The original film has to be good enough and the community around it has to be strong for it to be worthy of being reinvented. Those things are what make the difference in the quality of various fan films. We made "Matrix XP" with €2,000 and 20 people, and most of that money was spent for the leather coats and the catering.

The special effects from the original Matrix movie inspired us, and my brother Henning and I started to chat about how we could reproduce them. We had a series of gags, but nothing consistent enough to make a short film, so we decided to make a trailer.

We were very lucky with the timing, because when we put "Matrix XP" online, the second movie had been announced, but Warner Brothers was making sure that no information leaked to the Web. So fans were desperate to find Matrix-related stuff, and that's how "Matrix XP" developed a buzz.

Our Internet-service provider discontinued our contract two weeks after we put the film online because there was so much traffic that it crashed their servers. We stopped counting in 2004, but at that time we already had over 16 million downloads.

Eventually Warner Brothers Germany called us, but they weren't really nasty. They told us to close the online shop where we were selling T-shirts and mouse pads, and they said they would have to report it to the American head office. We never heard from them again.

Some time later, the Wachowski Brothers' office called and told us they had seen the film and enjoyed it. We secretely hoped for invites for "The Matrix Reloaded" premiere in Los Angeles but that never happened.

Everything started one summer when my friend Samuel Bodin and I were supposed to work on a project that got cancelled. We had everybody ready to work with us, so we decided to make a Batman movie using the green screen technique. We had never worked with it before!

The movie took two years to make. We worked on other projects to pay our rent, and as soon as we had time, we put all our effort into "Ashes to Ashes". In the end, we spent €10,000, and around 50 people worked on the film. We didn't want to copy anything; we wanted to make a tribute to the original comic. We were inspired by Shakespeare's "Othello" and Frank Miller's "Sin City".

We sent our film to Louis Leterrier (director of "Danny the Dog" and "The Incredible Hulk"). He wanted to meet us right away, and now he is helping us a lot to get ready for the US market.

"Ashes to Ashes" was our way into the business. We just got back from Cannes and got a contract for a feature film, and another one is being negotiated.