The fascinating story behind the iconic codes in the movie The Matrix 

How many of you have seen the 1999 sci-fi movie The Matrix directed by the sister duo Lana and Lilly Wachowski? If you have, you must be obsessed with the code that made all the difference in the film. In fact, most people who have seen it report to have a clear mental image of a series of green characters cascading down a black screen. And, despite more than one iconic scene in the film, this one with the tumbling green code stands out from the rest.  

Okay, now here comes the million-dollar question: What inspired the iconic green code that comprises the core of the sci-fi? Is it a complex mathematical equation? Or some random nothing? Well, the answer is as surprising as it can get. Turns out, it was just a bunch of sushi recipes. Read on to know more. 

Simon Whiteley: The Man Behind the Code 
The code, often deemed as the ‘digital rain’, was the brainchild of an Australia-based production designer called Simon Whiteley who was appointed for the movie from the firm Animal Logic. Okay, but how did he end up working on the code? This is how it happened: The Wachowski duo vetoed a previous code sequence that the original design team of the movie had developed, and the process had to be restarted. They wanted something old-fashioned and traditional, to suit the plot, more specifically something a bit more Japanese, like the popular comics manga. In fact, this was one of the reasons why Whiteley was hired. His wife was a Japanese and the entire crew thought that she would be influential in the process of new code-making. Whiteley was expected to take the help of his wife and figure out which Japanese characters were ideal and which weren’t.  

However, what Whiteley did instead was completely out-of-the-box. He went home and started browsing through his wife’s sushi cookbooks. And unexpectedly, one particular book caught his attention, and the recipe (written in Japanese syllabic and logographic characters hiragana and kanji) there manipulated what later became the iconic “falling code” or “digital rain” (stylised in katakana, which are Japanese syllabic characters used to spell foreign words).  

The free-flowing code 
Once Whiteley had his inspiration in place, it didn’t take long for him to design and paint all the Japanese letters of the code by hand. When he was done, it was time for him to pass them on to the product team led by his colleague Justen Marshall (the then R&D supervisor at Animal Logic). Marshall and his team digitised the code and made it cascade across the screen. But here arose another problem, the sequence flowing from left to right didn’t really create the effect that Whiteley was hoping for. Just like his source, he wanted the code to be organic and free-flowing and stand out amidst an otherwise machine-oriented movie. This is when he rightly returned to the sushi book that inspired him in the first place and observed that the book was written back to front, while the sentences read top to bottom. This struck him that the code too should flow down from the top of the screen and suggested the product team to follow the pattern. And the rest, as we all would agree, is history!  

Fun fact: Simon Whiteley insists that if carefully decoded, one can really turn the code into a real-life sushi dish.