I'm surprised they used two real locations for the hotels. The "Heart O'The City" one at the very start, and the "Deja Vu" staircase.
These hotels look really delapidated in the film. I thought they were studio sets. I wonder how they managed to make them look so bad, tbh with late 90s tech (green screen mostly and limited CGI) it sounds like it would have been simpler to just build a delapidated staircase in a studio than to make the actual thing look rotten.
My father spent a lot of time in Surry Hills in the 90s. Got the shock of his life when I told him I was moving there. I have been living around the area for the past 4 years, and he was amazed just how much had changed while I was showing him around recently!
Indeed. The compositing tool of choice for this movie and any other effects-heavy movie from the late '90s well into the 2000s was Shake (by Nothing Real, later bought by Apple). The only competition was Nuke, the in-house tool at Digital Domain. It is the last one standing today, since Apple gave up on the high end.
Interesting anecdote I heard: Shake was up for an Academy Award, but Apple pissed off the wrong customer when they discontinued the Windows version (which was used for The Matrix). I won't name the post house, but the owner reportedly sat on the academy's technical committee and tanked Shake's nomination as punishment. Kinda sucked for the team, who of course were blameless.
There was a surprising amount of set dressing done. Some people have pointed out before that they must have put down fake tiles as the direction of the tiles in the film are diagonal (I think) instead of checkered. But as other people have said, Sydney was very run down in the 90s and many buildings were genuinely just like that. It's come a long way.
I was there two years after it was filmed. It was not that run down, not by a long shot :) And I lived in a pretty bad area (I used to leave my car unlocked because the heroine junkies would smash the window to have somewhere to sit while shooting up). I guess some of the cleanup was for the benefit of the olympics but that doesn't apply to the back street stuff.
The real Heart O' the City Hotel is in Chicago, like the rest of the place names in the movie (although the real name is Heart O' Chicago). The Wachowskis wanted to film there, but Major Daley (historic asshole and scumbag, in case you're not familiar) wouldn't let them. I can't remember what the rationale was, but then of course two Batman movies shot there.
Yeah there was no excuse for it. Daley lied repeatedly about his motivation. The real story? That's where downstate politicians flew in, and to spite them he destroyed the coolest GA airport in the country. Meigs was the default starting point for MS Flight Simulator for its entire existence until then.
We're about to see a similar crime now in Santa Monica. This time a lame-duck outgoing FAA administrator, Michael Huerta, struck an illegal back-room deal with the corrupt Santa Monica city council to let them seize and destroy the airport after 2028... if citizens let them get away with it.
Meanwhile, in the Matrix they weren't pretending that it was Chicago. They just kept the street names and so forth in the script when they called for extraction. They're all pretty well-known streets in Chicago. I was looking for a list, when I found something I didn't know: Neo's name came from the club where I had the first shot I really enjoyed (a Kamikaze). There's a timestamp for ya: https://www.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/cf0uv3/til_neo_fro...
That should be MAYOR Daley, of course. But major D-bag nonetheless. His illegal destruction of Meigs Field in the middle of the night ranks up there with some all-time thefts from the public, along with his sale of Chicago's parking meters to a scumbag outfit for 100 years.
Fullerton Hotel (the deja vu staircase) was Sydney's General Post Office. It underwent renovation which took years, at a guess around the time the movie was filmed.
I was in Sydneys chinatown a few years back and above one of the restaurants I could see into a burnt out old apartment building that 100% reminded me of the matrix. I doubt it would have been too hard to find.
Oh when I was there 24 years ago Chinatown wasn't all that bad. We often went to eat there, or go to paddy's market (which was not quite in chinatown but on the edge of it).
It was also the only "ethnic town" that actually felt like one. "Koreatown" and "Thai town" were just normal CBD streets with maybe one or two massage parlors. I think those names were invented more for publicity than anything.
I wish I could go back to Oceania for a long trip some day. But it's so far and expensive from Europe :'(
PS Chinatown isn't even like a neighbourhood, it's like 2 streets ;) But the Chinese influence is everywhere in Sydney. Even in the neighbourhood I lived there was this really cool Chinese temple in the middle of a normal terrace housing block.
Yeah, at street level I couldnt fault the place. But having done a lot of wireless engineering I have a tendency to look up, and the places were like 5th storey and above. Shattered windows, burnt out interiors that sort of thing.
These hotels look really delapidated in the film. I thought they were studio sets. I wonder how they managed to make them look so bad, tbh with late 90s tech (green screen mostly and limited CGI) it sounds like it would have been simpler to just build a delapidated staircase in a studio than to make the actual thing look rotten.