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 our video library for more videos.)