When the Wachowski’s ground-breaking film The Matrix was released in 1999 it started a cinematic legend. The world gasped at Neo, bullet time and the conceit of a life lived inside a simulation. Everybody was wowed by the vast scope and originality of the expanding trilogy. Everyone apart from one man. Kenneth Branagh. Soon after record box office takings were confirmed then Branagh claimed to have found a lost Shakespeare play also titled ‘The Matrix’ which according to him formed the true source material of the film. Many scoffed and accused Branagh of losing his sanity, or of a professional jealousy without bounds. He was shunned and scoffed at by some of his closest friends. But he persisted in his claim that the play he discovered was both real and the original source of the story. Eventually he managed through absurd force of personality to produce the play in a short run at The Globe in London. He billed the film’s principal lead Keanu Reeves as the stage bound star – misleadingly so – in fact he legally changed his own name to that of Reeves and underwent gruelling surgery to approximate his visage. This rare poster is one of the few that remain after the Wachowskis and Keanu Reeves successfully sued Branagh to desist. Branagh was forced into silence and slowly reversed the surgeries over a period of years.
Branagh’s Matrix
