The Matrix (1999) Filming Locations – Shot-for-Shot – Sydney, Australia [video] | Hacker News Reader

The Matrix (1999) Filming Locations – Shot-for-Shot – Sydney, Australia [video]

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174 pointskeepamovin116 comments

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.

Heh :) Sydney downtown is very beautiful and very city vibe.

Sounds like something a giant spider would say ;)

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! :)

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.

the only one ingrained deeper for is Blade Runner's "walk now"

I was surprised to see the pedestrian crossing button right in the centre of the woman in the red dress scene.

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.

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

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

https://archive.cpa.org.au/guardian/2004/1201fox.html

IIRC that topic was discussed in an episode of Utopia

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3163562/

Paramount also used to have a presence there.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_funnel-web_spider

The males like to wander around aimlessly looking for mates.

Plus the Wachowskis have Chicago street names throughout.

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.

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.

Neo fights giant Kangaroo Smith

i would watch neo nazi vs kangaroo fight.

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.

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.

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...

I used to catch them in my backyard as a kid, never saw one that big though!

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?

All that work and the elevator still says Lift.

(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.

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.

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.

CGI was not as limited as you think in 1999. Look up films from that year and you’ll see.

For reference, Terminator 2 is from 1991

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.

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.

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.

They probably were delapidated, Surry Hills has undergone a lot of gentrification in the last 25 years.

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!

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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...

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.

Ahh that makes sense. So they probably didn't have to do too much to make it look grimey.

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.

> 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.

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!

I was working in Sydney and the instructions for dropping off the off-site backup tapes said "turn left at the Woman In Red fountain".

Ever see the military choppers doing their exercise? Amazing and scary.

Yes! We lived in a penthouse apartment in Surry Hills (the old hat factory) for 2 years from 2010 and the first time the choppers came in and dropped troops off on the rooftop opposite I was terrified! Became a regular source of entertainment, to sit on the terrace watching them be dropped off

It’s wild how much the green color grading used in the film made the daytime location shots look un-Californian.

There's actually a bit of a controversy over what the original film actually looked like. There are 35mm scans out there with no colour grading at all (e.g. https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ow1KDYc9XsE). Some people claim it never had the green and it was added later for the DVDs. The sequels definitely had it but turned up to 11. Trouble is nobody can really remember what they saw in the cinema in 1999 and there's a bit of Mandela effect going on thanks to retroactive grading and sequels.

From a quick look there's at least one CAM[corder] recording from when it released - is that any use for settling the debate?

short clip from it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k71faZm6P1A

I saw an original 35mm print at Cinespia somewhat recently and it's definitely not the green tint. That was added later.

The original look was a bleach bypass film process which was very colourful with blown highlights. There should be quite a bit of info on this online I would think.

Coolest part of this whole experience is that the Cinespia venue is at the Hollywood Forever in LA - it's a giant old cemetery with a huge lawn and massive screen. During the final scenes when Neo is about to fight Agent Smith in the rain it actually starts raining in real life (obviously rare for Los Angeles). People started leaving but I thought it was pretty damn amazing.

Very cool! I knew all of them, except for the two hotel locations! Sydney's inner city has changed a lot in the intervening years. It's surreal revisiting that Castlereigh St shot in the film, and seeing how undeveloped it looks in comparison to today.

My favorite of these shot-for-shot style videos is how well Last of Us 2 recreated Seattle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uukShs2qgCI

Love it - was walking with a friend near Martin Place they pointed out the "Reflection" sculpture that was in the movie during the red dress training exercise.

I thought they filmed scenes in the east bay? Oakland maybe? I swear I met (biblically) girls back then in s.f. that had been in some rave scene.

That was the second one (Reloaded). Filmed in downtown Oakland and Alameda Naval air station.

Sorry man, there never was a second “Matrix” nor a third.

Eh... I feel like they have aged better over time than a lot of 'trilogies'. They do not measure up to the original but they aren't truly terrible, at least if you're looking at them from a more philosophical standpoint.

Reloaded may have been passable as a standalone film (if not seen as a disappointing sequel by comparison to the original).

Revolutions was (IMO) terrible standalone or as a sequel. It felt like more of a CGI-heavy cash-in on the series than anything else.

I thought Reloaded was amazing at the time (I was a teenager). I saw it three times in the cinema. I was so excited for Revolutions. Had all these theories about what the architect said, why did the kid give him a spoon etc, are they still in another level of the Matrix? Then when it came out I saw it once and pretty much never talked about the Matrix again. Massive let down.

what about the fourth with the gender bend twist? I guess the meme is older than the fourth movie, but I rarely see it even get mentioned let alone memefied. I guess less people would know tetralogy instead of trilogy, at least, I had to look up what a series of 4 would be.

The first film was groundbreaking. It matched "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings" in terms of its cultural penetration. Unfortunately the series failed to live past that strong debut. The second and third films were a total letdown, and The Animatrix only appealed to a niche audience and was itself a mixed bag.

