Made up of Japanese characters, numbers and inversed roman letters, the green Matrix code has without a doubt acquired just as much of a cult status as the film itself, which came out in 1999 and was directed by the Wachowski Brothers.
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A design inspired by a recipe
Falling like rain on a black background, this digital code was the object of a good deal of speculation on the part of cinema fans who had made several attempts at deciphering it. And nobody really knew what message was hidden there. While some had for a long time attributed the presence of Japanese characters to the influence of manga and the cartoon Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix has nothing to do with it.
In a recent interview he gave to Cnet, Simon Whiteley, the chief production designer of the trilogy, revealed the meaning of the infamous unfolding code. He admitted he used a Japanese cooking book which belonged to his wife to create this graphic interface. Simon Whiteley explained that he scanned those pages of the book that were devoted to a sushi recipe, then extracted the characters and integrated them into his design.
‘Without that code, there is no Matrix. I like to tell everybody that The Matrix's code is made out of Japanese sushi recipes...’, Whiteley jokes.
That’s certainly a revelation that will ensure you will never watch the film in the same way again.
