About Inception – Film

Inception Film Details

Inception is a 2010 science fiction action film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, who also produced the film with Emma Thomas, his wife. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a professional thief who steals information by infiltrating the subconscious of his targets. He is offered a chance to have his criminal history erased, as payment for the implantation of another person’s idea into a target’s subconscious. The ensemble cast includes Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Elliot Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, Dileep Rao and Michael Caine.

After the 2002 completion of Insomnia, Nolan presented to Warner Bros. a written 80-page treatment for a horror film envisioning “dream stealers,” based on lucid dreaming. Deciding he needed more experience before tackling a production of this magnitude and complexity, Nolan shelved the project and instead worked on 2005’s Batman Begins, 2006’s The Prestige, and 2008’s The Dark Knight. The treatment was revised over six months and was purchased by Warner in February 2009. Inception was filmed in six countries, beginning in Tokyo on June 19 and ending in Canada on November 22. Its official budget was $160 million, split between Warner Bros. and Legendary. Nolan’s reputation and success with The Dark Knight helped secure the film’s US$100 million in advertising expenditure.

Inception‘s premiere was held in London on July 8, 2010; it was released in both conventional and IMAX theaters beginning on July 16, 2010. Inception grossed over $837 million worldwide, becoming the fourth-highest-grossing film of 2010. Considered one of the best films of the 2010s, Inception won four Oscars (Best Cinematography, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, Best Visual Effects) and was nominated for four more (Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Original Score) at the 83rd Academy Awards.

STORY

Cobb and Arthur are “extractors” who perform corporate espionage using experimental dream-sharing technology to infiltrate their targets’ subconscious and extract information. Their latest target, Saito, is impressed with Cobb’s ability to layer multiple dreams within each other. He offers to hire Cobb for the ostensibly impossible job of implanting an idea into a person’s subconscious; performing “inception” on Robert Fischer, the son of Saito’s competitor Maurice Fischer, with the idea to dissolve his father’s company. In return, Saito promises to clear Cobb’s criminal status, allowing him to return home to his children.

Cobb accepts the offer and assembles his team: a forger named Eames, a chemist named Yusuf, and a college student named Ariadne. Ariadne is tasked with designing the dream’s architecture, something Cobb himself cannot do for fear of being sabotaged by his mind’s projection of his late wife, Mal. Maurice Fischer dies, and the team sedates Robert Fischer into a three-layer shared dream on an airplane to America bought by Saito. Time on each layer runs slower than the layer above, with one member staying behind on each to perform a music-synchronized “kick” (using the French song “Non, je ne regrette rien”) to awaken dreamers on all three levels simultaneously.

The team abducts Robert in a city on the first level, but his trained subconscious projections attack them. After Saito is wounded, Cobb reveals that while dying in the dream would usually awaken dreamers, Yusuf’s sedatives will instead send them into “Limbo”: a world of infinite subconscious. Eames impersonates Robert’s godfather, Peter Browning, to introduce the idea of an alternate will to dissolve the company.

Cobb tells Ariadne that he and Mal entered Limbo while experimenting with dream-sharing, experiencing fifty years in one night due to the time dilation with reality. Mal refused to return to reality, and Cobb instead performed inception on her to convince her. After waking up, Mal still believed she was dreaming. Attempting to “wake up,” she committed suicide and framed Cobb to force him to do the same. Cobb fled the U.S., leaving his children behind.

Yusuf drives the team around the first level as they are sedated into the second level, a hotel dreamed by Arthur. Cobb persuades Robert that Browning has kidnapped him to stop the dissolution and that Cobb is a defensive projection, leading Robert to another third level deeper as part of a ruse to enter Robert’s subconscious.

In the third level, the team infiltrates an alpine fortress with a projection of Maurice inside, where the inception itself can be performed. However, Yusuf performs his kick too soon by driving off a bridge, forcing Arthur and Eames to improvise a new set of kicks synchronized with them hitting the water by rigging an elevator and the fortress, respectively, with explosives. Mal then appears and kills Robert before he can be subjected to the inception, and he and Saito are lost in Limbo, forcing Cobb and Ariadne to rescue them in time for Robert’s inception and Eames’s kick. Cobb makes peace with his part in causing Mal’s death. Ariadne kills Mal’s projection and wakes Robert up with a kick.

Revived into the third level, he discovers the planted idea: his dying father telling him to create something for himself. While Cobb searches for Saito in Limbo, the others ride the synced kicks back to reality. Cobb finds an aged Saito and reminds him of their agreement. The dreamers all awaken on the plane, and Saito makes a phone call. Arriving in Los Angeles, Cobb passes the immigration checkpoint, and his father-in-law accompanies him to his home. Cobb uses Mal’s “totem” – a top that spins indefinitely in a dream – to test if he is indeed in the real world, but he chooses not to observe the result and instead joins his children.

PRODUCTION

Development

Initially, Nolan wrote an 80-page treatment about dream-stealers. Originally, Nolan had envisioned Inception as a horror film, but eventually wrote it as a heist film even though he found that “traditionally are very deliberately superficial in emotional terms.” Upon revisiting his script, he decided that basing it in that genre did not work because the story “relies so heavily on the idea of the interior state, the idea of dream and memory. I realized I needed to raise the emotional stakes.”

Nolan worked on the script for nine to ten years. When he first started thinking about making the film, Nolan was influenced by “that era of movies where you had The Matrix (1999), you had Dark City (1998), you had The Thirteenth Floor (1999) and, to a certain extent, you had Memento (2000), too. They were based in the principles that the world around you might not be real.”

