It seems like a simple question for Lilly Wachowski: How did she and sibling Lana Wachowski dream up the idea of 1999 cyberpunk classic “The Matrix” involving a future world where our minds and bodies are enslaved for the benefit of machines?

She pauses.

“Well. That seems like a simple question,” Lilly Wachowski says, and laughs. “I mean, it’s hard to look back through the lens at a certain purchase of your life when you’re looking backwards and looking down into the valley of where you were and how did you get here.”

It was a confluence of things that she and her sister were reading, watching and listening to at the time, she says on a recent video call. The Wachowskis, who co-directed most of their movies, including “The Matrix” franchise, were on deadline for a different project, a comic book, Lilly Wachowski thinks.

“And all we could talk about was this idea,” she says. “It became all-consuming. You could apply the idea of ‘The Matrix’ to understand or justify any of the world’s ills or personal problems, things like that. It just dominated our lives at the time.”

The idea was this: Several hundred years in the future, the war between humans and sentient machines is all but over. The machines have enslaved almost all the humans, harvesting their bioelectrical energy while pacifying them inside the simulated reality of the so-called Matrix.Keanu Reeves plays Neo, a hacker who learns of the Matrix from human rebels led by Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus and Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity, and he joins the rebellion to topple the machines and free the humans.

That message of personal freedom the Wachowskis put on the screen would reveal itself again years later in their private lives when both siblings came out as trans women.

“I’m also able to now apply who I am and where I’ve landed to understand all the other (stuff) I was dealing with back then,” Lilly Wachowski says. “You know, two trans women, dreaming about liberation. Dreaming about identity and the claiming of self.

“Like the idea of knowing thyself, it’s like that was a question for us,” she says. “So, kind of complex when you really start getting into it.”

Lilly Wachowski will appear at a screening of the third “Matrix” movie, “The Matrix Revolutions,” at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles on Saturday. She’ll also chat with Lyndon Barrois Sr., a visual effects artist on “The Matrix Reloaded” and “The Matrix Revolutions.”

In a joint interview with Lilly Wachowski and Barrois, they talked about bringing “The Matrix” to the screen, the excitement created by the film’s groundbreaking visual effects, and what she thinks of the current embrace of AI a quarter century after she and her sister dreamed up their dystopian world where machines dominate humans.

Q: It must have been intimidating to think about how to put this all on screen. Can you talk about creating a visual world to match the philosophical world of “The Matrix”?

Wachowski: There are two things that pop into my head immediately. We had a very robust, imaginative childhood. We played role-playing games. We played Dungeons and Dragons. We played this thing called Traveller, which was this space RPG. And we ended up making our own game called High Adventure, which was a blend of everything. You could be a barbarian, you could be a magician, you could be a guy like Han Solo. We created this massive world.

The second thing is we read tons of science fiction, tons of fantasy, and we really were huge comic book fans. And with comics, the only barrier you have is what your imagination can draw. You can draw anything. Joel [Silver, who produced the film] kept getting us seed money to put into the drawing process. As soon as we got that money, we were like, “OK, let’s start drawing this and we’ll figure it out later.”

We were able to draw the entire movie so that you could sit down and basically watch it with me and Lana on either side of you, doing sound effects and giving you story beats, and walk you through the entire thing. It was just this force of our imaginatory will that brought it into being.

Q: Lyndon, you didn’t work on the first film, so I want to ask you about your reaction when you saw it for the first time.

Barrois: My current wife and I were dating at the time, and we went. We had seen “Bound” (the Wachowskis’ debut film) and were fans of that. So we went to see this picture not knowing what to expect, and just walked out going, “Holy (bleep), what did we just sit through?” I mean, it was such a ride. It was just a blast.

The story was great. Visually, it was stunning. It checked every box. So that first experience, it just sits with you, because it’s so much to think about on so many layers.

Then I got this call from a VFX producer I was working with at the time. He just went, “We got these films we want you to come up and meet about.” And when he told me what it was, I just hit the floor. I was like, “You (messing) with me?” I go up there, meet the time, see the story. The artwork, that’s what really got me. I was like, “Wow, this is what we have to do? I’m all in.”

Q: Back to you, Lilly. The special effects in “The Matrix” were very influential. Things like “bullet time,” for instance. How did you approach or create the visual effects you needed to make the world you wanted?

Wachowski: There was the sort of intellectual idea of trying to manipulate time and space that we wanted to feel — that things felt a little off. In some of the more simple setups, there are moments where some things within the frame are moving in slow motion and some things are moving at 24 frames per second. There’s a shot of Neo being pulled out of his office by the agents, and the world is moving at normal speed but Neo is moving in slow motion.

