The “philosophical” film Keegan-Michael Key calls the most “influential”
Actor, comedian and screenwriter Keegan-Michael Key might be best known for his sketch series Key & Peele, which he co-created with director Jordan Peele. The series ran on Comedy Central between 2012 and 2015. Key looks to have a deep admiration of cinema and has previously gone on record to state his love for several classics of the medium.
There looks to be one film in particular that Key considers the most influential, though, not only in terms of his own personal life but on a filmmaking basis, too. In a feature with the Academy Award website A-Frame, Key selected the five films that had the biggest impact on him, and one of them was the first Matrix movie.
“The original Matrix is influential, to me, on a philosophical level, but also influential on a filmmaking level,” Key said. “I can’t speak for anybody else, but when I saw the bullet time shot — when Keanu leans over and he dodges the first five bullets — and also earlier in the film when we go around Trinity when she’s up in the air before she kicks that cop in the chest, those moments must have been similar to when people saw The Jazz Singer.”
The Jazz Singer was, of course, the first feature-length film to have both a synchronised recorded score and lip-synched singing and dialogue, so it wowed the audiences of 1927. However, the big impact for Key was certainly The Matrix, directed by the Wachowskis and released in 1999.
He continued, “I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, but I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, what just happened? I can’t believe… What did I just…’ Because even if you’re not particularly aware of Hong Kong cinema and wire work, you have never seen anything like this before.”
It’s true that the film featured some of the best martial arts and wirework that we’d ever seen. This was, of course, right at the end of the 20th Century, so action films still were not quite as we know them today. The Matrix simply changed the future of cinema, something that Key certainly agrees with.
“This was something that had moved a step beyond, and it propelled different genres of film forward. It propelled the action film forward,” he said. “It propelled the sci-fi film forward, and it propelled Hong Kong cinema forward in a movie that wasn’t even made in Hong Kong.”
He concluded, expressing his love for the film and the never-ending quest to interpret its meaning, “That’s a movie that I can watch over and over again and still not get all of the psychological and philosophical underpinnings of the movie. And I’ve seen it well over ten times. And still, I have not been able to completely immerse myself in everything that happens in that movie from a philosophical standpoint.”
