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Posted on: Wednesday, May 14, 2003

Brawl scene uses a digital Keanu to play 'trix on mind

By Scott Bowles
USA Today

The sign in the courtyard reads "No Brawling," but Neo and Agent Smith take no notice.

Neo breaks off the pole and whips it like a baseball bat, knocking his assailants hundreds of feet into the air. Smith duplicates himself a hundred-fold in a relentless attack of the clones.

Welcome to the Burly Brawl, the signature special effect of "The Matrix: Reloaded," which hits theaters today. What the slow-motion effect "bullet time" did for the 1999 original, in which Keanu Reeves' Neo danced past bullets, filmmakers are hoping this supercharged fight sequence will do for the sequel.

In the brawl, Neo uses the pole as battering ram, billy club and pole vault to fend off Smith.

"We didn't want it to look like Keanu was flying through the air," says John Gaeta, the special-effects guru behind all "Matrix" magic. "We wanted it to BE Keanu flying through the air."

To do that, Gaeta and his team holed up in an abandoned naval base west of Oakland with a stockpile of computers, cameras and lighting equipment.

The crew put Reeves and Hugo Weaving, who plays Agent Smith, in front of five high-resolution digital cameras, capturing every angle of the actors. They took their costumes and analyzed how light played off the fabric. They dangled the men from wires to record how the human body twists in midair.

All of that was fed into computers, which re-assembled the men into virtual actors.

"Reloaded" boasts roughly 1,000 virtual-effect shots, compared with 412 in the original. The final installment, "The Matrix Revolutions," out Nov. 5, will feature 1,500 shots.

"I didn't want to use a stunt double or an artist to paint a picture of Keanu fighting," he says. "The effect only works if you know that's Keanu, but you're not quite sure what he's doing is real or possible."

But the stars of "Reloaded" would like you to know that much of what they do is authentic. Carrie-Anne Moss, who plays Reeves' love interest Trinity, broke her leg during the eight months of conditioning and martial arts training, twice the regimen called for in "Matrix."

She also had to drive a motorcycle 40 miles an hour without a helmet in a 14-minute chase scene. "I'm ready to change my lifestyle to something a little slower," says Moss, due to have her first baby at the end of summer.

Brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski, who write and direct the trilogy, "love the action, but they never let it be just about that," she says. "They also want it to be a love story, a hero's story. They want it to be human."