posted July 14, 2010 12:39 PM         

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?"[17] 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".[17] He 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.[18] 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".[18]

[edit] Screenplay
Originally, he had envisioned Inception as a horror film[19] but eventually wrote it as a heist film even though he found that "traditionally [they] are very deliberately superficial in emotional terms".[18] Initially, Nolan wrote an 80-page treatment about dream-stealers.[19] 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".[18] Nolan worked on the script for nine to ten years.[17] When he first started thinking about making the film, the director 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".[18] He first pitched the film to Warner Bros. in 2001 but in retrospect felt that he needed more experience making large scale films like Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.[20] 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".[20] After making The Dark Knight, Nolan decided to make Inception and spent six months completing the script.[20] For the director, the key to completing the script was wondering what would happen if several people shared the same dream. He said, "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".[21]

Leonardo DiCaprio was the first actor to be cast in the film.[17] 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".[22] 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".[20] He 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".[17]

[edit] Production
On February 11, 2009, it was announced that Warner Bros. purchased Inception, a spec script written by Nolan.[23] Production began in Tokyo on June 19, 2009. Other locations included Los Angeles, London, Paris, Tangier and Calgary.[19] Principal photography for the film began on July 13, 2009.[24] 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.[19] On August 17, 2009, filming took place around the Pont de Bir-Hakeim, a bridge that crosses the Seine River in Paris, France.[25][26] Filming also took place in Morocco on Monday, August 24, 2009.[27] Filming in Los Angeles started September 27, 2009. Filming near Calgary at Fortress Mountain Resort began in late November 2009 on an elaborate set on top of a mountain and took three months to build.[28] The production had to wait for a huge snowstorm, which eventually arrived.[19]

The film was shot on anamorphic 35mm with key sequences filmed on 65mm, and certain other sequences with VistaVision but 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."[17] 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.[17] Special effects expert Chris Corbould and his team built giant rotating hallways and a massive tilting nightclub for scenes where dream-sector physics become chaotic. 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".[18] 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".[18] Gordon-Levitt remembered, "it was six-day weeks of just, like, coming home at night ****** ' 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.[29]

posted July 14, 2010 02:00 PM         

Empire magazine rated it five stars in the August 2010 issue and wrote, "it feels like Stanley Kubrick adapting the work of the great sci-fi author William Gibson ... Nolan delivers another true original: welcome to an undiscovered country"

posted July 14, 2010 02:13 PM         

i think about things a lot, like how our thinking affects our reality and what is real and what is not. and does positive thinking really change our reality. and to some degree have to admit it certainly does, while i ponder also, are we simply avoiding the truth, or is the truth actually what we percieve as truth. i mean these are just things I think about and try to wrap my mind around.

anyway, not many movies really catch my interest. this one does.

posted July 14, 2010 02:17 PM         

quote:

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ow our thinking affects our reality and what is real and what is not. and does positive thinking really change our reality.

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posted July 14, 2010 02:37 PM         

thanks for your input abs, i very much agree. although I am trying to piece together in my mind how it and if it "works"...and even went a step further as to create memories that I never had, like loving childhood memories, playing a picture in my mind. It felt great, but not sure if it affected my present real circumstances, if that makes any sense to you. I guess it sounds a bit wierd, but I don't know how else to explain it. Don't mean to digress from the subject, but actually it is more like a sub-chapter of the same book...when you try to take it a step further.

posted July 14, 2010 02:38 PM         

Re: THe butterfly effect