The inside scoop on inception
Christopher Nolan and Leonardo DiCaprio Open Up About The Year’s Most Thought-Provoking Film
by B. Love
Few films in recent memory have provoked as much thought and discussion as Inception, the latest mind-boggler from indie auteur-turned-blockbuster director Christopher Nolan. From Memento and Insomnia to The Prestige and The Dark Knight, Nolan has built a career on well-crafted thrillers that never pander to the lowest common denominator. His latest film, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is arguably his best yet, earning a 9.2 rating on IMDB.com and an 87% ranking on Rotten Tomatoes while bringing in over $200 million at the U.S. box office in its first three weeks of release. Here, we present the highlights of a recent press conference in which Nolan and DiCaprio discuss their thoughts on Inception, dreams and intelligent filmmaking.
Have you been fascinated by dreams in your lifetime, and do you think differently about them since working on this film?
Christopher Nolan: I’ve been fascinated by dreams my whole life, and the relationship between movies and dreams is something that’s always interested me. I liked the idea of trying to portray dreams on film. I’d been working on the script for about 10 years in the form that you’ve seen it, where [there’s] this heist structure. I think the primary interest is this notion that your mind while you’re asleep can create an entire world that you’re experiencing without realizing that you’re doing that. I think that says a lot about the potential of the human mind, especially the creative potential.
Leonardo DiCaprio: It was interesting being part of this film, because I’m not a big dreamer. I never have been. So I tried to take a traditional approach to researching this project and doing preparation for it. But I realized that this is Chris Nolan’s dream world, with its own structure and its own set of rules. I was able to sit down with Chris for two months every other day and talk about the structure of this dream world, and how the rules apply in it… The only thing I extracted from my research is that I don’t think there’s a specific science you can put on dream psychology. I think it’s up to the individual. Obviously, we suppress things– emotions– during the day that we haven’t thought through enough, and in that state of sleep our subconscious mind randomly fires off different surreal story structures. When we wake up, we should pay attention to these things.
Christopher, you’ve done a great job of keeping this film mysterious. Is there a danger that at a certain point even secrecy becomes a form of hype? How do you balance that with what you want people to know about this film?
CN: Well, it’s certainly difficult to balance marketing a film with wanting to keep it fresh for the audience. My most enjoyable movie-going experiences have always been going to a movie theater, sitting there and the lights go down and a film comes on the screen that you don’t know everything about, and you don’t know every plot turn and every character movement that’s going to happen. I want to be surprised and entertained by a movie, so that’s what we’re trying to do for the audience. Obviously, we also have to sell the film. It’s a balance that I think Warner Bros is striking very well. I suppose that at a point, keeping something secret does lend itself to its own degree of hype, but I don’t really think of it as secrecy. We invite the audience to come and see it based on some of the imagery and plot ideas, but we don’t want to give everything away. I think too much is given away too often in movie marketing today.
Were there any moments during filming where it was so complex that it was confusing?
LD: This story structure was extremely ambitious in the fact that simultaneously, you had four different states of the human subconscious that represented different dream-states, and each one affected the other. What Chris talked about early on was being able to go to these six different locations around the world, [and what] was startling to me was seeing it in a visual format. That’s the magic of moviemaking. You clearly identify one scenario with the other, and it’s a completely different experience. The snow-capped mountains of Canada, a van or an elevator shaft, Paris or London– you experience it because you have a visual reference. It was a lot easier to understand than I ever thought it would be. That’s a testament to how engaging the visual medium is.
Did you want to touch on the concept of cinema as a layer of our dreaming?
CN: When you look at the idea of being able to create a limitless world and use it as a playground for action and adventure, I naturally gravitate towards cinematic worlds like the Bond films and things like that. So without being too self-conscious about it, I allowed my mind to wander where it would naturally and I think a lot of the tropes from different genres of movies– heist films, spy films, that kind of thing–naturally sit in that world.
Leo, what did you love about this character?
LD: This was an extremely ambitious concept Chris was trying to pull off here. There are very few directors that would pitch to a studio a multi-layered, existential, high action, surrealistic drama that [takes place] inside the mind. To have an opportunity to do that is a testament to the work he’s done in the past. Watching Memento and Insomnia, he’s able to portray these highly complicated plot structures and give them an emotional weight that has the audience fully engaged. So for me, it was a matter of sitting down with Chris and being able to really form the backbone of a character that had a real cathartic journey. These different layers of the dream do represent psychoanalysis– him getting deeper and closer to the truth of what he needs to understand about himself. That, in its own right, is immediately intriguing. As we were talking more and more about the character, it all became more and more exciting. I think all of us mutually felt like this was a journey that we had to be a part of.
What was your research into dreams and science?
CN: I don’t tend to do a lot of research when I’m writing. I took the approach in writing Inception that I did when I was writing Memento, which is to examine my own process– in this case of dreaming, and in Memento’s case, of memory– and try to analyze how that works and how that might be manipulated. I think a lot of what you want to do with research is just confirming things you want to do. If the research contradicts what you want to do, you tend to go ahead and do it anyway. So at a certain point I realized that if you’re trying to reach an audience, being as subjective as possible and trying to write something genuine is the way to go.
You first pitched Inception around the time you made Insomnia. How did the idea change over time?
CN: The pitch was very much the movie you see, although I hadn’t figured out the emotional core of the story. I grew into the film in a sense. Heist movies tend to be almost deliberately superficial and not have high emotional stakes. The thing I got stuck on was that doesn’t work when you’re talking about the human mind and dreams, because it has to have emotional consequences and resonances. So that was really my process over the years, finding my relationship with the love story and the emotional side.
This feels like a film that could only get made because of the commercial success you’ve enjoyed. Does that freedom empower you to push boundaries, or does it put pressure on you to fit it into a more conventional shape so the studio can sell it?
CN: I was asked after doing The Dark Knight whether I felt any pressure on the next film, and it’s not really the case. I felt a responsibility, because it’s not often that you get to have a large commercial success and then have something you want to do that you can excite people about. So it’s a great opportunity, and the responsibility we felt was to make the best film possible. Obviously, with the success of The Dark Knight, the studio was prepared to put a lot of faith and trust in us to do something special. Those opportunities are very rare for filmmakers, so I felt a responsibility to do something memorable with it.
Leo, you previously referred to your work in this film and Shutter Island as a sort of therapy session. When you’re playing a character operating in an imaginary world, how does that change your performance? And when you do two films like that back-to-back, does one influence the other?
LD: It was certainly something I was aware of. But as far as both of them being locked in this dream world and going on some kind of cathartic journey, that’s where the similarities ended. But to answer your question about how one acts in that world and if there’s something you need to do differently, I would say absolutely not. That’s what was exciting about even attempting my first science fiction film. Chris and I both have a hard time with science fiction, because it’s hard for us to emotionally invest in worlds that are too far detached from what we know. But Chris Nolan’s science fiction worlds are deeply rooted visually in things we’ve seen before. But emotionally, as far as the character’s journey, I took everything as if it was based in reality. You have to. Otherwise you’re not invested in the character and the character’s journey, and you’re not going to make it believable to an audience. Everything is real, in essence.
Christopher, what are you doing as a director now that’s different from when you started in Hollywood 12 years ago?
CN: My filmmaking approach has always been the same. When I was doing Following [his first film, released in 1998], which was shot with friends one day a week for a year, I used exactly the same process. What I’m doing on set is watching things happen as an audience member and trying to look at how the image we’re photographing will advance the story and what the next image be. That process really hasn’t changed for me, and it’s strangely similar no matter how big the film gets.
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