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29 March 2024

Cast offers insight into Inception

From left: Actor Ken Watanabe, writer/director Christopher Nolan, actress Ellen Page, actor Leonardo DiCaprio, and actress Marion Cotillard at the premiere of Inception in Los Angeles. (GETTY IMAGES)

Published
By Staff Writer

What's wrong with this picture? The summer season's biggest buzz movie has no robots, no vampires, no aliens, no toys, or no comic book characters in iron suits.

And it's not even in 3D!

But what Inception, which debuts in UAE cinemas today, does have is Leonardo DiCaprio, Dark Knight director Chris Nolan and enough sharp thinking to sink the Titanic.

The big-budget, sci-fi film about a team of freelance dream thieves headed by DiCaprio's Dom Cobb is no frothy teen dream populated by women in little clothing, men baring their six-pack abs, or robots bashing the pixels out of each other.

Instead, Nolan, who also wrote and produced Inception, plunges the audience into the murky and often disturbing depths of the subconscious mind, where anything goes but nothing is quite what it seems.

Watch the trailer for Inception below:

Here the director and cast talk about this summer's most anticipated movie.

– I wanted to know if you’ve been fascinated by dreams in your lifetime and also if you’ve thought differently about them since working on this film?

–Christopher Nolan: I’ve been fascinated by dreams, really, my whole life, since I was a kid. And I think the relationship between movies and dreams is something that has always interested me. I like the idea of trying to portray dreams on film. And I’d been working with the script for some time, really about ten years in the form that you’ve seen it, with this idea of a kind of structure and all the rest. I think, for me, the primary interest in dreams and in making this film is this notion that your mind, while you’re asleep, can create an entire world that you’re also experiencing without realising that you’re doing that. I think that says a lot about the potential of the human mind - particularly the creative potential. It’s something I’ve always found fascinating.

– Leonardo DiCaprio: It was interesting being a part of this film because I’m not a big dreamer and never have been; I remember fragments of my dreams. I tried to take a traditional approach to researching this project and doing preparation for it. I read books on dream analysis, Freud’s book on the analysis on dreams, and tried to research it in that sort of formula. But I realise that this is Chris Nolan’s dream world. It has its own structure and its own set of rules that’s he’s created. So, in doing that, it was basically being able to sit down with Chris for two months every other day and talk about the structure of this dream world and the rules that apply in it. The only thing I’ve extracted from the research of dreams is I don’t think there’s a specific science you can put on dream psychology. I think that it’s up to, obviously, the individual. When you suppress emotions, things during the day and thoughts that we obviously haven’t thought through enough, in that state of sleep, in our subconscious, our minds sort of randomly fire off different surreal story structures and when we wake up we should pay attention to those things.

– For Christopher Nolan, you’ve done a great job of keeping this film mysterious for the past year. How do you balance secrecy and the hype that generates with what you want people to know about this film?

– CN: Well, it’s certainly difficult to balance making a film and putting it out there to everybody with wanting to keep it fresh for the audience. My most enjoyable movie-going experiences have always been going to a movie theatre, sitting there, 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 and that’s a balance that I think Warner Bros. is striking very well and I suppose at a point, yes, keeping something secret does lend itself to its own degree of hype. But I really don’t think of it as secrecy. We invite the audience to come and see it based on some of the imagery and some of the plot ideas and the premise, but we don’t want to give everything away. I think too much is given away too often in movie-making these days.

– In shooting this film, were there ever any moments where it was so complex and involved for the actors that you became disoriented at all and had to regroup about where your characters were at a given moment?

– Cillian Murphy: For me, personally, I found it was quite easy to orientate which dream sequence we were in because of my costume. If in doubt, I could just look at my shoes and say, “Oh, I know who’s dream I’m in.”

– Joseph Gordon-Levitt: And also, if you’re doing it right, you spend a lot of time thinking about every scene in any movie you do and, so, I enjoy having to put some thought into it before we role the camera.

– LD: What was very interesting for me was reading the original screenplay and, obviously, this story structure was extremely ambitious. What Chris talked about very early on with us was being able to go to these six different locations around the world, and it was startling to see the screenplay in a visual format. That’s the magic of movie-making. You clearly identify one scenario with the other and each [dream state in the film] is a completely different experience. When you’re at the snow-capped mountains of Canada or whether you’re in a van or an elevator shaft, or in Paris or London, you experience it and you have a visual reference. It was a lot easier to understand than I ever thought it would be and that’s a testament to how engaging the visual medium is.

– Can you tell us a little bit more about both the training and the filming of the amazing Fred Astaire-like zero-gravity fight sequence in the elevator?

– CN: Well, I’ll leave Joe to tell you the bad stuff, but really the thing I want to point out that people might not be aware of watching it is that we had a stunt guy, who looks exactly like Joe, made-up perfectly, and he stood there on-set every day for three weeks and didn’t do a thing because Joe insisted on doing absolutely everything himself, apart from one shot. There’s one shot with the stunt guy. Everything else he did himself and he just did the most incredible job with these bizarre rigs and bizarre, sort of, torture devices.

