Before the Wachowskis wrote a single line of The Matrix, they flew to Hong Kong. John Woo's Hard Boiled — its lobby shootout, its operatic slow-motion, its bodies used as instruments of pure cinematic force — became the template. Yuen Woo-ping, who choreographed every action sequence in The Matrix, had been working in Hong Kong action cinema for two decades. The bullet time isn't science fiction. It's John Woo made digital.
Films That Influenced The Matrix
