Plot
Dominic "Dom" Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) washes up on a beach and is brought by armed guards into the chamber of an elderly man. The scene then cuts to a dream in the mind of Saito (Ken Watanabe) where Cobb, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and dream world architect Nash (Lukas Haas) are on an "extraction" mission, in which an individual's mind is infiltrated through dreams and information is stolen. Extractors and their victims sleep in close proximity to one another, connected by a device that administers a sedative and share a dream world built on their mental projections. Pain is felt but death results in consciousness. Cobb carries a spinning top to test whether he is dreaming or awake, which spins unceasingly or topples, respectively. Unbeknown to Cobb or Arthur, Saito is in fact auditioning the team to work for him.
Saito asks Cobb to perform the act of "inception"–secretly implanting an idea in a person's mind. The target is Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), son of Saito's terminally ill corporate rival Maurice Fischer (Pete Postlethwaite). The objective is to make Fischer dismantle his father's empire so that Saito’s can run unchallenged. Cobb recruits Eames (Tom Hardy), a forger who shifts identities inside dreams, Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a chemist who develops sedatives and student Ariadne (Ellen Page), whom he and Arthur train as their new architect. In Cobb's mind she discovers that a vision of his deceased wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) continually haunts him, constantly sabotaging his missions. Cobb reveals to Ariadne that he and Mal spent many years in a limbo dream world forging their lives. After waking, Mal remained convinced that she was still in a dream and committed suicide, attempting to force Cobb to join her by incriminating him in her death. Cobb refused, forced to flee the U.S. and his children to avoid murder charges. In return for the mission, Saito promises to clear the charges and reunite Cobb with his children. The plan involves creating multiple dream layers, and due to the strength of Yusuf's sedative, death will not awaken the person but instead send them into limbo. At such a dream depth, the duration of the plane's flight would be the equivalent of fifty years stranded in limbo.
When the elder Fischer dies in Sydney, Saito and Cobb's team share the flight with Robert Fischer back to Los Angeles and drug him. They enter into his dream, a rainy inner city area, and kidnap him. However, they are assaulted by his mental defenses—projected mercenaries—and Saito is badly injured. Eames takes the identity of Peter Browning (Tom Berenger), Fischer's godfather, to try and extract information from him. The team then enters a van and sleep into the next dream level, a hotel where the team tricks Fischer into believing that the kidnapping on the first level was orchestrated by Browning. Cobb convinces Fischer to enter Browning’s subconscious in order to find out his motives, but in fact the team enter deeper into Fischer's. The third level is a snowy mountain fortress Fischer must break into to ultimately locate the idea the team is planting. However, Fischer is killed by Cobb's projection of Mal and goes into limbo. Cobb and Ariadne follow him to this fourth level in an attempt to salvage the mission and confront Mal. It is revealed that back when they were in limbo together, Cobb planted the idea in Mal's mind that her life was a dream, and is therefore indirectly responsible for her suicide. The guilt he feels is what causes the projection of Mal to sabotage all of his missions. Mal attempts to convince Cobb to stay in limbo and attacks him, but Ariadne shoots her. Fischer and Ariadne are able to return to the mountain fortress, where he reaches the intended understanding that his father had wanted him to be his own man.
To successfully return to reality, a team member is left behind on each dream level: Yusuf driving the van, Arthur in the hotel, and Eames and Saito in the fortress, to protect those in the next level and fight off Fischer's projected mercenaries, keeping them from attacking the bodies. Ultimately they are running out of time, since at each level, timed "kicks" to help them return to reality are imminent: the mountain fortress falling due to the explosives, the elevator hitting the end fo the shaft in the hotel, and the crashing of the van into a river. A wounded Saito dies while at the snow fortress and Cobb remains in limbo to locate him. The film returns to the first scene in which Cobb locates an aged Saito and tells him that they need to escape back to reality. Cobb suddenly awakens to find everyone on the plane, including Saito, up and well. Saito honors their arrangement and Cobb enters the United States, reunited with his children at home. Cobb spins the top to test reality, but is distracted by his children. The top begins to wobble, but the scene cuts to black, which leaves the question of whether Cobb is awake or still dreaming.