– JGL: Thanks. It was just about the most fun I’ve ever had on a movie set. It was also probably the most pain I’ve ever been in on a movie set, physically, but, you know, pain in a good way, like in the way that, I guess, athletes must get. They have to put on the pads and wrap their ankles and they get a little beat up throughout the day, but that’s just part of slamming yourself into walls and jumping around all day. I was just really grateful to the whole stunt team. Tom Struthers, whom Chris has worked with before, and his whole team of guys really brought me in and taught me a lot and let me do it. To speak to your Fred Astaire comparison, I get a kick out of that because there’s this dance sequence in a Fred Astaire movie from, I don’t know, 50 years ago – longer ago than that – where it’s a similar effect. I was thinking about it and I came up with a certain analogy because Inception does employ a similar technique, and it’s sort of how Sesame Street and Star Wars both use Jim Henson puppetry. It’s a similar technique, but it’s a very different effect.

– Marion, how did this movie play with your mind? You’re in these scenes where you really can’t escape. Did you find that challenging?

– Marion Cotillard: What can I say without saying too much? I had to base my character on different kinds of inspiration that I have. Usually, when I start to work and to prepare the movie, I find some inspirations, different kinds of human beings; it can be someone I know, someone I don’t, a girl, a boy. So, usually when I start right away, some inspirations come and this time I was waiting and nobody came. And I thought maybe I should be inspired by the blank page and then I started thinking about Chris Nolan’s imagination and that was my inspiration that didn’t take the form of a human being.

– What were the toughest action sequences?

– LD: The toughest action sequences? I think the sequence in Morocco was pretty tough because I had to run through a crowd of people and I felt like a pinball because I was bouncing from Moroccan to Moroccan and falling into various vending machines. That was a little bit tough, but at the end of the day you’d be surprised. We pulled off a lot of stuff in a day’s work that was pretty spectacular. All of us, everyone here did. It was a very professional team that took care of us.

– Chris, were you able to bring this in on time and on budget because you went to so many different continents and you did so many things?

– CN: Yeah, we did. We had a very, very efficient crew and with this very, very professional bunch of actors we were able to hammer through it. We finished early and we finished under budget. So, we really brought the thing off very, very smoothly, which was great. We try to be as efficient as possible because, in my process, I think that actually helps, helps the work. I like having the pressure of time and money and really trying to stick to the parameters we’ve been given. So, yeah, it went very smoothly.

– For the actors, what is your favorite part of working with Chris Nolan?

–JGL: One thing I’ll say is one of my favorite parts of working for Chris is as well thought out as everything was, he leaves room for spontaneity on the day, both from the side of the camera that he and Wally [Pfister, ci nematographer] work together in this very organic way, as well as from the actors. It’s nice to not feel like you’re just reenacting a preconceived moment, but that there’s room for an organic feeling to develop while the camera’s rolling. And even in midst of these enormous technical productions, Chris always prioritized making sure that spontaneous and organic feeling could happen at the moment.

– Chris, this is your first large-scale movie that’s based on a wholly original idea and not pre-existing material. What made you feel you could take that leap of faith and how do you think it will affect your filmmaking going forward?

– CN: Well, I think the thing that people sometimes find surprising about source material, if you will – whether it’s a comic book adaptation, a remake of another film, whether it’s a sequel, these are all things I’ve done before, or an adaptation of a short story – the interesting thing about an original concept is that, particularly with this sort of ten-year gap, it took me from my initial set of ideas and to finishing the screenplay. By the time you get there, you’ve lived with those ideas for so long it really isn’t very different from working from somebody else’s story, for example. As with Memento, when I adapted my brother’s short story, the same thing happens. You take on the story as your own, and because the screenwriting process is a very long one for me, it takes years really to put a script together. By the time you get there at the end, it starts to feel a little bit irrelevant as to where you started. So, the experience has been quite similar in fact.

– Does the freedom you must have felt after The Dark Knight embolden you to test the boundaries of what you want to and can do? Or, does that put more pressure on you to in some way fit it into maybe a slightly more conventional structure?

– CN: Well, I’m asked a lot whether after The Dark Knight I felt particular pressure on the next film and it’s not really the case. I put it this way: I felt a responsibility because it’s not that often that you get to have a large commercial success and then have something you then want to do that you can excite people about. So, it’s a great opportunity and the responsibility we felt in doing that was to make what we felt was the best film possible, the most interesting film possible, because obviously 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 us to really do something special.  Those opportunities are very rare for filmmakers. So, I felt a responsibility to really try and do something memorable with it.

To read our review of Inception, click here: /eb247/the-business-of-life/entertainment/film-review-inception-2010-07-15-1.266709