Lilly Wachowski shared the words she would tell herself 30 years ago, before her gender transition, when she was co-writing and directing the 1996 neo-noir classic Bound, which helped launch The Matrix filmmaker’s career.
“Well, start taking that estrogen. What are you doing? Come out of the closet!” Wachowski told moderator Julie Klausner and a captivated crowd at the Tribeca Festival.
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Wachowski was on stage at the Tribeca Festival in Manhattan with the cast of her and sister Lana Wachowski’s sapphic, career-kickstarting feature film debut, including Jennifer Tilly, Gina Gershon, Joe Pantoliano and Christopher Meloni. The festival screened the film for its 30th anniversary at Spring Studios, where it received a rapturous reaction from the audience, which gave Wachowski and the cast a standing ovation when they walked on stage.
Klausner opened the talk with her question to the co-director after acknowledging that the film — which follows tough convict Corky (Gershon) and mobster’s girlfriend Violet as they hatch a scheme to swindle $2 million from her boyfriend Cesar (Pantoliano) — seemed to be sending Wachowski postcards from her past. The film opens with a shot of a closet, Klausner noted.
Gershon revealed that she contemplated firing her agents when they told her it would be a bad career move to take the role of hardened convict-turned-plumber Corky — especially after she had just wrapped the role of Crystal Conner in Showgirls, which at that point was considered a box office bomb and not the campy cult classic it has since become.
“I was like, ‘What’s your point?’” the actress said she told her reps when they noted the character is a lesbian. “There’s so much more about this.”
Gershon offered a different version of how Pantoliano landed the role of villain Cesar, correcting the actor by saying she had a hand in his offer of the juicy role of the mob-connected boyfriend who becomes unhinged as the two lovers try to make off with his stolen cash. Pantoliano had told the crowd that he undercut another actor being considered by lowering his fee by $25,000 — garnering laughs from the film’s fans and those who had just watched it for the first time at Spring Studios in downtown Manhattan.
But it was scene-stealer Tilly who switched on her charm and dry wit for the crowd and drew the strongest applause of the night, as she offered tongue-in-cheek half-truths about the indie classic’s production, art direction and relationship to the green-lighting of The Matrix, which the Wachowskis directed three years later. That film redefined the sisters’ careers and opened the door for a slew of films that drew from its style and story.
“I heard that one of the reasons they wrote [Bound] is you weren’t really happy with the way [their first script] Assassins turned out,” she said. “You’d written The Matrix, and you wanted to direct The Matrix, and your agent said, ‘Nobody is gonna let you direct a $120 million film,’ which is what it was budgeted at the time. And that’s why you wrote Bound — so you would have a calling card. Is that true?”
Wachowski corrected the record, saying the notion that one film was made simply to greenlight the other just isn’t true.
“We did not write Bound to convince people to let us direct The Matrix. We wrote Bound because we were going through some things — and we had to … we had a lot to figure out,” she said. “We wanted to make a film with two strong women characters, and the foreshadowing and Matrix stuff just came along later.”
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