Transgender filmmaker Lana Wachowski
says she once considered suicide.
The 47-year-old Wachowski on Saturday
received the Human Rights Campaign's (HRC) Visibility Award at the
group's annual San Francisco gala dinner held at the Fairmont San
Francisco Hotel.
Wachowski along with her brother Andy
Wachowski wrote and directed the 1999 futuristic sci-fi thriller The
Matrix. The siblings are also behind the films V for Vendetta
and Cloud Atlas, which opens Friday.
While filming the second and third
parts of the Matrix trilogy in the early 2000s, Lana, who
until 2002 was called Larry, separated from his wife and later
publicly came out transgender. In 2009, she married her second wife.
In accepting her award, Lana said her
“intense anxious isolation” led her to pen a four-page suicide
note to her parents. She then went to a train platform with the
intent of jumping in front of a passing train. While waiting, an
elderly man stared at her.
“I don't know why he wouldn't look
away,” she told a crowd of roughly 600. “All I know is that
because he didn't, I am still here.”
“If I can be that person for someone
else, then that sacrifice of my private civil life may have value,”
she said. (The video is embedded on this page. Visit
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