Leonardo DiCaprio, left, talks with director Christopher Nolan on the set of Inception.
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Christopher Nolan might be considered Advil’s best friend. As the man behind Inception, the diabolically clever heist film built around dreams, he’s determined to put our brains through a workout, even if it hurts.
Yet the British writer/director paradoxically views himself as part of the same audience he’s vexing. He declares kinship with Ellen Page’s character of Ariadne, whose role in Inception is to quiz Dom Cobb, Leonardo DiCaprio’s dream thief character, about what’s going on.
“I think I am part of the audience,” said Nolan, 39, on the line from Paris, where he’d travelled for one of Inception’s many premieres.
“I’ve grown up watching and loving big summer blockbusters and action entertainment, and Inception is very much intended in that tradition of large-scale entertainment. My only worry about the film is that I don’t want people to go in feeling like they have to analyze the movie as they watch it.
“Because then they will miss things! If they just go in and relax and enjoy it as a piece of entertainment, they’re going to understand absolutely everything they need to.”
Nolan has been having a bit of a problem with journalists, whom he feels are trying too hard to connect all the dots in the film — and there is one heck of a lot of dots.
The Inception viewer is never certain of watching reality, a dream or a dream within a dream. DiCaprio’s Cobb leads a team of “extractors” who burrow into the sleeping minds of corporate leaders to steal valuable industrial secrets.
“I’m trying to encourage journalists not to suggest to people that they’re going to be facing some kind of quiz or something,” Nolan said, laughing.
“It really is a roller-coaster ride, and the point is to be on that ride, enjoying it.”
He’s equally adroit — some might say slippery — about his many inspirations for Inception. Elements of The Matrix, Alice in Wonderland, Last Year in Marienbad, 2001: A Space Odyssey, David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ and many other reality benders are evident in Nolan’s film, a fact he doesn’t deny.
But Nolan prefers to point to the late Argentine poet, author and essayist Jorge Luis Borges as the chief spark for his flame.
Borges was a pioneer of magic realism, a combination of real and surreal elements often used by filmmakers, but he’s hardly a household name.
“I’ve always got a lot out of reading his short stories and his approach to paradox,” Nolan said.
“Funnily enough, I find Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland) magnificently surreal. But what we wanted to try to do for Inception is to make the impossible feel possible, if you know what I mean.
“We tried to really adhere to one of the tenets of the basic story, which is that dreams feel real while we’re in them. So, really, everything we did in terms of filming on location, trying to give a concrete sense to things, was in the service of that.”
Nolan insists he had never seen Alain Resnais’ surreal classic Last Year in Marienbad prior to filming Inception. He acknowledges the many “interesting connections” between the films, but laughs off any suggestion that he was paying homage in some way to Resnais.
“I was amazed to find out, when I saw it, that it felt like I probably had (seen it) at some point. But I hadn’t!
“What it suggests to me about film culture is the way in which very influential kinds of “template” films — films that have really, really broken some kind of new ground — just percolate down through the culture.”
The highly cerebral Nolan didn’t have to issue viewing instructions for either Batman Begins or The Dark Knight, the two superhero franchise blockbusters that vaunted him from a critic’s favourite into a crowd pleaser of Spielbergian dimensions.
He’s aware, but shows no signs of concern, that many people will go to Inception expecting another movie like The Dark Knight, his 2008 smash that only James Cameron has managed to beat for global box-office success.
Inception is more of a piece with Memento and Following, films of a decade ago that were built around elaborately shifting narratives. DiCaprio’s Cobb is named for a character in Following, Nolan’s 1999 feature debut about a curious stalker who gets into unforeseen trouble.
Nolan liked the name enough to use it again but he wasn’t deliberately attempting to suggest a connection between Inception and Following.
He could have catered more to modern movie sensibilities, and fattened his box-office take, by making Inception in 3-D. He did actually test a few sequences in that format, but decided against using it.
“I’m glad we didn’t for this film. We looked at it. We tested the (3-D) conversion process. ... The tests actually worked very well, but we didn’t have the time to do it to the standard I would want to do it.
“And I think I’ve got certain issues with some of the technical aspects of 3-D and how it’s presented in movie theatres: the dimness of the image, the need to wear the glasses, and so forth. So I’m more of a wait and see on this.”
He’s not completely averse to giving the audience what it wants, and he may use 3-D for future films, including a third Batman film he’s tentatively planning for a 2012 release.
“I mean, if audiences are demanding it, if it really is the thing that they expect out of a summer blockbuster, then that’s what we’ll give them. But I’m actually very pleased to be able to put this film out in a more traditional way, with a brighter and clearer image, with higher quality and so forth.”
Anyone who has followed Nolan’s career to date will note a fascination with dualities: the lucid vs. forgetful protagonist of Memento, the dark vs. evil characters of the Batman movies and now the dreaming-vs.-awake mind travellers of Inception.
“It’s a fair assessment,” Nolan agreed.
“I think that’s a pretty elemental concern for a storyteller of any kind, really: that duality, that polarity, that shift between things.”
Inception seems to be the summit of these dualities. Nolan is clearly captivated with the mind’s ability to allow the subconscious to assume control of the conscious during the dream state. He’s delighted to have been able to depict it on film.
“I think, really, it has to do with realizing what the mind is able to do when you’re asleep in creating a world in very fine, really intimate detail. It’s realizing that if you’re dreaming that you’re walking along the beach, you can pick up a handful of sand and all the grains of sand are there in your hand as if you were walking on a real beach.
“What that says about the mysteries of the human mind and the infinite creative potential of all of our minds, I think is fascinating.”
The big dream left for him to realize is whether the audience buys into his wild reinvention of the heist thriller. He’ll find out when the first box-office numbers are released this weekend.
But he’s confident the audience will be with him on the Inception ride. He may give us all headaches, but it’s with the best of intentions.
“I think I make films that I would really want to go see. That’s always my jumping-off point. Really, I think you have to trust those instincts and try to be sincere. Because I believe that audiences are very smart and they smell insincerity a mile away.”
