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CHRISTINA RICCI (pictured, with Emile Hirsch) ''You'd walk onto an empty neon set and they'd be like, 'Today the cliff is over here, over there is where the cars are parked, and your helicopter is in that direction'''
Warner Bros.

Speed has driven them crazy before. An after-school ritual for millions of boomers and early Gen-Xers back in the late 1960s and 1970s, the cartoon was America's first significant brush with anime. It's not hard to imagine young Andy and Larry (now 40 and 42) glued to their TV set at the time, switching between channels — all three or four of them back then — until landing on this brightly colored, poorly dubbed Japanese doodle. ''If you watch the cartoon with the Wachowskis in mind, you can learn things about them,'' suggests John Gaeta, a visual-effects supervisor who's worked with the brothers since the original Matrix (he's the guy who masterminded that film's ingenious ''bullet-time'' effect). ''On one level the cartoon is super-primitive. But if you look at how hard the action actually is — it's edgy, intense stuff. You can see why the Wachowskis would be into it.'' Study it more closely, and you can also see where the boys got their thing for clingy leather outfits and wraparound shades.

A few other directors almost beat the Wachowskis to Speed Racer's finish line. Back in the mid-1990s, Warner Bros. hired Julien Temple to helm the film, casting Johnny Depp in the starring role. ''When he was younger, Johnny kind of looked like Speed,'' notes Silver. (He also reveals that Depp was the Wachowskis' first choice to play Neo during early drafts of The Matrix: ''The boys liked the idea of Johnny.'') When Temple's movie didn't pan out, Racer stalled through a series of interested writers and directors (Alfonso Cuarón, J.J. Abrams, even Gus Van Sant). ''A lot of people worked on it,'' says Silver, who's been trying to get Racer up and running since acquiring the rights about 20 years ago, long before he started working with the Wachowskis on the Matrix movies. ''But nothing ever felt right until the boys told me what they wanted to do with the film.'' The Wachowskis didn't just tell Silver, they showed him, with a four-minute mini-movie demonstrating exactly what sort of makeover they'd give the creaking cartoon character. They had him at vroom vroom. ''You know that scene in one of the Matrix movies where the bee camera goes under a truck, and you're like, 'How'd they do that?''' Silver says. ''Well, the Wachowskis wanted to make a whole movie like that. With racing cars.''

They filmed nearly the entire production in Berlin last summer, but don't expect any shots of pigeons on Alexanderplatz. Virtually every sequence of the movie was digitally captured deep inside a greenscreen soundstage. The actors would show up in costume, get handed a prop if they were lucky, and pretend to be racing in the Alps or strolling in a Moroccan landscape. ''You'd walk onto an empty neon set and they'd be like, 'Today the cliff is over here, over there is where the cars are parked, and your helicopter is in that direction,''' Ricci says. To help the performers get in the mood, the Wachowskis rigged a special monitor that instantly sketched the actors into their CGI environments, so they could check themselves out in Greece or Italy or any of the other preloaded locations they were shooting that day. Still, acting is acting. ''I didn't want to make the character too big or exaggerated,'' says Hirsch, who watched all 52 episodes of the original cartoon on DVD before squeezing his head into Speed's helmet. ''If anything, I wanted to make him more minimalist. He's cooler than cool when he's outside the car, but he goes crazy behind the wheel. It's almost like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I mean, there's this scene in the car where I go, 'Okay, no more Mr. Nice Guy!' At that moment, I really do look demented.''

Silver can commiserate.''You know, these greenscreen movies are harder on actors,'' he says, getting back into the golf cart after the screening. ''They're basically on the set relating to a tennis ball. But Larry and Andy are trying to do something that no one has ever done before, that nobody has ever seen before. Especially in a big family film. That's what they'd say, if they would talk to you.''

Additional reporting by Adam B. Vary

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Posted Mar 28, 2008 | Published in issue #985 Apr 04, 2008 | Order Article Reprints
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