You liked Matrix? You want some more? How about a double dose? Directors Larry and Andy Wachowski and star Keanu Reeves are in talks to shoot two episodes back-to-back for Warners and Village Roadshow Pictures towards the end of next year.

Poor old Keanu: however hard he tries to move off in other directions with movies like A Walk in the Clouds and Feeling Minnesota, those ol’ action pix just keep calling him back. Still, he baulked at Speed 2 (wisely, it turns out), so there must be something special about the Matrix concept to hook him back again. In addition to the $20 million each plus gross points, that is.

With scant regard for those who are uncertain whether the plural of matrix is matrixes or matrices, the Wachowskis - like George Lucas before them - apparently always saw their sci-fi epic as part of a trilogy. Wisely, they did not insist on this when they persuaded Joel Silver, Warners and Village Roadshow to assemble the $50 million it took to make the first film.

Now that Part I has grossed over $350 million worldwide, however, the brothers have reportedly had little trouble talking Warners into going for the triple, with a massive 250-day (as in: eight-month) shooting schedule set for some time in the autumn of 2000. Laurence Fishburne and Carrie-Anne Moss are expected to go along for the ride again as well.

No mention of whether, like the first film, Matrix 2 and 3 will film in Sydney. But one assumes that the Wachowskis will once more call on the services of Hong Kong fight choreographer Woo-ping Yuen, whose wire-assisted mid-air battles made the original memorable.

She was pictured in the last issue of Preview, but you probably don’t remember her name. That may well be because Texas-born Shannon Elizabeth played a foreign exchange student, and perhaps you assumed that, like Nadia (her character name), she was Eastern European. But Elizabeth, who was the only object of desire not surrounded by short-crust pastry in American Pie, comes from Waco, Texas, and is currently headed for the big-time.

As a result of the attention she received in this summer’s gross-out grosser, Elizabeth has been cast in the lead female role in horror spoof Scream If You Know What I Did Last Halloween, which the Wayans clan - director/star Keenen Ivory Wayans, plus writers Shawn and Marlon Wayans - are making for Miramax’s genre division, Dimension Films.

Elizabeth is not a complete newcomer - previous big-screen credits include indie dramas Evicted, directed by Michael Tierney; and Dish Dogs, in which she co-starred with Matthew Lillard - but the Wayans’ movie is by far her biggest role and is scheduled to be the first of three films for Miramax in a non-exclusive deal.

Lowering his sites a little from his last outing, in which the whole world came close to being destroyed, Armageddon director Michael Bay has signed on the dotted line to make a movie about one man’s crusade to prevent Kenya’s elephants going the same way as bits of Manhattan did in the space-rock movie, albeit without the benefit of a rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack.

Bay, a former music-video director who moved into features with Bad Boys and The Rock, is to tackle Africa, a film notably lacking in the special effects and street cred which have characterised his first three films. The movie is based on the true story of wildlife expert Richard Leakey (brother of Gorillas in the Mist protagonist Dian Fossey), who first went to Kenya as an archaeologist, then discovered a two-million-year-old human skeleton and ended up - for reasons that are too complicated to go into here - looking after the country’s game reserves.

Against strong local opposition, Leakey took on the ivory poachers, instituting a shoot-to-kill approach which did a lot to solve the elephant problem but was even more instrumental in getting Leakey embroiled in local politics.

Africa, scripted by Forrest Gump screenwriter Eric Roth (whose tobacco-industry whistle-blower story The Insider is out this autumn), will reportedly add a little romance to the story, which will be told through the eyes of a female New York journalist who heads off, ‘Crocodile’ Dundee-style, to write a profile of Leakey and ends up falling in love with him. Neither of the two lead roles has yet been cast, nor has a start-date been set for the movie, which Bay will make at Sony.