Cast
Leonardo DiCaprio as Dominic "Dom" Cobb, the Extractor – a thief who steals his clients' ideas.[16]
Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Arthur, the Point Man – the person responsible for researching the team's targets.[17][18]
Ellen Page as Ariadne, the Architect – a college graduate student who constructs the world of the dream.[19] She is apparently named for the mythical Ariadne who helped Theseus escape from the Minotaur's labyrinth.
Tom Hardy as Eames, the Forger – a sharp-tongued team member who impersonates the target within the dream world and forge an identity in a physical form.[20]
Marion Cotillard as Mallorie "Mal" Cobb, the Shade – Cobb's deceased wife, who manifests in the dreamscape beyond Cobb's control. Mal in Latin means evil.[16]
Cillian Murphy as Robert Fischer, the Mark – the heir to a business empire and Dom's latest client and target.[21]
Ken Watanabe as Saito, the Tourist – a businessman who employs Cobb and assists their mission.[22][17]
Tom Berenger as Peter Browning, Robert's godfather.[1][17]
Dileep Rao as Yusuf, the Chemist – the team member who formulates the drugs needed to enter the dream world.[23]
Pete Postlethwaite as Maurice Fischer, Robert's dying father.[23]
Lukas Haas as Nash, Dom's previous Architect.[24]
Michael Caine as Miles, Cobb's mentor, teacher, and father-in-law, and Ariadne's college professor. Miles is also the guardian of Cobb's children.[25]
Development
Inception was first developed by Christopher Nolan, based on the notion of "exploring the idea of people sharing a dream space — entering a dream space and sharing a dream. That gives you the ability to access somebody’s unconscious mind. What would that be used and abused for?"[8] Furthermore, he thought "being able to extract information from somebody’s brain would be the obvious use of that because obviously any other system where it’s computers or physical media, whatever — things that exist outside the mind — they can all be stolen ... up until this point, or up until this movie I should say, the idea that you could actually steal something from somebody’s head was impossible. So that, to me, seemed a fascinating abuse or misuse of that kind of technology."[8] Nolan admits that Inception shares some basic ideas with short stories by Jorge Luis Borges such as The Circular Ruins and The Secret Miracle.[26][27]
Nolan had thought about these ideas on and off since he was 16 years old, intrigued by how he would wake up and then, while falling back into a lighter sleep, hold on to the awareness that he was dreaming, a lucid dream. He also became aware of the feeling that he could study the place and alter the events of the dream.[28] He said, "I tried to work that idea of manipulation and management of a conscious dream being a skill that these people have. Really the script is based on those common, very basic experiences and concepts, and where can those take you? And the only outlandish idea that the film presents, really, is the existence of a technology that allows you to enter and share the same dream as someone else."[28] Harvard University dream researcher Deirdre Barrett points out that Nolan did not get every detail accurate regarding dreams, but that films which really do that "... tend to have illogical, rambling, disjointed plots which wouldn’t make for a great thriller. But he did get many aspects right," she said, citing the scene in which a sleeping DiCaprio is shoved into a full bath and water starts gushing into the windows of the building he is dreaming, waking him up. "That's very much how real stimuli get incorporated, and you very often wake up right after that intrusion."[29]
ScreenPlay
Initially, Nolan wrote an 80-page treatment about dream-stealers.[11] Originally, Nolan had envisioned Inception as a horror film,[11] but eventually wrote it as a heist film even though he found that "traditionally [they] are very deliberately superficial in emotional terms."[28] 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."[28] Nolan worked on the script for nine to ten years.[8] When he first started thinking about making the film, Nolan was influenced by "that era of movies where you had The Matrix, you had Dark City, you had The Thirteenth Floor and, to a certain extent, you had Memento, too. They were based in the principles that the world around you might not be real."[28]