The surprising and unsolicited fourth film had some promise in the first third of the film - I loved how it subverted expectations and was a meta deconstruction of the series itself. After the provocative and almost blasphemous setup, the film quickly devolved into poor action, weird pacing, and overall bad plot and character arcs. In a word, it felt senile. (The action shouldn't have been that bad with Keanu helming John Wick. It was just laziness.) The denouement was just same-y slop we see in every other dialed in action movie. Such a letdown for such a shocking cold open.

If you haven't seen the fourth film, it's a bit of a mind fuck. But turn it off the minute the reveal is over. That part is a treat, but it isn't worth your time otherwise.

Star Wars and The Matrix anre great examples of over-explaining removing mystery and undermining your world building.

> over-explaining removing mystery and undermining your world building.

This! Spending too long in a fictional universe waters it down. The trimmings of imagination are best when used sparingly. If you reveal too much, the magic ceases to work.

yeah, telling me about midichlorians and using some scientology reading of them just killed it for me.

not just the midichlorians, but the fact that every little knob and lever in an x-wing or on your blaster has an explanation of what they do. every single alien you saw in Mos Eisley eventually got an official name and canonical backstory (not to mention the small-world effect where it just so happens that most of those backstories intersect with the same small handful of important people).

so it's no longer a world where your imagination can run wild, it's a world where pedantic nerds get to tell you "you're wrong. here's the actual answer". and it's not even that the "actual" answers are necessarily bad... it's just the fact there is an answer at all removes some of the magic

Though you have to admit this was funny...

Ponda Baba's bad day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbSixPMrT2o

That kind on detail can be great for the writers, because it can keep things in sync.

But for the enjoyers, most of it should only be “glimpses of mountains far-off”.

Much of the appeal of star wars is that things actually looked like they had purpose and function despite being a purely imaginative future.

> every single alien you saw in Mos Eisley eventually got an official name and canonical backstory (

This is such a weird meme. I suppose if you looked up every single story ever published referencing star wars you might be able to come up with names for most of them, but if you don't want to, why are you putting in the effort?

I'm not usually a fan of "don't engage with it!" defenses, but we're not talking abouy ignoring one movie out of a trilogy, we're talking about not deliberately searching out obscure fan fiction.

Beyond that, the people in the cantina should have names, because that's what "real people" have, and this is supposed to be a movie about a reality like ours that just happens to have spaceships and spacemagic.

In a universe with literally trillions of sentient beings, spaceships and literal magic, if your imagingation is lacking magic, I think that's on you.

And that every extra gets their own story; the random slave that Jabba kills is mostly forgettable but apparently in the extended universe, she survives, is or becomes a jedi and becomes Luke Skywalker's wife ???

It really feels like they have absorbed fanfiction into the mainline series. The Star Wars sequels had potential after the first film, but since it seems they had no idea what they were doing the second and third were a waste. The very intentionally placed marketable plushies did not help.

The Hobbit could have been fine, but they botched the production, had to pull in Peter Jackson to try and save it, they made it a cynical cash grab with forcing it to become a trilogy with unrelated story and made-up plotlines put in. Rings of Power was completely unnecessary and I have zero intention to watch it.

In hindsight, the Matrix sequels were actually alright. For one thing they pushed the technology (and budgets) of filmmaking forwards, with the big gun suits vs the tentacle robots segment costing more than most films that had been made up until then.

>The first film was groundbreaking. It matched "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings" in terms of its cultural penetration. Unfortunately the series failed to live past that strong debut. The second and third films were a total letdown, and The Animatrix only appealed to a niche audience and was itself a mixed bag.

I dunno, I feel like people had erased the entire film up to the lobby scene. It has frontloaded pacing issues. The sequels were 100% studio, but they were solid films in their own right.

The second/third ones never really captured the magic of the first - part of that is because of the refreshing world building.

The rest of the trilogy felt... a bit self-indulgent for lack of a better description. Everything from the "When Harry Met Sally scene" with the drink to the interminably long fight scene with every possible "martial arts" weapon - I found myself rolling my eyes even as a teenager.

I haven't seen the most recent one. Like Star Wars, I sort of lost interest with the whole franchise.

>subverted expectations ... meta deconstruction

Anytime these words are written or spoken it is time to run.

I suspect this is an age thing. The older I get the more I appreciate stories that surprise me.

I agree, but not just for the sake of it. Often it feels like a cheap "twist".

A well made craft still excels.

I'm totally going to watch the fifth one when it comes out but fully expect to be heavily disappointed.

There's going to be a fifth one?

I feel like hardly anyone even know that a fourth exists, let alone seen it. Didn't it come out during COVID? I watched it because I had a home cinema at the time. The thing I hated the most was how it looked more like a YouTube video than a movie. Something just wasn't right and made it feel very much like fanfiction. I've completely forgotten the story but remember it was unsurprising given the more recent developments of the Wachowskis.

> I've completely forgotten the story but remember it was unsurprising given the more recent developments of the Wachowskis.

I think you mean recent developments at WB. The movie was a self-parody, describing in painful detail the demands from the studio for a sequel Matrix movi- er, "game", even when the creator was so over it.

Indeed. It was pretty much a parody — only not as funny as such usually are.

