The Matrix 4 director Lana Wachoski says that bringing back Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) in a surprise reboot of the films helped her manage grief. She said at the International Literature Festival Berlin: “My dad died, then this friend died, then my mom died. I didn't really know how to process that kind of grief. I hadn't experienced it that closely… You know their lives are going to end and yet it was still really hard.”
“My brain has always reached into my imagination and one night, I was crying and I couldn't sleep, and my brain exploded this whole story. And I couldn't have my mom and dad, yet suddenly I had Neo and Trinity, arguably the two most important characters in my life,” she explained.
She leaned in. “It was immediately comforting to have these two characters alive again, and it's super simple,” she continued. “You can look at it and say: 'OK, these two people die and OK, bring these two people back to life and oh, doesn't that feel good.' Yeah, it did! It's simple, and this is what art does and that's what stories do: they comfort us.”