Le Nouvel Observateur : Your reflections on reality and the virtual are some of the key references used by the makers of The Matrix . The first episode explicitly referred to you as the viewer clearly saw the cover of Simulacra and Simulation . 3 Were you surprised by this? Jean Baudrillard : Certainly there have been misinterpretations, which is why I have been hesitant until now to speak about The Matrix . The staff of the Wachowski brothers contacted me at various times following the release of the first episode in order to get me involved with the following ones, but this wasn't really conceivable (laughter). Basically, a similar misunderstanding occurred in the 1980s when New York-based Simulationist 4 artists contacted me. They took the hypothesis of the virtual for an irrefutable fact and transformed it into a visible phantasm. But it is precisely that we can no longer employ categories of the real in order to discuss the characteristics of the virtual. Nouvel Observateur : The connection between the film and the vision you develop, for example, in The Perfect Crime , is, however, quite striking. In evoking a desert of the real , these totally virtualized spectral humans, who are no more than the energetic reserve of thinking objects... . Baudrillard : Yes, but already there have been other films that treat the growing indistinction between the real and the virtual: The Truman Show, Minority Report, or even Mulholland Drive , the masterpiece of David Lynch. The