They should have went all the way and replaced Keanu Reeves with Charlie Sheen. At least Hot Shots had humor…

Sorry, they are as canon as the phantom menace even if you don’t like them (neither do I for that matter but hey, if these creators wanted to wreck their legacy who are we to stop them).

Reloaded is ok. It's not like Star Wars 1 (which btw isn't real), more like Star Wars 6.

Return of the Jedi (6) was perfectly fine. More like 7 which was ok as a nostalgic cameo vehicle, but resulted in throwing away the Rogue Squadron arc which should have always remained canon.

But not like that hadn't happened before. Anyone remember Splinter of the Mind's Eye, the original sequel to Star Wars?

Return of the Jedi was in fact the best of the original trilogy. It's weird to use it as a point of comparison like that's a diss.

It's not a diss, it was an ok movie. Most people consider it less great than 4 and 5, partially because they redid the big scene in 4.

It did feel derivative, but then they just did it again with one of the sequels because they could, except this time it's a death planet instead of star/moon. The Empire or whatever they called it had been reduced to a parody / comic relief.

And somehow the death planet also has a self-destruct. Well, parody is a good way to put it, the sequels are about as Star Wars as Spaceballs is.

GP's comment is probably a reference to this classic XKCD: https://xkcd.com/566/ (the last panel)

I remember being at the alameda skatepark and hearing them shoot the freeway scene where the twins are driving a mac truck and trinity comes to help.

I love these types of videos. The ones for Jurassic Park and Jaws are also good. The problem with this type of content is that nobody has the time or money to do more than a couple of these videos so the body of work is spread over hundreds of different creators, making it next to impossible to find and watch a significant fraction of what's out there.

There’s some really good ones for Terminator one and two as well. It’s fantastic to see the locations in Los Angeles and California. Different channel.

This one: https://youtu.be/i1xPujRzWks?si=bmIBjlA-9GYDaOEM

And for the OG: https://youtu.be/C8BC0VuF8Ys?si=E8VRiGht-guW_DUC

The Occupy Sydney protest was held in front of the federal reserve in the same plaza as the scene with the woman in the red dress. I didn't find that out until after the protest. While there, I thought the place looked familiar but couldn't pinpoint where I knew it from.

I worked in that area a while back. It is (was then) a quiet part of Sydney just commercial offices and business that supports it. Despite being a fairly central location. It's a beautiful place to hang out you can walk to harbour views.

Here's one for There's Something About Mary (1998), if anyone's interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naqW_uPlCH0

I was hoping to see the subway location, but I guess this was just a set piece

Lots of sources online say it was shot on the disused platform at St James, but that was the subway scene in the second film. Some sources say it was shot at a freight siding at White Bay. If that's true then the actual station must be a set piece. You can find some behind-the-scenes footage online[1], and you can see that the staircase down to the platform is real, so that makes me doubt it was White Bay. Whatever the case, it's not at St James. You can find lots of pictures of the disused platforms online[2], and you can see the roof is totally different. I'd love to know what the actual truth is!

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f79nuDTcCA

[2]: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Disused_platform_S...

https://www.uer.ca/locations/viewgal.asp?picid=88851

I think this confirms the White Bay answer. I doubt this location exists anymore. The entire Glebe Island Silos area has been heavily redeveloped since the 90s.

There was a film studio out at White Bay they filmed some of the movie at too which was demolished shortly after which likely explains the general location.

The movie certainly benefitted from filming in Sydney right before all the urban renewal kicked off. Doubt you'd be able to commander a train and a disused platform space today on their budget.

No, that subway was definitely real as well, on what used to be the city circular line. The guy missed a few of the locations such as the Oracle apartment, which is actually an apartment building in Redfern.

I thought that was a set, the green tiles in the kitchen and the green walls had made me think she was 'more machine' than the other characters.

The room/lobby with the Aboriginal man at the bottom of the lift, was that the same location ?

https://imgur.com/a/original-seraph-0igD2aP <-- this scene.

Yes, the lift lobby is an actual location. I’ve been there. It’s in Redfern if I recall correctly.

I can’t speak to what the apartment interior was who knows?

Although saying that I appreciate your deep reading of the film to correlate the green tiles in the kitchen as indication the oracle was more machine than something else. Or at least more part of the system. This is interesting and I think a great deep reading of it.

At the same time I also recall multiple older style kitchens that I’ve been in while growing up or renting in my early 20s that in Australia had these kind of green tiles in the kitchen. It’s quite a popular aesthetic there.

Also the club scenes, with a bunch of regulars from Hellfire/Black Market, on Regent St. (Now a cafe supply store.)

Nice! I always wondered about that. I thought it might have been on William St.

Just a meta comment here: I really like how we’re discussing in these threads whether the locations of the film the matrix are real or fabrications ha ha ha ha

It really shows the artistry in the movie that those mostly unremarkable locations were made to look like they did in the film.

What's fascinating is that they still have phone booths in Syndey (re: the last shot). Do they actually still work?

Yes, and they provide free nationwide phone calls.

https://www.telstra.com.au/exchange/payphones-free-for-calls...

And free wifi.

https://www.telstra.com.au/exchange/free-wifi-telstra-paypho...

Man, I loved this.

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