DREAM CATCHER
Exploring the resilient idea behind our film of the decade…
There’s a pleasing symmetry to the fact that Inception – voted the no. 1 film of the decade by Total Film’s staff and contributors – itself took 10 years to develop. Maybe that’s what’s required to make a film that burrows into your subconscious and can’t be uprooted. Writer/director Christopher Nolan came up with the idea during mornings at college, at the liminal point between sleeping and waking (and breakfast).
The idea of the dream-state fascinated him, but it went through various genre iterations, and it wasn’t until the idea was paired with the heist set-up that it truly clicked. “I’d been wanting to deal with the idea, and developing something about the idea of dreams in dreams – and the relationship of dreams to reality – for many, many years,” he told TF in 2017. “And I had explored different genres like the horror genre. But I never really settled on a story model I was particularly happy with until Inception started to form itself as a heist movie and what that was. And even that was 10 years or so before I actually managed to finish the script. I mean, I dabbled in other approaches, but nothing that substantial, really.”
What really helped the project fall into place was making the antagonist the hero’s wife: previous versions had featuring a double-crossing partner in opposition. But making Dom Cobb’s wife, Mal, the bane of his subconscious, helped to create the emotional stakes required to engage audiences with such a high-concept thriller. As Nolan said at the time, “If you’re going to do a massive movie, you’ve got to be able to unlock that more universal experience for yourself as well as the audience.” While Nolan’s movies are criticised as ‘cold’ in some quarters, it’d require a hard heart not to be moved by Dom’s anguish, especially when he has to relive Mal’s suicide. There’s also an intense emotional charge in the fatherson scenes between the Fischers, even though the tender moment is a just a skilful plant by Dom’s team.
The labyrinthine dream-worlds work to a very specific set of rules; they can be manipulated by the architects and also affected by physical conditions on the levels above. These ideas lend themselves to some standout visuals. “The folding over of the city, I remember very clearly being something I wrote in the script because it made sense in the script – but I had absolutely no idea how to visualise it,” said Nolan. “And then, myself and Paul Franklin, my visual effects supervisor, and Wally Pfister [cinematographer], we developed it in the making of the film. We figured out how that was going to work. For me, it was a very exciting process to embark on, because I’d written something I didn’t know how to do. It just looks fun.”
The revolving corridor, however, had a very specific cinematic precedent. “The interior stuff was sort of the other way around,” he explained. “I’d always been a massive fan of Kubrick’s work, particularly 2001. I’d always been fascinated by his zero-g effects and how he achieved them. So I had a desire and a knowledge of how physically to try to shoot those sequences…”
The parallels between Cobb’s extraction team and a filmmaking crew have been well-documented, including by Nolan himself. “The way the team in Inception talks about it, and the way they put together what they’re doing – it’s [very much] analogous to largescale filmmaking,” he told us. Creating and projecting artificial worlds that immerse their captive audiences to the extent they can change the way they think and feel… there’s always been a fine line between cinema and dreams. Inception entered the subconscious of moviegoers’ minds back in 2010, and it seems it’s there to stay.
INCEPTION IS AVAILABLE ON DVD AND BLU-RAY.