Interview: Fanimatrix Auteur Rajneel Singh, Part 5

Welcome to the fifth—and final—installment of our epic interview with Rajneel Singh, director of the classic Matrix fan film, .

If you’ve already seen his 16-minute flick, you know it’s a pulse-pounding action flick made on a non-existent budget; if you haven’t seen it and you happen to dig Keanu Reeves’ second-best franchise, then you owe it to yourself to check this fan film out. After you do, come back and find out how they did it with this last installment of our multi-part chat with Singh.

It seems like the cost of making a fan film that looks good has sky-rocketed in recent years. The Dark Knight Project cost $15,000 to make, Batman: Dead End was $30,000, and Star Trek: Phase II reportedly costs about $40,000 an episode if you don’t count their $100,000 Enterprise bridge set. Your flick obviously had a lower budget, but it looked like a Matrix movie—how much did it cost?

The final film cost $700NZ in 2003, which was around $500US given the exchange rate at the time. The money went to pay for several costumes, renting out a location, renting a couple of lights and dimmers and paying for a lot of gas and food for some of the shoots.

By the end of all that, I’m sure you knew how to run a shoot, but what do you feel that you learned from making this film?

I think it would be easier to talk about what we didn’t learn from making this movie! [laughs] It would be impossible to list everything. But I think the most important thing we took away from this experience was the knowledge that we were ready to take on our dream careers of being filmmakers. The success of the film (despite its flaws) told us that we definitely had the basic ground-level skills in making compelling and engaging movies and that it was no longer a fantasy for us to pursue this goal. It was real and the proof was in our hands.

The other important thing we learned was the importance of production value—something that a lot of fan films do not have or, sometimes, do not use as efficiently as they could. We were surprised, several months later, by the flood of emails and stories on the net suggesting that we shot the film in Sydney (where the first Matrix film was shot) and we had people quizzing us endlessly on how did we achieve “The Matrix Look” in our film. We find that ironic because we only had three lights, a handful of green gels and a ridiculously over-the-top color-grade.

In the end, it became clear that good production value stems from knowing how to stylize reality in such as way as to illicit the correct psychological response from your audience. We make a fan film about The Matrix and so we didn’t go balls-out in trying to make the film look like it was made for a million bucks. Instead, we just worked very hard in trying to figure out what makes The Matrix movies look they way they do—and did our best to recreate that with $700.

Given those limits then, is there anything you would have done differently?

If we had known the movie was going to be such a success, I think we would have worked to have a better story and a better script, and would have done more pre-planning to produce a slicker, more professional and more larger-than-life film.

We did have the contacts, at the time, to make a larger and more flamboyant film, but we lacked the experience and confidence to use them because we felt we would probably waste those resources. But I think, looking back, we would have probably tackled them relatively well.

What do you think drives so many people such as yourself to make fan films?

It’s really hard to say as I’ve never been an avid fan film-maker. After The Fanimatrix was over, I really didn’t have too much interest in going down that path again in terms of my own career.

I think people invest into a fan film for many reasons: devotion and adoration to something; wanting to learn about filmmaking; wanting to see how something was done the first time; sometimes living vicariously through the universe they’re recreating; or sometimes maybe just because they’re bored and they want to know what goes into making a movie of any kind. They’re all valid reasons and I think so long as you’re happy in doing what you’re doing, then nobody can really take that away from you.

Everyone who makes fan productions gets plagued by people asking this: Why did you choose to make a fan film, as opposed to making an original movie based on the same plot but with new characters?

I think it came down to a convergence of resources—goths, stuntmen, martial arts training, industrial locations—and trying to see how close we could get to an established benchmark. We want to make big, exciting, genre films and wanted to see how close we could get with the meager resources we had available to us. As Socrates postulates, “Wisdom comes from knowing what you do not know.” It was a way for us to measure the gap between where we were and where we wanted to be in the future.

Last question—since your movie made such a splash, did you ever hear from the folks behind the Matrix feature films? Hopefully there weren’t any copyright issues.

In fact, as an interesting addendum to the story, we were contacted about two years after the release of The Fanimatrix by a production company in California that was making The Ultimate Matrix Box Set and were producing the DVD documentaries for the set. They informed us that they had assembled a documentary about “Matrix Fandom” and wanted to include the film in the box set—as it was the Wachowski Brothers favorite Matrix fan-film! Sadly, it never came to pass as the amount of money required to clear the music rights for the fan film was too expensive and there was simply not enough room in the box set DVDs for The Fanimatrix and the “Matrix Fandom” documentary. But all in all, it seems our film was well-received by the powers that be in Hollywood.

Thanks to Rajneel Singh for the great interview!