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By FirmwareBurner 2025-06-1613:1511 reply Seeing the movie as a kid I totally expect it to be filmed in New York, Chicago, Toronto, Vancouver, but Sydney never crossed my mind since the shots looks too "North America" to be anything else. Probably because in my mind Sydney is a beach with the opera house and an outback with kangaroos and giant spiders.
By magarnicle 2025-06-1823:291 reply You have to go a long way to get to the "outback" from Sydney, though Hollywood has other ideas. I laughed in Mission Impossible 2 when they set up their base in the desert for their operation in Sydney Harbour. Just a short 500km (at least) helicopter ride away.
You remind me of a movie that I can't remember the name off but it was a low budget American spy movie that was shot in Europe through European subsidies targeted at getting work in Europe for cinema crews.
One shot is supposedly happening in an American city, but it's shot somewhere in Brussels, where they discuss people hiding, then you got a transition shot where now they are supposed to be thousands of km away with said people hiding, and the second shot is filmed in the building across the street.
Many other shots were also combination of places that I knew extremely well, which really was funny at times because once you locate everything it makes the whole situation much more comedic.
By throwaway422432 2025-06-203:39 That can make for a very weird viewing experience.
"Oddball" was filmed in an Australian town I grew up in. There was a chase scene that combined and compressed multiple locations. In one particular scene you are looking at an extra with a backdrop of part of the main street, but the location he is looking at (supposedly directly across the road) is actually about 1/2km away.
The giant spider is actually a thing. Earlier this year, the "Newcastle Funnel Web" was identified as a new species: bigger and deadlier than the Sydney Funnel Web Spider.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-14/researchers-prove-thr...
By jazdw 2025-06-1914:38 I used to catch them in my backyard as a kid, never saw one that big though!
That's why Sydney was so popular. The CBD has a really American feel but prices and wages are Australian. Fox studios had a huge campus there. Not sure if they still do.
It's now Disney Studios (https://disneystudiosaustralia.com/) after Disney's acquisition of Fox. There's 9 large sound stages. A large amount of movies are filmed there.
The lease of the land at the time was controversial.
> The rental was $2 million, payable over 40 years. However, the payment date was not specified, and the deal proceeded with an initial $1 per annum peppercorn rental, in return for which the government was obliged to spend $75-80 million on site works for the benefit of Fox
By wiether 2025-06-199:29 IIRC that topic was discussed in an episode of Utopia
By dehrmann 2025-06-196:13 Paramount also used to have a presence there.
The one that really baked my noodle was seeing Melbourne play the role of Boston in Knowing (2009), which it did fairly well if you don't look too closely.
By keepamovin 2025-06-1615:09 Like that film, but holy shit I did not know that was Melbourne! No way. Have to go back and watch. Classic Cage hahaha :)
also nice Matrix reference
By dehrmann 2025-06-196:12 When I visited Sydney, it felt like NYC with LA weather and cars on the wrong side of the road.
I knew it was filmed there, but hadn't put together that it was filmed around the corner from where I stayed, and I walked by multiple filming locations.
By jeffwilcox 2025-06-1823:14 Plus the Wachowskis have Chicago street names throughout.
By caz2000 2025-06-1914:48 The Wachowskis have said they chose Sydney specifically because it reminded them of Chicago, which is where they wanted to film. That said I think it surprised everyone in Sydney how it ended up looking on film.
Didn't they have to reverse the footage of cars (like when Neo is climbing outside out of his office building) so they look like they're driving on the right-hand side?
By Andrex 2025-06-1912:43 All that work and the elevator still says Lift.
By Jedd 2025-06-1913:44 (Sydney-sider here)
I have a vague memory of people being asked to drive around with a passenger, with the driver holding the wheel down load (twenty to four?) - while the passenger held their arms up high, as if they were holding a wheel.
By keepamovin 2025-06-1613:262 reply Heh :) Sydney downtown is very beautiful and very city vibe.
Especially the sound of the crosswalk signals. Orbital introduced me to them in the 90s, so when I heard in person the first time I had a knowing smile and started to groove to the rest of the track that my brain filled in for me
We call them 'pedestrian crossings' down under! It's been sampled in a few songs actually. The sound is so ingrained in our psyche that you recognise it instantly.
By dylan604 2025-06-1822:58 the only one ingrained deeper for is Blade Runner's "walk now"
By worthless-trash 2025-06-190:01 I was surprised to see the pedestrian crossing button right in the centre of the woman in the red dress scene.
By FirmwareBurner 2025-06-1613:551 reply Sounds like something a giant spider would say ;)
By keepamovin 2025-06-1614:23 Ah yes us sydneyspiders - I mean Sydneysiders - we're always looking for delicious - I mean gullible - I mean curious tourists in Sydney, and their dollars. We really don't have enough hehehe! :)
By caz2000 2025-06-1914:50 There's roos (or at least Wallabies) that graze on a big golf course on the other side of Sydney Harbour. They've been known to make it onto the highway and cross the bridge into the city - just near where the red dress scene was filmed.
By Calwestjobs 2025-06-196:17 i would watch neo nazi vs kangaroo fight.
By throwaway992673 2025-06-1822:58 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_funnel-web_spider
The males like to wander around aimlessly looking for mates.
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.
By dkjaudyeqooe 2025-06-1823:111 reply They probably were delapidated, Surry Hills has undergone a lot of gentrification in the last 25 years.
By hamish-b 2025-06-191:15 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!
By loloquwowndueo 2025-06-1822:573 reply CGI was not as limited as you think in 1999. Look up films from that year and you’ll see.
By DidYaWipe 2025-06-192:57 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.
By nico 2025-06-190:25 For reference, Terminator 2 is from 1991
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.
By wkat4242 2025-06-1922:48 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.
The hotel: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh...
Yeah I even know of that guy. The guy that destroyed Meigs field :'(
I got my pilot's license later and if it hadn't been gone I would have loved to do a few circuits there.
I'm surprised they wanted to pretend it was Chicago though. There's many well-known landmarks featured prominently like the AWA tower.
By DidYaWipe 2025-06-207:36 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...
By DidYaWipe 2025-06-196:49 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.
By wkat4242 2025-06-1922:49 Ahh that makes sense. So they probably didn't have to do too much to make it look grimey.
By protocolture 2025-06-190:311 reply 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.
By protocolture 2025-06-203:05 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.
By mattigames 2025-06-1823:052 reply I still believe the Matrix Online videogame had a lot potential, it just needed a better game loop, I think some new Matrix game taking ideas from games like Helldivers, GTA V and Cyberpunk could become a hit, where there are 2 parallel worlds, the Matrix and reality, and some things you do in one can help you in the other, e.g a way to discover from the matrix where the sentinels are in reality, the overall aim of the game would be to gain territory on "reality", and you would gain "exploits" that help you gain territory faster, meaning destroying robot bases and liberating human farms, plus recruiting some of them. On the monetization side the publisher can of course just do the popular thing and sell skins (that only show in the Matrix of course), for both cars and characters, maybe paint jobs for your ship would work fine too.
By neilv 2025-06-1823:14 > On the monetization side the publisher can of course just do the popular thing and sell skins (that only show in the Matrix of course)
A perfect fit. If that didn't already exist in gaming industry, it would've been invented for a Matrix game.
By heraldgeezer 2025-06-1913:08 This really is old men rambling huh.
WoW was already dominating. Nobody played it.
>it just needed a better game loop
This car would be good, it just needs a better everything...
Games are for gameplay!