Nolan first pitched the film to Warner Bros. in 2001, but then felt that he needed more experience making large-scale films, and embarked on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.[9] 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 absolutely anywhere by the end of the film. And it has to work on a massive scale."[9] After making The Dark Knight, Nolan decided to make Inception and spent six months completing the script.[9] Nolan states 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."[30]
Leonardo DiCaprio was the first actor to be cast in the film.[8] Nolan had been trying to work with the actor for years and met him several times, but was unable to convince him to appear in 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 gonna unlock his dreamworld and ultimately affect his real life."[31] 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."[9] 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."[8]
Production
On February 11, 2009, it was announced that Warner Bros. purchased Inception, a spec script written by Nolan.[10] Principal photography began in Tokyo on June 19, 2009 for the scene where Saito first hires Cobb during a helicopter flight over the city.[11][32] The production moved to England and shot in Cardington, a converted airship hanger north of London.[33] It was there that a long hotel corridor was constructed by production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas, special effects supervisor Chris Corbould, and cinematographer Wally Pfister; this corridor was able to rotate a full 360 degrees to create the effect of alternate directions of gravity for scenes where dream-sector physics become chaotic. The filmmakers originally planned to make the hallway 40 ft (12 m) long but as the action sequence became more elaborate, the hallway's length grew to 100 ft (30 m). The corridor was suspended along eight large concentric rings that were spaced equidistantly outside its walls and powered by two massive electric motors.[33] One of the film's actors, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, spent several weeks learning to fight in a corridor that spun like "a giant hamster wheel".[28] Nolan said of the device, "It was like some incredible torture device; we thrashed Joseph for weeks, 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".[28] Gordon-Levitt remembered, "it was six-day weeks of just, like, coming home at night *BEEP*' battered ... The light fixtures on the ceiling are coming around on the floor, and you have to choose the right time to cross through them, and if you don't, you're going to fall.[34] On July 15, 2009, filming took place at University College London library. The signage of the library was altered to French to imitate a bibliothèque.[11]
Filming moved to Paris, France where they shot the pivotal scene between Ariadne and Cobb at a bistro.[35] For the explosion that takes place during this scene, the local authorities would not allow the actual use of explosives. The production used high-pressure nitrogen to create the effect of a series of explosions. Pfister used six high-speed cameras to capture the sequence from different angles and make sure that they got the shot. The visual effects department enhanced the sequence, adding more destruction and flying debris.[35] The next location that the production traveled to was Tangiers which doubled for Mombasa, where Cobb hires Eames and Yusuf. A foot chase was shot in the streets and alleyways of the historic Grand Souk.[36] To capture this sequence, Pfister employed a mix of hand-held camera and Steadicam work.[37] Tangiers was also used to film an important riot scene during the initial foray into Saito's mind.
