a lot of coordination with the Visual Effects Department and the Special Effects Department. The sets themselves were not complicated in their architecture or execution so much as getting all the requirements accommodated so the subsequent processes that go on in post-production can occur as smoothly as possible from our physical set.

MATRIX: How was the mud made?

DAMIEN: I didn’t get too involved in the mud, but we did go through a process of getting a lot of samples of different kinds of mud made by the Special Effects Department. There was a lot of discussion about how that mud would perform when it was in the bottom of the crater and how it would slide down the walls. Jules has a lot of little pots on his desk, which are mud samples that we looked at for that process. We had to look at the practical considerations too, that for long periods of time Keanu [Reeves, Neo] and Hugo [Weaving, Agent Smith] and their respective doubles have to be in that mud, so it had to be safe. It couldn’t contain bacteria or pathogens or real dirt; it was manufactured mud so that it could be used safely on the set.

The Matrix Crater particularly was physically an enormous set. We used a lot of different processes of molding real rock as well as sculpting rock out of foam and spray foam so that it looked a particular way. Owen wanted the Crater to be a very harsh environment, like it really looked like somebody had torn a chunk out of the City Street for Neo and Smith’s penultimate fight. So we tried to sculpt and create a really jagged harsh environment around the edge of that Crater like there was a lot of upward movement in the rock, and it really looked like the thing had been torn apart. Hundreds of hours of sculpting and molding went into creating the walls of the crater. There were a lot of detailed special effects requirements as well as getting the aesthetics and the look of the crater exactly as Owen and the Brothers wanted to see it.

MATRIX: Where did you get the rocks that you took molds from?

DAMIEN: Some of the rocks were molded here on the Fox Lot in the rock cuttings that are around the studios, and some of the rocks we molded from a quarry out in Western Sydney. When I say rocks, they were mined rock faces, so they’re rock faces that have the appearance of a quarried or exploded rock face. We did a reconnaissance out in West Sydney and chose bits of rock that Owen liked the look of. The Plaster Department then spent days out there sculpting in as big a pieces as they possibly could on surfaces of jagged rock, and then we’d come back here and piece it all together and create many more bits of rock.
I think that it’s probably hard for some of the on set crew and the audience to understand how long a process has gone before they get to A) shoot the set, or B) turn up in the cinema. There are hundreds of thousands of people hours in creating the sets, shooting the sets, and post production on the sets. In the same vein we wouldn’t understand all the processes that go into play in post-production and other aspects.

MATRIX: Do you remember how long the construction of the Matrix Crater took?

DAMIEN: I don’t remember exactly, but I’d say probably six to eight weeks from beginning to build it to bumping it into the stage and finishing it. With the Crater particularly, a lot of the work went on in the stage because we had to erect all the foam parts of the walls. A lot of sculpting went on in situ after we’d molded the rocks because it’s not as simple as just gluing it all together once you’ve brought all your pieces together. A lot of work went into finessing the rock and get it looking as real as possible.

THE MATRIX BUILDING

MATRIX: Do you have a favorite among any of the sets you’ve done?

DAMIEN: One I particularly like is the Matrix Fight Building - again part of what we’re calling the penultimate fight between Smith and Neo. It was designed to look like a period - possibly turn of the century - warehouse space. It was a really fun mix of the set decoration, the set finishing, and the selection and detailing of timber and brickwork in there to get that turn of the century look, and to make it reflect the quality that was in the storyboards.

That set was fairly extensively storyboarded because it forms part of the final fight. The whole sequence in the Matrix City Street, the Fight Building and the Crater was exhaustively storyboarded, so we knew what we were dealing with in terms of shots. It also had a lot of Effects requirements: a lot breakaway walls and columns, and parts of the building truss got smashed away during the fight. There was flying, so there was a lot of wirework in the set. We had a lot to coordinate from the aesthetics through to the Effects and Stunt teams getting in there.

MATRIX: What special allowances do you make for stunt people on a set?

DAMIEN: It is different on every set. Sometimes we need to provide soft finishes, like if someone is going to take a hard fall. It wasn’t one of the sets I was involved with, but I know in the Merovingian’s Chateau, for example, they created a massive section of soft decorative floor to match the real floor because there were some pretty hard hits and falls taken by stunt guys.

In the Fight building, more specifically, we had breakaway columns and trusses that had to be soft to an extent, but when they break appear to break like real timber. You can’t throw an actor or stunt person into a solid piece of hard wood, even pre-broken, so we have to build elements of the set as real timber, or to look like real timber, and others to be breakaway.

We had breakaway walls and a special spider web wall: there’s a sequence where Neo pushes off a wall on a higher part of the Matrix Building and it spider webs out from the center. Again that was an Effects piece, but they have to deal closely with the Art Department to get the parameters of the piece of wall they’re trying to create that effect in. We had breakaway glass windows in the set, which a number of stunt Agent Smiths went through. I think we covered just about everything in that one set. Again, with the Wire team in there doing a lot of flying and elevated wirework, the design of the set changed quite late in the piece as well, to get extra elevation with the actors. You’ll notice in REVOLUTIONS that they fly at a very high level from one length of the Fight Building to the other. Behind them the ceiling space and the wall space steps up dramatically to accommodate them flying at a high level, and then Smith and Neo collide into each other in the center of the Matrix Building.

In the early concepts for the Matrix Fight Building we were looking at a space that had a much a flatter roof. The finished Matrix Building, which you will have seen in REVOLUTIONS, is a loft space with a very high pitched raised section in the middle, and pitched roofs at the side. The early designs were for flat roofed industrial spaces with timber trusses through the middle.

MATRIX: Thank you very much, Damien.


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Interview by REDPILL
February 2002