With recent developments surrounding the upcoming fourth movie in The Matrix franchise, including the reveal of an official title, the question on everyone's mind is: why didn't franchise creator and co-director Lilly Wachowski return for the sequel? At this year's TCA panel for Showtime's Work in Progress, Wachowski was asked this very thing, and the filmmaker gave a very thoughtful answer about the life journey she's been on since she and her sister first directed the original Matrix trilogy, which began with the first film in 1999.
Wachowski explained that after completing her transition and overworking herself on projects like Cloud Atlas, Jupiter Ascending, and Sense8 Season 1, she was "completely exhausted" and that her world was "falling apart" from all of the stress and strain. She went on to tell the story of how she took a break from the industry for a while:
"I needed to, like, reconnect to myself as an artist. And I did that by going back to school and painting and stuff. And I made that decision -- I started painting that summer with my mom, and then Lana got the call from Netflix that they wanted to order up another season [of Sense8], and I said, "I can't do it. I don't want to do it." And, you know, my mom and dad died like three years ago, and that was, like, a particularly brutal stretch of time in my life."
Wachowski also went into more detail about what exactly was going on in her life when her sister Lana first pitched her the idea of another Matrix movie. The sisters had just lost their parents — who died within a few weeks of one another — and Wachowski said it felt like "going backwards" and that it was "expressly unappealing." In Wachowski's words:
"I didn't want to have gone through my transition and gone through this massive upheaval in my life, the sense of loss from my mom and dad, to want to go back to something that I've done before and sort of walk over old paths that I had walked in... like I was going to go back and live in these old shoes, in a way, and I didn't want to do that."
During the same question and answer session, Wachowski made it clear that there was no bad blood between the sisters, and when asked about collaborating in the future, she answered, "Who knows? Maybe."
You can catch Work in Progress Sunday nights at 11 p.m. ET on Showtime. The Matrix Resurrections is scheduled to be released on December 22, in both theaters and on HBO Max.