Filming moved to the Los Angeles, California, USA area where some sets were built on a Warner Bros. sound stage, including the interior rooms of Saito's Japanese-style castle. The dining room was inspired by the Nijo Castle built around 1603. These sets were inspired by a mix of Japanese architecture and Western influences.[37] The production also staged a multi-vehicle car chase on the streets of downtown L.A. and this also involved bringing a freight train down the middle of a street.[38] To do this, the filmmakers configured a train engine on the chassis of a tractor trailer. The replica was made from fiberglass molds taken from authentic train parts and then matched in terms of color and design.[39] Also, the car chase was supposed to be set in the midst of a downpour (to present an increased risk that the flying water might "kick" the participants out of the dream-within-a-dream), but the L.A. weather stayed typically sunny. The filmmakers were forced to set up elaborate effects (e.g., rooftop water cannons) to give the audience the impression that the weather was overcast and soggy. L.A. was also the site of the climatic scene where a Ford Econoline van flies off the Commodore Schuyler F. Heim Bridge in slow motion.[40] This sequence was filmed one day on and one day off for months with the van being shot out of a cannon according to actor Dileep Rao. Capturing the actors suspended within the van in slow motion took a whole day to film. Once the van landed in the water the challenge for the actors was not to panic. According to Cillian Murphy, "And when they ask you to act, it's a bit of an ask".[40] The actors had to hold their breath for four to five minutes while drawing air from scuba tanks.[40]
The final phase of principal photography took place in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in late November 2009. The location manager discovered a closed ski resort known as the Fortress Mountain Resort.[12] An elaborate set was assembled on top of a mountain, taking three months to build.[41] The production had to wait for a huge snowstorm, which eventually arrived.[11]
The film was shot primarily in the anamorphic format on 35 mm film, with key sequences filmed on 65 mm, and certain other sequences in VistaVision. Nolan did not shoot any footage with IMAX cameras as he had with The Dark Knight. "We didn’t feel that we were going to be able to shoot in IMAX because of the size of the cameras because this film given that it deals with a potentially surreal area, the nature of dreams and so forth, I wanted it to be as realistic as possible. Not be bound by the scale of those IMAX cameras, even though I love the format dearly".[8] Nolan also chose not to shoot any of the film in 3-D as he believes that shooting on digital video does not offer a high enough quality image.[8]
Nolan has said that the film "deals with levels of reality, and perceptions of reality which is something I'm very interested in. It's an action film set in a contemporary world, but with a slight science-fiction bent to it", while also describing it as "very much an ensemble film structured somewhat as a heist movie. It's an action adventure that spans the globe".[42]
Post-Production
For the dream sequences in Inception, Nolan kept the computer-generated effects to a minimum and utilized practical methods whenever possible. Nolan said, "It's always very important to me to do as much as possible in-camera, and then, if necessary, computer graphics are very useful to build on or enhance what you have achieved physically".[43] To this end, visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin built a miniature of the Fortress Mountain Resort set and then blew it up for the film. For the fight scene that takes place in zero-g, he used CG-based effects to "subtly bend elements like physics, space and time".[44] The most challenging effect was Limbo City at the end of the film because it continually developed during production. Franklin had artists build concepts while Nolan gave his ideal vision: "Something glacial, with clear modernist architecture, but with chunks of it breaking off into the sea like icebergs".[44] Franklin and his team ended up with "something that looked like an iceberg version of Gotham City with water running through it".[44] They created a basic model of a glacier and then designers created a program that added elements like roads, intersections and ravines until they had a complex, yet organic-looking, cityscape. For the Paris-folding sequence, Franklin had artists producing concept sketches and then they created rough computer animations to give them an idea of what the sequence looked like while in motion. Later during principal photography, Nolan was able to direct Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page based on this rough computer animation Franklin had created. Inception had close to 500 visual effects shots (in comparison, Batman Begins had approximately 620) which is considered minor in comparison to contemporary visual effects epics that can have around 1,500 or 2,000 VFX shots.[44]
Marketing
In the spring of 2010 a viral marketing campaign was started for the film. On June 2, 2010 a manual was sent out to various companies. The manual was filled with bizarre images and text all relating to Inception. As the month went on, more and more viral marketing began to surface, including posters, ads and strange websites all related to the film.[49][50] On June 7, 2010 a behind the scenes featurette on the film was released in HD on Yahoo! Movies.[51] Warner Bros. has spent $100 million marketing the film.[52]
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Produced by Christopher Nolan
Emma Thomas
Written by Christopher Nolan
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio
Ken Watanabe
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Marion Cotillard
Ellen Page
Tom Hardy
Cillian Murphy
Dileep Rao
Tom Berenger
Michael Caine
Music by Hans Zimmer[1]
Cinematography Wally Pfister
Editing by Lee Smith
Studio Legendary Pictures
Syncopy Films
Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures
Release date(s) London premiere:
July 13, 2010
United States:
July 16, 2010
Running time 148 minutes[2]
Country United States
Language English
Budget $160,000,000[3]
Gross revenue $227,663,000[4]