That’s intellectually where bullet time came from, and then we drew those shots. I don’t think of a drawing as just a still image. I think of a drawing as a moment that is being captured in motion. We ended up drawing the camera path of each of these frames with our friend Steve Skroce. At that point, we were using these very articulated “Star Trek” characters, these figurines.

The characters could get into very unique positions. So with Steve, we just let him have fun and find these key frames for the camera path. Delivering that to visual effects guys and physical effects people on how to capture this on film was really interesting, like, you know, rocket cameras. (Laughs.) “This is never gonna work, but here’s an idea to get a camera to go 100 miles an hour in a path.”

Q: Lyndon, when you saw bullet time in the first movie, were you able to understand what they were doing right away?

Barrois: Even though I do the work, I always just try to approach it first as a fan. Because I don’t want to sit there thinking about, how is this done, or how to decipher it. So when we saw that first time, it was so beautifully done. And then I’m going, “How in the (bleep) did they pull that off?” There was no social media. Then you had to wait for Cinefex magazine to come or whatever that show was, “Movie Magic,” to really watch it.

Then when you saw the camera set up and this, it was just, again, one of those things that really sticks with you as an artist. There are things that hit such a bar that everybody’s doing them. When I did “Kung Pow!” we even parodied it with a cow. It just became everything. We all wanted to do it to some degree.

Q: There’s a scene in “The Matrix” where Morpheus has to explain to Neo what artificial intelligence is. Today we all know AI. What’s it like, Lilly, to look back at the differences between how we view tech like AI today and how you did then?

Wachowski: Wow, I mean, as far as we’ve come in terms of the technology itself, there’s something to be desired. It’s not really approaching anything that is close to the films, the ideas in the films. Sentient technology; it’s not there. When I’m thinking about (the Academy Museum’s cyberpunk exhibit) and this talk between me and Lyndon, I feel like the stories and books, even games they end up playing, are in this highly optimistic place. The people who write about those worlds are imagining all of this tech everywhere; everybody’s cool. They’ve got bionics and these implants and stuff.

I see where we are and where we’re going, and I’m like, oh God, it’s not anything like that. The reality is that we are heading towards crushing poverty. That the environment is going to collapse. That the disparity between the upper class and the lower class is going to be astronomical. And the things we should have been writing about are the danger of that stuff.

When you look at what AI is being used for right now, it’s about this fight for the truth. It is about propaganda. It is about devaluing human beings. As a filmmaker, I think AI is kind of interesting. But its practical applications in the world is engineering itself towards commerce. It’s a money-making tool.

Sorry, that’s a lot.

Barrois: No, that’s great. But here is where it gets interesting. That is a valid outlook on it, but see, I’m also an active user (of AI), and I remember having this conversation 30 years ago at the advent of CGI (computer-generated images). I’m one who personally lost their first feature job to CGI. I was going to be an animator on “Mars Attacks!” because it was all stop-motion. When I lost this job there, you know, “Am I done? Or do I have to evolve and learn software?” Which is what I had to do.

The problem with it is, the problem with any technology, the tech will always outrun the ethics and the laws. That’s the very unfortunate thing. It moves too fast. But again, genie’s out of the bottle. It will definitely threaten people’s livelihoods. But as an artist, I just have to be optimistic. It’s like the line from “Jurassic Park”: “Nature finds a way.” Artists will find a way.

The problem is, Lilly, the thing you guys created and the work we did together, we made it look too cool.

Wachowski: Damn it, it’s our own fault. (Laughs.) I take full responsibility, everybody.

Q: It still looks cool! Looking back at the original movies, do you see things in there you didn’t realize it was saying at the time?

Wachowski: I don’t know. I don’t know what else we could put in there. You know, we put in stuff for ourselves. It was like an exercise of self-analysis, of self-reflection. It was hugely important in our path out of the closet. And when I talk to trans people, trans women come up to me everywhere telling me how important those movies were for them getting out of the closet.

They’re like breadcrumbs from my own way out of the closet, like I’m scratching my way up and we’re leaving this trail and people are able to follow.

Q: What do you think of the way parts of the story have been co-opted to mean things you did not intend? I’m thinking of how “red pilled” has come to mean seeing crazy conspiracies everywhere in society.

Wachowski: How do you fight propaganda? We’ve got a real problem in the country in this fight for what is real and what is true. It’s like the right wing, the fascists, have always co-opted the language of the left. They’ve done it throughout history. And so now you’ve got this movement in this country where they’re saying, “Oh yeah, these are antisemites on our college campuses. Let’s black-bag ’em and send them to detention facilities.” And student protest is an American tradition.

How do you fight fascism? It’s one of the reasons why I thought the Academy Museum screening “Matrix Revolutions” was appropriate. Because how does humanity survive in that film? Every single one of the characters in that film is necessary in the fight. So that’s where we are now. We have to step up and we all have to get shoulder-to-shoulder to fight the fas cists.