If you go to England and you see these modern buildings next to the British Museum, or you go and see the sights in Chicago, and you see this juxtaposition of different aesthetics… that’s one of the ways we hit on to infuse the entire film with the concept of time. You have to see old and new right smack next to each other, and then you feel time. We also did that with these elemental juxtapositions of the very old and the very new, the distant history next to the distant future, with all of these signs that these ancient cultures are signs of how these powerful beings have reached down and steered us.

Lana Wachowski on the juxtaposition of the old and new in Jupiter Ascending

We wanted Mila Kunis’s character, Jupiter, to be the most complex in the movie. We didn’t want another action movie where the woman ends up being just an armpiece for the man. We wanted to make the man into her armpiece! “The Wizard of Oz” was a big reference. I thought, How great it is that Dorothy has Toto, he’s always at her side, defending her? We wanted Jupiter to have a protector like Toto.’

Lana Wachowski describing the thinking behind the characters of Jupiter and Caine