Christopher Nolan has finally broken his silence, speaking with the L.A. Times about his highly-anticipated upcoming summer film “Inception.”
Featuring a stellar ensemble cast including the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Marion Cotillard along side Cillian Murphy, Michael Caine, Ken Watanabe,Tom Hardy and Lukas Haas, the film was previously only given the now infamous logline of a “sci-fi actioner set within the architecture of mind”
“This is the biggest challenge I’ve taken on to this point,” the director admits. “We’re trying to tell a story on a massive scale, a true blockbuster scale – the biggest I’ve ever been involved with. We tried to make a very large-scale film with ‘The Dark Knight’ and with this one we wanted to push that even further.”
Much mystery has surrounded the plot of the film, which has thus far predominantly proved elusive. One alleged report broke down the script in detail but up until now, we could only speculate on it’s accuracy from trailer snippets and character details.
Nolan and the L.A. Times though have confirmed those reports describing the film as “an international thriller,” “a story of madness and lost love” and “Hollywood’s first metaphysical heist movie” centering on “corporate espionage by way of dream invasion where motives and even reality are slippery in a film that toys with perception as its travels through time and space.” Influences on the story were noted to be from Ian Fleming, the Wachowski Siblings and Sigmund Freud, though that seems more like the L.A. Times’ take on it.
“I think we’ve put a lot of different things into the pot with this one,” explained Nolan. “I grew up watching James Bond films and loving those and watching spy movies with their globetrotting sensibility…. We get to do that here, not just geographically but also in time and dimensions of reality as well. We get to make a movie that’s expansive, I suppose you’d say, in four dimensions.”
So, a four-dimensional, international, thrilling sci-fi-actioner that centers on corporate espionage, dream invasion, metaphysical heisting, madness and lost love? Good luck marketing that to the Joe Blows of the world, it’s no wonder they’re just going with a “The Dark Knight! Leonardo DiCaprio!” campaign.
“It’s something that we had been talking about on and off for seven or eight years,” Nolan’s real-life and working partner, Emma Thomas adds. “Coming off of the ‘The Dark Knight,’ the only thing we really knew is that we wanted to do something more personal. It seemed like the right time to do this. The fact that it’s really just an enormous movie — that wasn’t ever really a factor in the decision. This story lends itself to a movie of this size.”
Due out June 16th, “Inception” is sure to be the talk of the summer, one way or another.