Nolan first pitched the film to Warner Bros. in 2001, but decided that he needed more experience making large-scale films, and embarked on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. He soon realized that a film like Inception needed a large budget because “as soon as you’re talking about dreams, the potential of the human mind is infinite. And so the scale of the film has to feel infinite. It has to feel like you could go anywhere by the end of the film. And it has to work on a massive scale.” After making The Dark Knight, Nolan decided to make Inception and spent six months completing the script. Nolan said that the key to completing the script was wondering what would happen if several people shared the same dream. “Once you remove the privacy, you’ve created an infinite number of alternative universes in which people can meaningfully interact, with validity, with weight, with dramatic consequences.”

Nolan had been trying to work with Leonardo DiCaprio for years and met him several times, but was unable to recruit him for any of his films until Inception. DiCaprio finally agreed because he was “intrigued by this concept—this dream-heist notion and how this character’s going to unlock his dreamworld and ultimately affect his real life.” He read the script and found it to be “very well written, comprehensive but you really had to have Chris in person, to try to articulate some of the things that have been swirling around his head for the last eight years.” DiCaprio and Nolan spent months talking about the screenplay. Nolan took a long time re-writing the script in order “to make sure that the emotional journey of his character was the driving force of the movie.” On February 11, 2009, it was announced that Warner Bros. purchased Inception, a spec script written by Nolan.

CAST

Leonardo DiCaprio as Dom Cobb, a professional thief who specializes in conning secrets from his victims by infiltrating their dreams. DiCaprio was the first actor to be cast in the film. Both Brad Pitt and Will Smith were offered the role, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Cobb’s role is compared to “the haunted widower in a Gothic romance”.
Ken Watanabe as Saito, a Japanese businessman who employs Cobb for the team’s mission. Nolan wrote the role with Watanabe in mind, as he wanted to work with him again after Batman Begins. Inception is Watanabe’s first work in a contemporary setting where his primary language is English. Watanabe tried to emphasize a different characteristic of Saito in every dream level: “First chapter in my castle, I pick up some hidden feelings of the cycle. It’s magical, powerful and then the first dream. And back to the second chapter, in the old hotel, I pick up [being] sharp and more calm and smart and it’s a little bit different process to make up the character of any movie”.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Arthur, Cobb’s partner who manages and researches the missions. Gordon-Levitt compared Arthur to the producer of Cobb’s art, “the one saying, ‘Okay, you have your vision; now I’m going to figure out how to make all the nuts and bolts work so you can do your thing'”. The actor did all but one of his stunt scenes and said the preparation “was a challenge and it would have to be for it to look real”. James Franco was in talks with Christopher Nolan to play Arthur, but was ultimately unavailable due to scheduling conflicts.
Marion Cotillard as Mal, Cobb’s deceased wife. She is a manifestation of Cobb’s guilt about the real cause of Mal’s suicide. He is unable to control these projections of her, challenging his abilities as an extractor. Nolan described Mal as “the essence of the femme fatale,” and DiCaprio praised Cotillard’s performance, saying that “she can be strong and vulnerable and hopeful and heartbreaking all in the same moment, which was perfect for all the contradictions of her character”.
Elliot Page as Ariadne, a graduate student of architecture who is recruited to construct the various dreamscapes, which are described as mazes. The name Ariadne alludes to a princess of Greek myth, daughter of King Minos, who aided the hero Theseus by giving him a sword and a ball of string to help him navigate the labyrinth which was the prison of the Minotaur. Nolan said that Page was chosen for being a “perfect combination of freshness and savvy and maturity beyond years”. Page said their character acts as a proxy to the audience, as “she’s just learning about these ideas and, in essence, assists the audience in learning about dream sharing”.
Tom Hardy as Eames, a sharp-tongued associate of Cobb. He is referred to as a fence but his specialty is forgery, more accurately identity theft. Eames uses his ability to impersonate others inside the dream world in order to manipulate Fischer. Hardy described his character as “an old, Graham Greene-type diplomat; sort of faded, shabby, grandeur—the old Shakespeare lovey mixed with somebody from Her Majesty’s Special Forces”, who wears “campy, old money” costumes.
Cillian Murphy as Robert Fischer Jr., the heir to a business empire and the team’s target. Murphy said Fischer was portrayed as “a petulant child who’s in need of a lot of attention from his father, he has everything he could ever want materially, but he’s deeply lacking emotionally”. The actor also researched the sons of Rupert Murdoch, “to add to that the idea of living in the shadow of someone so immensely powerful”.
Tom Berenger as Browning, Robert Fischer’s godfather and fellow executive at the Fischers’ company. Berenger said Browning acts as a “surrogate father” to Fischer, who calls the character “Uncle Peter”, and emphasized that “Browning has been with [Robert] his whole life and has probably spent more quality time with him than his own father”.
Michael Caine as Miles, Cobb’s mentor and father-in-law, and Ariadne’s college professor who recommends her to the team.
Dileep Rao as Yusuf. Rao describes Yusuf as “an avant-garde pharmacologist, who is a resource for people, like Cobb, who want to do this work unsupervised, unregistered and unapproved of by anyone”. Co-producer Jordan Goldberg said the role of the chemist was “particularly tough because you don’t want him to seem like some kind of drug dealer”, and that Rao was cast for being “funny, interesting and obviously smart”.
Lukas Haas as Nash, an architect in Cobb’s employment who betrays the team and is later replaced by Ariadne.
Talulah Riley as a woman, credited as “Blonde”, whom Eames disguises himself as in a dream. Riley liked the role, despite it being minimal: “I get to wear a nice dress, pick up men in bars, and shove them in elevators. It was good to do something adultish. Usually I play 15-year-old English schoolgirls.”
Pete Postlethwaite as Maurice Fischer, Robert Fischer’s father and the dying founder of a business empire.