Coming off a presentation at Wondercon today, the LA Times has posted a new interview with the director of the summer’s most anticipated film, Inception. I’ve gathered a few interesting tidbits below, but I encourage you to check out the entire thing over on the site. I also gathered the majority of the Inception reactions from Wondercon if you want to check them out here.
- Inception has a $160 million budget.
- Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, “a dream thief who plucks secrets from the minds of tycoons after pumping them full of drugs and hooking them up to a mysterious contraption.” He is a “wounded dreamer” after his wife died. Shutter Island anyone?
- described as a “brainy Mission: Impossible by way of The Matrix.”
- Nolan has thought about the project since he was 16, wrote the script 7 to 8 years ago.
- Originally written as a heist movie, the emotional life of DiCaprio’s character now drives the story upon recent rewrites: “The character issues, those are the things that pull the audience through it and amplify the experience no matter how strange things get.”
- Built giant rotating hallways and a massive tilting nightclub for scenes when “dream-sector physics take a sharp turn into chaos.”
- On the rotating hallway and Joseph Gordon-Levitt: “It was like some incredible torture device; we thrashed Joseph for week, but in the end we looked at the footage, and it looks unlike anything any of us has seen before. The rhythm of it is unique, and when you watch it, even if you know how it was done, it confuses your perceptions. It’s unsettling in a wonderful way . . . we want an extraordinary thing that happens in an ordinary way. That’s always been the goal.”
- On the computer effects: “Several vivid sequences show a dream metropolis in churning calamity, a city skyline seems to fold in on itself as a dream begins to lose its shape and, unlike many Hollywood versions of dream surrealism, the scene has the look of a massive mechanical failure, not a morphing, liquid calamity.”
- Architecture plays a “major influence on the culture of the film too with dreams that are more like blueprints than poems.”
- The idea of otherness is set in reality unlike Avatar, Surrogates, Gamer and Tron: Legacy. Think of more like The Matrix, Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor, and Memento. “They were based in the principles that the world around you might not be real.”
- Cillian Murphy plays one of Cobb’s targets in the film and he says it’s very dark and always interesting, unlike some of the fantasy films we have recently got (i.e. Avatar).
- Inception “gives much of its prime screen time” to Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, DiCaprio’s junior partners.
- Scenes were shot in “a converted old zeppelin hangar”, the same place used in his Batman films.
- Some Batman sets are still up; “Arkham Asylum, the Narrows and other Gotham City landmarks”
- The third Batman will “almost certainly be Nolan’s next project.”
- Page says Nolan is set apart due to him making “a summer film that evokes literature and architecture in an era when other directors seem to be tilting toward a video-game aesthetic.”
- Page also says “the story is complicated but never confusing.” The “emotional spine” and “sincerity” are still there.
- Lastly, Nolan wants us to “be in the maze”: “Think of film noir and if you picture the story as a maze, you don’t want to be hanging above the maze watching the characters make the wrong choices because it’s frustrating. You actually want to be in the maze with them, making the turns at their side, that keeps it more exciting . . . I quite like to be in that maze.”
Inception hits theaters July 16th, 2010.
What do you think about all this new information? Is Inception one of your most anticipated films of the year?