TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Aleksandar Hemon has an excellent profile of the Wachowskis ahead of the release of their next film, Cloud Atlas:

The siblings grew up in a close-knit family in Beverly, a middle-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Their parents—Ron, a businessman, and Lynne, a nurse—were film enthusiasts. They dragged Larry and Andy and their two sisters to any movie they found interesting, ignoring the parental-advisory labels. “We would have ‘movie orgies’—double features, triple features, drive-ins,” Andy recalled. “I was so young that I didn’t know what the word ‘orgy’ meant, but I knew that, whatever it was, I liked it.”

Lana initially hated “2001,” and was perplexed by the mysterious presence of the black monolith. “That’s a symbol,” Ron explained. Lana told me, “That simple sentence went into my brain and rearranged things in such an unbelievable way that I don’t think I’ve been the same since. Something clicked inside. ‘2001’ is one of the reasons I’m a filmmaker.”

I had a similar reaction after watching the Matrix (except I loved it from the very beginning). The movie was engaging on so many levels; on the surface, it was an entertaining sci-fi action movie, but as you probed deeper, it revealed more and more depth and meaning. At twelve years old, it was the first time I remember looking at a movie allegorically and gaining a better understanding of it by studying mythology, religion and philosophy. I obsessed over that film until the Matrix Revolutions was released in 2003, watching it over and over again.

What I love about the Wachowskis is they truly approach filmmaking as art, something that should have a greater meaning beyond the literal narrative.