After finishing Insomnia (2002), Nolan wrote an 80-page treatment about “dream stealers” envisioning a horror film inspired by lucid dreaming, and presented the idea to Warner Bros. Nolan determined that rather than writing it as an assignment, it would be more suitable to his working style if he wrote it as a spec script and then presented it to the studio whenever it was completed. So he went off to write it, thinking it would take “a couple of months”, but it ultimately took nearly eight years. He also felt that he needed to have more experience with large-scale film production, and instead worked on Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige (2006), and The Dark Knight (2008). He spent six months revising the script before Warner Bros. purchased it in February 2009.
Nolan’s films are rooted in philosophical, sociological and ethical concepts and ideas, exploring human morality, the construction of time, and the malleable nature of memory and personal identity. Experimentation with meta-fictive elements, temporal shifts, solipsistic perspectives, nonlinear storytelling and the analogous relationship between the visual language and narrative elements, permeate his entire body of work. His characters are often emotionally disturbed and morally ambiguous, facing the fears and anxieties of loneliness, guilt, jealousy, and greed; in addition to the larger themes of corruption and conspiracy. By grounding “everyday neurosis – our everyday sort of fears and hopes for ourselves” in a heightened reality, Nolan makes them more accessible to a universal audience.
“set within the architecture of the mind” During production, details of the plot were kept secret. Nolan, cryptically described it as a contemporary sci-fi action thriller
“I’m fascinated by our subjective perception of reality, that we are all stuck in a very singular point of view, a singular perspective on what we all agree to be an objective reality, and movies are one of the ways in which we try to see things from the same point of view”
IN CEP TION The act of
Inception is a 2010 BritishAmerican science fiction, heist ,thriller written, coproduced, and directed by Christopher Nolan. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a professional thief who commits corporate espionage by infiltrating the subconscious of his targets. He is offered a chance of redemption as payment for a task considered to be impossible: “inception”, the implantation of another person’s idea into a target’s subconscious, as if the idea was of their own genesis.
instilling an idea
into someone’s mind
by entering their dreams.
Music The slow, gloomy, blaring trombones in the main theme of the film score are actually based on an extremely slowed down version of the fast, high pitched trumpets in the beginning of the Édith Piaf song “Non, je ne regrette rien,” which is used as a plot device in the film. Furthermore, when music is heard by someone who is currently within a dream, the music is perceived as slowed down. Thus, the main theme of the film score is almost exactly what the beginning of “Non, je ne regrette rien” would sound like to a dreamer. This thematic device is brought to its logical conclusion when the song plays at the end of the credits, signaling that the audience is about to ‘wake up’ from the film. The running time of 2 hours 28 min is a reference to the original length of Édith Piaf’s song “Non, je ne regrette rien”, which lasts (on its first recorded edition) 2 minutes 28 seconds.
PRODUCTION
2.28
Set The exterior of Fischer’s snow fortress is based on, and actually contains some elements of, the Geisel Library at the University of California, San Diego, designed by famed futurist architect William L. Pereira. The barrel chairs in Saito’s dining room were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1937 for Wingspread, the Herbert Johnson house in Wisconsin. Saito sits at the head of the table in a copy of the Willow Chair designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1903. This further plays on the Architect theme that is prevalent throughout the movie.
Filming & Effects In spite of the films extensive surreal effects sequences, the majority special effects throughout the film, such as the Penrose stairs, rotating hallway, mountain avalanche, and zero gravity sequences, were created through practical methods, not through the use of computer generated imagery. The film only has around 500 visual effect shots, as opposed to most other visual effects epics which can have upwards of 2000 VFX shots.