Lilly Wachowski on Her New Studio Anarchists United, the Black Power Origins of 'The Matrix' and How 'Harry Potter' Fans Are 'Supporting Trans Genocide'

Primary Journalistic Dispatch & Direct Reporting

The visionary filmmaker behind 'The Matrix' opens up about her new studio for marginalized voices, J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk.

Wachowski is - along with her sister, Lana - the most powerful and influential trans filmmaker around. The 58-year-old had gifted us " The Matrix " series, "Bound" and "Sensse8," to name a few, and yet, after her critically acclaimed series "Work in Progress," about a middle-aged lesbian who begins dating a much younger trans man, was canceled by Showtime after two seasons, she spent years pitching "cool and queer trans stories" to Hollywood but couldn't find a single taker.

So, Wachowski took matters into her own hands, joining forces with Bay Area film programmer Sarah Marie Flores and producer Lawrence Mattis to form Anarchists United Foundation and Anarchists United Studio with the mission of championing stories from marginalized communities. Here's how it works: The foundation provides grants and fellowships to aspiring filmmakers, mentorships via its Directors Prep & Pitch Lab and office space courtesy of United Spaces of Anarchy, while helping fund the studio. Anarchists United's first project is "Cassie Workman Is Witchy AF," a DIY docuseries that features the trans Aussie comic exploring the history of the occultism and magic with her trademark wit. It will debut Sept. 16 on YouTube.

In-Depth Developments & Factual Context

In a candid interview, Wachowski spoke with Variety about her new studio, trans rights and a whole lot more.

The story is: I was talking to Sarah Marie Flores, who is our third in the triumvirate of the Anarchists - between me and Lawrence Mattis - and was coming out of this TV show that I'd worked on that I was really proud of, "Work in Progress," which went for two seasons, got on all these top ten lists and didn't get the viewing numbers that the studio wanted, so we were summarily canceled and a few months later pulled from streaming. This rankled me. There was something particularly special about working on "Work in Progress" to me: It was the first time I was able to cast as many trans and queer people as I did, and in all of that representation and seeing all these people onscreen who I'd never gotten to see before, I was like, This is something that makes sticking around in the business worthwhile . So, when Showtime turned around and canceled the show even though it was so critically acclaimed and really made for peanuts, it lit a fire under me. I saw all these windows closing and opportunities dwindling for marginalized voices, and I was like, "Somebody needs to do something about this. Somebody needs to make another attempt at the old United Artists model where it would be an artist-run studio." And Sarah said, "That someone is us ."

At the time of this ideating session with Sarah, I was doing a ton of mentoring through this awesome program called Queer Art Mentorship out of New York. I got 160 submissions and was like, "Holy shit! How am I going to pick one person?" I ended up taking on around 15 mentees out of this program and there was something that was extremely overwhelming about it but also telling as a trans person while all of this horror is happening to the trans community - the impossible amount of propaganda that has changed public opinion in a lot of different ways around trans people - that I could see how important connectivity and mentorship is. I think our connectivity is going to be the thing that saves us. We want to give people as much of a chance to work in this industry as we can while we're also simultaneously trying to subvert the industry. We're trying to connect as many people as we can, give them the tools that we can and provide a support network so that when we're able to dismantle what's happening in the industry, this network will be able to build something new in its place.

Industry Impact & Strategic Analysis

You're right. We were at this "trans tipping point" where you had Laverne Cox on the cover of Time magazine and the NCAA deciding to pull the Men's Basketball Tournament out of North Carolina if they decided to institute these bathroom bans that would harm trans people. That was this moment in time where we had pushed this idea of trans rights as far as it had gotten. And then what happened was, it's not that public opinion shifted, it's that billionaires started pumping out negative propaganda against trans people. They started creating reports about kids with litter boxes, and the Cass report came out in the U.K. - that has since been debunked but has been used as this cudgel against trans people. This idea of "trans surgery for minors" - they're still saying this shit. Jesse Watters was talking to the Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed about cutting kids' tallywackers off. None of this is happening! This is all right-wing propaganda against trans people. That is what has caused the shift.

While that's happening, our industry is being consolidated into these corporate monoliths that are run by people like Larry Ellison, and Larry Ellison is a radical conservative idealogue. Make no mistake: That ideology is permeating everything under the Paramount label, which will soon include Warner Bros. unless somehow these lawsuits hold up.

It's completely bonkers! They're like these Death Stars. They want CNN because they want to make it into Fox News. I got involved with Anarchists and I had written this script ["The Hunted"] with my partner as this receptacle for all my anger. I was using it as this piece of art that was an incredibly cathartic experience to write, and it was a salve for both of us. It's political, but to be trans in this world that we live in is political. My body is political.

Forward Outlook & Market Perspective

Absolutely . Art that doesn't take a political point of view is a political point of view. I've said this before, but if I never make another movie again, I'm fine. I'm getting old. But in my experience of pitching stuff, I've pitched a lot of wonderful, cool queer stories and trans stories, and Hollywood didn't want any of it. There was this TV show based on this comic book "Cosmoknights" that I was going to direct, and it was from me and Emily Andras, who made "Wynonna Earp." It's "Star Wars" with lesbians in space. Amy Poehler was producing it, and we pitched it all around town. We had a cool bible that Emily had written, and I put together a jazzy video for it, and everybody passed. We had this cool adaptation of "Manhunt" by Gretchen Felker-Martin, which was a bestseller on all these top ten lists, and couldn't get that going. This is around 2022, and now it's four years later and I haven't made a thing. I cannot find a studio that will do any of it.

Anarchists United was a name that our partner Lawrence Mattis had gotten the domain for. He was like, "Can we name our company this?" And I was like, "Yeah, it's great."

I mean, I can't sit in a room and explain the movie to every single person who watches it. Even if I did sit in a room with Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump - yikes - it doesn't matter. They're not misunderstanding the film; they're co-opting a message. And that's what fascists do: They co-opt the messages of progressives and use it to their benefit to confuse and obfuscate what is going on and the intention of their ideology. They do it with everything. They do it with Martin Luther King Jr. Look at how they've changed the idea of what antisemitism is.

You've got to hand it to Christopher Nolan for casting Elliot in the first place. That right there is the definition of allyship, and the fact that Christopher Nolan is going out there and talking up Elliot about how awesome he was to work with speaks volumes about him as a human being. But who is following suit in the industry? There are people out there who have the power to cast trans actors, but what the fuck are they doing? Are they so inured with the system that they're burying their heads in it? Seems like it.

I became pals with Cassie. She had this animated show called "Sorry About the Mess" - a delightful show about her experiences when she was living in Olympia, Washington, and it has a supernatural vibe and there's this talking badger named Keith. I was like, "Oh my god, this is hilarious and I want to work with this woman." They had this project set up at [Paramount] and then the show wasn't able to be financed. She came to visit me in Chicago, we sketched out the entire plot to it, she got to work and started writing and then the funding fell out. And then she cooked up "Witchy AF." We did it on a microbudget, got some buddies to direct, crewed up in New Jersey and shot it in a few days.

I mean… these people are Nazis. They're literal Nazis. There is a one-to-one connection between Elon Musk and the Nazi community. He did a full-blown Sieg Heil on a national stage. I think that the global community needs to firewall the U.S. from their populaces in a way because this country has allowed Nazi propaganda to proliferate at such a degree that it has become dangerous to the global population. As much as another country can, I think they need to be fighting back against hate speech and shutting those platforms down. They've had some success in Brazil and Europe, but it's kind of over for the U.S. and the U.K. at the moment. What Twitter does and what Meta does in the U.K… they're cooked.

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