New York Magazine

John Gaeta: Those who know the Matrix series recall that we’ve always drawn on Asian cinema. Anime like the original Speed Racer sort of replaced the idea of realism with how they want you to feel: A moment in a character’s story arc could reach these near-phantasmagorical proportions. It was very expressive, and that style had a great deal to do with our production design.

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J.G.: This is a kind of flying-car version of Formula 1. Like the wheel on your swivel chair, these tires are captured from above and are controllable independently, so you can spin them 180 degrees and race down a highway at 400 mph doing figure eights. Add to that some form of high-powered pneumatic-ram-meets-electromagnetic-pogo-stick, and, well, you can basically flip your car, go spiraling, do backflips, jump around the track, and fight each other. It’s acrobatic combative racing.

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Dan Glass: People are familiar with the jump-jacks from the original series and things like that. But we also play with the tracks themselves, turning them into obstacle courses, skateboard parks.

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J.G.: Sin City was something that came up between the Matrix movies and the beginning of our conversations about Speed Racer. Robert Rodriguez has said that he was inspired by the grown-up comic-books approach that The Matrix took. He’s a fan of the same comic-book art that we are. One of Frank Miller’s best artist mates is Jeff Darrow, our conceptual artist. You can see a line from The Matrix to Sin City and back to Speed Racer, in terms of modern comic-book art and inking.

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J.G.: We knew we wanted to pursue a color palette that was really vivid. At one time, Technicolor would have been the most vivid process. We called this techno-color. You can see the influence of music videos: Hype Williams, some Marilyn Manson, like “Welcome to the Dope Show.” There’s great experimentation in music videos that you can’t often do elsewhere.

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D.G.: We built this film as layers of still images, so we can manipulate each layer. We can set every layer in focus to get these ultra-high-clarity crisp, detailed, colorful images that almost feel 3-D. Or we can go to the opposite end: We throw everything out of focus except for one layer, to exaggerate the way optical focus works.

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D.G.: In traditional cel animation, there’s very little depth of field. In the more recent Japanimation or international animation, there isn't the opportunity to focus or defocus planes easily. We can manipulate everything. We build layers that really punch characters from the background, usually in some kind of excessive way.

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D.G.: We also started to question traditional optics in other ways. Usually highlights (like the light glare of car headlights, pictured) convolve into circles, because that’s the shape of the iris in the lens. We said: Why not boxes and diamonds and rectangles and stars and hearts?

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D.G.: We use effects to contribute to the emotions in a scene, in the way that anime uses visuals to convey an emotion or just create something visually stimulating. We’re interested in more than representing things realistically or technically. We’re basically thinking: Whatever it takes to make it look cool, fun, interesting, unusual.

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D.G.: We just open the “shutter” for these long exposure-effect shots, to convey speed. We still talk about things like “shutters” because that’s the language, but of course there are no shutters. It’s all virtual, inside the computer.

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D.G.: You need motion blur to convey continuous motion. The cars are moving at 200 to 300 mph around hairpin turns and jumps and curves. Capturing genuinely crisp pictures of this would be impossible in the real world and is hard in the virtual world. We could render a frame as crisp and take off the motion blur—but if you put frames like that in the film, you’d get a strobing effect and it would appear to stutter.

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D.G.: We punch areas of clarity into action. As a car goes past the camera at superfast speed, the bulk can be smeared, but we'll paint through an area that stays crisp. They go by so fast you don’t notice it, but your brain registers it, and it helps you to understand the madness.

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J.G.: For a long time we’ve been waiting for cameras and data flow to all really be connected. David Fincher would be one of the very few who's applied this. James Cameron is pursuing it now. We’re after this photo-anime approach. It’s not necessarily about perfectly integrated color and light attributes; it's about style and emotional and expressive design.

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D.G.: We’re not deliberately trying to be innovative; it’s more just a general creative playfulness. Visual-effects technology has gotten to a point where we’re much freer—before, you never really knew whether you could pull off what you wanted to do.

Photograph: Warner Bros.