INTERVIEW: Leonardo DiCaprio & Christopher Nolan

Tuesday , 03 Aug 2010

Inception was a major undertaking for writer/director Christopher Nolan. Known for his work on Memento (2006) and the Dark Knight (2008), Nolan reworked the Inception script for a decade before teaming up with Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Japanese legend Ken Watanabe, to make this stunning epic. Nolan and DiCaprio share some stories around the making and development of the film.

Have you been fascinated by dreams in your lifetime and have you thought differently about them since working on this film?

Christopher: I’ve been fascinated by dreams, really, my whole life, since I was a kid. And I think the relationship between movies and dreams is something that has always interested me. I like the idea of trying to portray dreams on film and I’d been working with the script for some time, really about 10 years in the form that you’ve seen it, with this idea of a kind of structure and all the rest. I think, for me, the primary interest in dreams and in making this film, is this notion that your mind, while you’re asleep, can create an entire world that you’re also experiencing without realising that you’re doing that. I think that says a lot about the potential of the human mind - particularly the creative potential.

Leonardo: It was interesting being a part of this film because I’m not a big dreamer and never have been. I remember fragments of my dreams. I tried to take a traditional approach to researching this project and doing preparation for it. I read books on dream analysis, Freud’s book on the analysis on dreams, and tried to research it in that sort of formula. But I realise that this is Chris Nolan’s dream world. It has its own structure and its own set of rules that’s he’s created. So, in doing that, it was basically being able to sit down with Chris for two months every other day, and talk about the structure of this dream world and the rules that apply in it. The only thing I’ve extracted from the research of dreams is I don’t think there’s a specific science you can put on dream psychology. I think that it’s up to the individual. When you suppress emotions, things during the day, and thoughts that we obviously haven’t thought through enough, in that state of sleep, in our subconscious, our minds sort of randomly fire off different surreal story structures and when we wake up we should pay attention to those things.

Chris, you’ve done a great job of keeping this film mysterious for the past year. How do you balance secrecy and the hype that generates with what you want people to know about this film?

Christopher: It’s certainly difficult to balance making a film and putting it out there to everybody, with wanting to keep it fresh for the audience. My most enjoyable movie-going experiences have always been going to a movie theatre, sitting there, the lights go down and a film comes on the screen that you don’t know everything about, and you don’t know every plot turn and every character movement that’s going to happen. I want to be surprised and entertained by a movie. So, that’s what we’re trying to do for the audience. Obviously, we also have to sell the film and that’s a balance that I think Warner Bros. is striking very well - and I suppose at a point, yes, keeping something secret does lend itself to its own degree of hype. But I really don’t think of it as secrecy. We invite the audience to come and see it based on some of the imagery and some of the plot ideas and the premise, but we don’t want to give everything away. I think too much is given away too often in movie-making these days.

Leo, in terms of acting, when you’re a character playing in an imaginary world, how does that change the rules of acting?

Leonardo: If there’s something you need to be aware of or do different, I would say absolutely not - and that’s what was exciting about even attempting it. This is my first science fiction film. One of the earliest conversations I had with Chris was about how both of us have a hard time with science fiction. We have a little bit of an aversion to it because it’s hard for us to emotionally invest in worlds that are too far detached from what we know. And that’s what’s interesting about Chris Nolan’s science fiction worlds, is they’re deeply rooted in things we’ve seen before. They are cultural references and it feels like a world that is tactile, that we understand that we could jump into and there’s not too much of a leap of faith to make. But emotionally, as far as a character’s journey, I took everything as if it was entirely real. You have to - otherwise you’re not invested in the character and not invested in the character’s journey. You’re not going to make it believable to an audience. Everything is real, in essence.