When Lilly Wachowski signs on to write or direct a project, you can generally be pretty sure something interesting is going to come out of it. Sure, not every project Wachowski has launched (either with her sister Lana, or solo) over the last 30 years has completely redefined the visual language of action movies for the decade-plus after its release. (Although that did happen one more time for the Wachowskis than it has for most everybody else.) But even Wachowski’s less immediately commercial projects have had a spark of vibrant creativity lurking in their hearts, whether it was the candy-neon explosion of Speed Racer, the noir passions of Bound, or the emotionally intimate world of Netflix series Sense8.
All of which makes it a genuine bummer to hear that Hollywood can’t scrape a measly $10 million to make Wachowski’s latest script, simply because she wants to make an action-thriller with an entirely trans cast. Per Variety, Wachowski was talking on KCRW’s The Business podcast last week when the topic of her script The Hunted (written with her partner Mickey Ray Mahoney) came up. Per Wachowski—who hasn’t directed a film since 2015’s Jupiter Ascending, with Lana taking over solo directing duties on The Matrix Resurrections—”People like it, but they really don’t want to make it because it’s [got a] wall-to-wall trans cast.”
In other conversations, Wachowski has described The Hunted as “Sort of a response to all of the horrible anti-trans stuff that’s going on in the world. What if trans people could form this almost Weather Underground level of resistance? It becomes a murder mystery that goes up the ladder into the furthest reaches of government.” (It’s also distinct from Wachowski’s planned TV adaptation of Gretchen Felker-Martin’s similarly named horror novel Manhunt, about a world where trans women have to hunt men who’ve transformed into monsters in order to extract estrogen from their testicles; like we said, Wachowski projects really don’t fuck around.)
In the interview, Wachowski called The Hunted “a script that was extremely important for me to write. It was a response to what is happening in the world for trans people, and it gave me a hugely cathartic receptacle to dump all of my anger and rage and frustration into.” As to getting it made, the veteran filmmaker simply suggested she’d “have to get creative and figure out different ways that I can get this in front of people.”
