Lilly Wachowski on 'The Matrix: Resurrections': 'I needed this time away from this industry'

Lana and Lilly Wachowski, then known as the Wachowski Brothers, co-directed "The Matrix" (1999), "The Matrix Reloaded" (2003) and "The Matrix Revolutions" (2003), but the forthcoming fourth installment was directly only by Lana Wachowski.

Why?

"That's a tough one," Lilly Wachowski told Entertainment Weekly of her decision not to work on "The Matrix: Resurrections." "I got out of my transition and was just completely exhausted because we had made Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending, and the first season of Sense8 back-to-back-to-back. We were posting one, and prepping the other at the exact same time. So you're talking about three 100-plus days of shooting for each project, and so, coming out and just being completely exhausted, my world was like, falling apart to some extent even while I was like, you know, cracking out of my egg. So I needed this time away from this industry. I needed to reconnect with myself as an artist and I did that by going back to school and painting and stuff."

The filmmaker later added:

"[Lana] had come up with this idea for another Matrix movie, and we had this talk, and it was actually—we started talking about it in between [our] dad dying and [our] mom dying, which was like five weeks apart. And there was something about the idea of going backward and being a part of something that I had done before that was expressly unappealing. And, like, 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 had done before, and sort of [walk] over old paths that I had walked in, felt emotionally unfulfilling, and really the opposite—like I was going to go back and live in these old shoes, in a way. And I didn't want to do that."

Lana, formerly Laurence, came out as trangender in 2012, while Lilly, formerly Andy, came out in 2016 (h/t USA Today).

Lilly discussed "the trans narrative" threaded throughout "The Matrix" franchise last August.