Photo via Flickr user Tony Werman 
 
 The first few minutes of The Matrix (1999) are ominous and disorienting: a torrent of lime-green characters trickle down and then jam the frame. From afar, it looks like utterly indecipherable code; If you peer closely, however you'll be able to discern that it's a jumble of Japanese characters: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. 
 
 The Wachowskis, who directed the movie, have opened every subsequent film within the Matrix franchise with this sequence. You could even consider the green techno-rain the series' defining imagistic attribute. 
 
 For those of us who've found it impossible to get a handle on what, exactly, is gushing onto the screen, though, I've got news: As it turns out, we've been played. 
 
 The man behind the code is Simon Whiteley, who worked as a production designer on the film. In an interview with CNet last Thursday, Whiteley revealed that the source of that mystifying code was none other than a batch of his Japanese wife's cookbooks—and the sushi recipes he found within them. 
 
 "I like to tell everybody that The Matrix's code is made out of Japanese sushi recipes," Whiteley, who's also lent his design talents to Babe (1995) and The Lego Movie (2014), told the publication. "Without that code, there is no Matrix." 
 
 Photo via Flickr user stu_spivack 
 
 So, to recap: This vexing code, which many nerds have surely spent an ungodly amount of time trying to decipher, is a bunch of sushi recipes. Wild! Thanks for clearing that one up. This will no doubt lead some obsessive franchise fans to extract the recipes from each frame; I wish anyone who braves such an endeavor good luck. 
 
 Plus, there's this:In spite of the fact that Whiteley was the architect of one of the film's most indelible sequences, he was uncredited in the film. That's a shame. ||||| Green code in Japanese-inspired symbols trails down a computer screen like digital rain. It tells those who can read it what's happening in The Matrix, a virtual reality. 
 
 Paul Wright 
 
 Simon Whiteley, creator of The Matrix code, attributes the design to his wife, who's from Japan. 
 
 "I like to tell everybody that The Matrix's code is made out of Japanese sushi recipes," says Whiteley, a production designer from England who's now based at the Animal Logic animation and visual-effects studio in Sydney. He scanned the characters from his wife's Japanese cookbooks. "Without that code, there is no Matrix." 
 
 Whiteley brought his meticulous precision to his latest project, "The Lego Ninjago Movie," concept-designing its Japan-inspired Lego world and the mechs that riff off skyscraper-tall metal gun machines in "Pacific Rim." The third in "The Lego Movie" franchise is now out in theaters worldwide. 
 
 "The buildings you see in Ninjago are two or three times as high as Jackie Chan," Whiteley tells me. As in he built Ninjago in studio out of hundreds of thousands of bricks that reached as high as a small, real-life city. And by bricks I mean bricks from Billund, Denmark, where Lego is made. Whitelely flew there to collect them. That's precision. 
 
 "Simon is an incredibly detail-orientated production designer," says Ingrid Johnston, Animal Logic's head of production. "At times you can find yourself having crazy conversations [with him] about why things need to be a certain way." 
 
 Talking to Whiteley by phone about Lego, we quickly get sidetracked delving through the trove of movie gems mixed in alongside "The Matrix," "The Matrix Reloaded" and "The Matrix Revolutions"on Whiteley's IMDb page. 
 
 Whiteley's start in film pivoted on being in the right place at the right time. In the mid '80s, instead of computers, production methods included painting on glass, making matte paintings and using hot-metal typesetting for credits on big sheets of paper that were filmed and displayed on screen. At his college in Birmingham, Whiteley struck luck with a tutor who ran the graphics department at the BBC. Whiteley accepted his golden ticket. 
 
 Here, he recounts some of the career highlights that followed. 
 
 Zack Snyder's strange technique 
 
 "The owl movie" (that's "Legends of the Guardians") as Whiteley affectionately refers to it, nudged him into the circles of Zack Snyder, who recently directed "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice." Snyder's run up to the 3D animation included "300," which spurred an unconventional technique. 
 
 "He got his stuntmen from '300' to dress up in owl suits with owl claws and cardboard wings to fight all the fights," Whiteley says. "It was hilarious." 
 
 James Martin/CNET 
 
 Realistic Harry Potter, Star Wars 
 
 Whiteley has watched the evolution of childhood staples like Harry Potter and Star Wars. He saw the advent of the digital age, from the early Star Wars films when everything was built as models, to the introduction of computers. 
 
 "Now we're starting to see a kind of pushback," he says with a hint of affection. "The best designs are the ones where models are made and CG is used carefully." 
 
 Whiteley has rubbed shoulders with his share of big-name celebrities -- he overcame being starstruck to have a laugh with John Travolta and Nick Nolte while on a World War II ship in LA for 1998's "The Thin Red Line." Yet he speaks most affectionately of an interaction with non-human characters from Harry Potter. 
 
 "We got to see the owls from Harry Potter, which was fantastic," he says. "We got to see Hedwig." He took his family to a Warner Bros. owl sanctuary near Cornwall and filmed and photographed the owls for two whole weeks, building motion capture footage. 
 
 Harry Potter, he notes for the record, doesn't use much CG. "If they can use a real owl," he says, "they'll use one." 
 
 Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures 
 
 Do you want to build a Lego city? 
 
 What differentiates "Lego Ninjago" from the first two Lego movies is world expansion outside the digital. "Instead of being in a basement like in the first movie, it was as if your child had gone out into the back garden," Whiteley says. "So we introduced miniature plants, grass, rocks and ... built those in 3D." 
 
 Whiteley used a Lego-specific computer program for designing models called LDD, Lego Digital Designer, and you (and other kids) can download it off the web here. Every single brick in Billund's library is available in the program, a tool Whitelely and the other Lego designers tapped for all three movies. 
 
 "We could open people's eyes to a new look," Whiteley says. "That's the funnest part of my job, designing something for a director and then either seeing it physically built or built in CG." 
 
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– If you're the type who would take the blue pill and would prefer to "just wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe," stop reading. If you want to discover the truth about a mystery of The Matrix, pop the hypothetical red pill and read on, but with the warning that a bubble might be burst. Munchies spotted a CNET report on the origins of the green code that waterfalls down the screen as the movie—and its successors—opens by way of Simon Whiteley. He's the production designer who created the code, and he says credit goes to his Japanese wife and her cookbooks, which he scanned. "I like to tell everybody that The Matrix's code is made out of Japanese sushi recipes," he notes. "Without that code, there is no Matrix." Munchies offers this further bit of Matrix trivia: Whiteley's name doesn't appear in the film's credits. (See what makes Barack Obama's list of the best sci-fi movies and TV shows.)