With “Inception,” British director Christopher Nolan has made the coolest and smartest science fiction movie since “Blade Runner.” It’s as if he took the fascinating character studies found in his early films, “Memento” and “Insomnia,” then went on to master the art of dazzling big-budget action in “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight,” then fused it all together in “Inception.”
It helps, too, that Nolan has been fascinated by dreams since he was a kid.
“Inception” is a thriller about dreams and the wild dream worlds in our subconscious minds. It’s also about technology that allows people to enter others’ dreams and steal ideas from them. A great twist on that – and one of the plotlines that pushes the film along – is the concept that if someone can steal a good idea, then they can likely also plant a bad one.
“I like the idea of trying to portray dreams on film,” Nolan said. “My primary interest in making the film was the notion that while you’re asleep you can create an entire world, and at the same time, you experience it. I think that says a lot about the creative potential of the human mind.”
Just like an intense dream experience, the film shoots off into all sorts of bizarre areas, at one point putting most of its characters into four different states of the human subconscious, in which each one was affecting the other.
Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Cobb, the best in the business of extracting dreams, who has now been hired by a mysterious client to start planting them.
“I’m not a big dreamer,” admitted DiCaprio. “Never have been. I can remember fragments of my dreams. I tried to take the traditional approach to researching this project. I read books on dream analysis, but I realized this is Chris Nolan’s dream world; it has its own structure and its own set of rules that he created, so it was great to be able to sit down with Chris every other day for two months and talk about the structure of this dream world, and the rules that apply in it.
“The story structure,” he added, “was extremely ambitious.”
Nolan is certainly proud of his complicated accomplishment, noting that he liked being able to create a limitless world and use it as a playground for action and adventure. He also kept the script very personal.
“I don’t tend to do a lot of research when I’m writing,” he said. “I tend to just examine my own process – in this case of dreaming – and try and analyze how it works and how it might be changed or manipulated. If you’re trying to reach an audience as subjectively as possible, trying to write something genuine is the way to go.”
He then casually mentioned that it took him close to a decade to get the film made.
“When I first pitched the studio the project, the pitch was very much the movie you see, but I hadn’t yet figured out the emotional core of the story. I had the heist thing, I had the relationship between architecture and dreams, I had the idea that you would use an architect to design a dream for someone else. All of those things were in place for several years. But it took me a long time to find this idea of emotionally connecting with the story.”
It’s Nolan’s first big-budget film that was based on one of his own ideas, after writing and directing a comic book adaptation, a remake and a sequel. Yet he found some similarities among all of them.
“The interesting thing about an original concept is that, especially with this 10-year gap, by the time you get there you’ve lived with those ideas for so long, it isn’t very different from working from somebody else’s story,” he explained. “The same thing happens. You take on the story as your own. By the time you get near the end, it starts to feel a little irrelevant as to where you started from.”
And he feels very fortunate that he was granted total freedom to get what was in his head onto the screen this time. Of course it didn’t hurt that “Batman Begins” pulled in almost $400 million at the box office, and “The Dark Knight” grabbed just more than $1 billion.
“It’s not that often that you get to have a large commercial success and then have something you want to do that you can excite people about,” he said. “With the success of ‘The Dark Knight,’ we were in a position where the studio was prepared to put a lot of faith in us and trust is to do something special. Those opportunities are very rare for filmmakers.”
SOURCE: patriotledger
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