THE MATRIX
One of my proudest moments of working with Maverick Records came on the soundtrack for The Matrix. The creative director there handed me a handful of slides before he left for the night. He gave me specific instructions to scan them and set them up in a file, but not to get into the design yet. He knew my overeager tendencies, and wanted to get started on the design himself the next day.
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Well… once I had scanned and placed the images I thought, “I’ll just line them up nice and neat. And maybe I’ll crop that one a bit better. Oh, and what if I take those cool green data streams and put them over this shot here?” I never intended to go against orders, or to undermine anybody’s authority. And it wasn’t like this project looked like a great prize, either. Keanu Reeves wasn’t exactly at the peak of his career in 1999, and nobody had really heard of the Wachowskis yet. This was just another soundtrack coming through. But I loved the images, and just had too much fun playing around. Next thing I knew it was 4 o’clock in the morning, and the entire design was done and mocked up.
The Maverick art department consisted of the creative director, his secretary, and me—the lone freelancer. We were desperately understaffed for the amount of work that had to go out every day, so my boss didn’t have the luxury of redoing anything that was ready to be presented. When he saw that I’d designed the package overnight against his specific directions, he wasn’t happy with me. Which I can certainly understand. Luckily, he also liked what I’d done, and worked his magic with the studio and the Wachowskis, getting the design approved with hardly any changes. All I remember having to add was the human harvest pod on the back cover. Not bad!
I never actually got to watch the movie until it hit theaters, at which point I realized that I’d misinterpreted the original slides. When I’d seen the image of Neo and Morpheus fighting in the dojo, I had assumed that Morpheus was the bad guy. If you look through the booklet, you’ll notice that Neo and Morpheus are always placed in opposition. There is one image of Agent Smith, and he’s got his back turned to the camera. Good stuff!
Jason Bentley was an A&R man at Maverick at the time, and also acted as music supervisor for the whole Matrix trilogy. His office was just down the hall from the art department, and it was through chatting with his assistant Jennifer Stone that I talked myself into designing the flyers for Jason’s weekly club night bossa:nova. Which led to lots of interesting new ideas and adventures! I was definitely in the right place at the right time.
Out of all the things I designed for the company, this was one of my favorites musically, and it was far and away the most commercially successful, so I’m especially proud that it’s one of the handful of Maverick releases for which I got sole design credit.
