Laurence Fishburne and second-unit director David Ellis talk about a big scene filmed in Alameda, California. Beware of the SPOILERS, although, this will be everywhere and is in the Matrix Revisited DVD:
Production on the Matrix sequels may not be complete, but star Laurence Fishburne has hit the road. For a car-chase sequence in Warner Bros.’ $ 127 million Matrix Reloaded, producers spent more than three months building a two-mile highway in Alameda, Calif.–and the actor did some Morpheus motorin’. “There’s no cops!” Fishburne says. “You can get in a vehicle and put pedal to the metal and forget about it. I was going so fast, they couldn’t stop me.”
The Matrix pit crew spent three months filming on the counterfeit concrete, constructed at an abandoned naval air station. “It’s the first time a studio has built a freeway for a movie,” boasts second-unit director David Ellis. (Warner Bros. declined to comment for this story.) The set was torn down after the sequence wrapped–with the materials to be recycled in a low-income housing development in Mexico.