With the arrival of Tenet only a week away, we’re celebrating at Empire Online with Nolan Week – looking back over the work of a modern-day filmmaking icon. After changing the comic-book movie game with The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan took his biggest gamble yet – making a true original $170 million summer blockbuster based on lucid dreaming and sci-fi-inspired psychological espionage. The resulting Inception was one of the most acclaimed action movies of the 21st Century. Read Empire’s original 2010 feature, going on set of the movie to get into the mind of Nolan himself.
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Christopher Nolan wakes up. It’s just before eight, he wants to go back to sleep – he was up late last night, like any self-respecting student would have been – but the only way he'll get a free breakfast is if he drags himself down to the University College of London refectory now. He duly does so, and returns to bed shortly after. Sleep takes him once more. Only a light sleep. But interesting things happen in light sleep.
Christopher Nolan stands on a beach. He stoops and grasps a handful of sand. Looks at the tiny, innumerable grains. A thought coalesces: "My mind did that. It put every grain of sand into my hand..." Not only that. "We all do this, every night, when we dream. Our minds create and perceive the world simultaneously. The mind is infinitely expansive, and infinitesimal..."
Christopher Nolan wakes up. It is winter-dark, before dawn. There's no urge to go back to sleep. No time limit for a free breakfast. Besides, there is much to be done today. On a nearby mountain, at the eastern fringe of the Canadian Rockies, he has erected a fortress. And today, November 22, 2009, the final day of the shoot for his seventh feature, $170-million blockbuster Inception, he is going to blow that fortress up.
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Some hours later, Empire crunches unsteadily up the final few metres of the snow-crusted incline. First a Snowcat, then a Skidoo brought us this far, 7,600 feet above sea level, to ‘the fortress’ (actually “the baddies’ hospital”, as producer Emma Thomas charmingly puts it). It has taken three months to contruct – during which time Nolan has shot in Morocco, Tokyo, Paris, London and LA – and is located in a defunct ski resort in Kananaskis, a municipality around 85 miles west of Calgary. Crewmen scurry about, rather more nimbly than Empire, rather more used to the five goosedown-stuffed layers we have to wear to keep the biting Arctic cold at bay.
The fortress is an angular assemblage of grey slab and metal grille. Movie-show prefab, perhaps, but sturdy enough to brave the 100 mph winds that can whip the valley. Its main tower looms over a former ski-slope and looks across a dramatic mountain range. It has been cordoned off, black-and-yellow CAUTION lines pulled taut around its perimeter.
Down an iron stairway to the adjacent building steps Chris Corbould, Inception’s special-effects maestro: the man who built the Batmobile and the Batpod, who flipped an articulated lorry in a Chicago street for The Dark Knight; veteran of 11 Bond movies. "Let me show you something," says Corbould, taking Empire’s arm excitedly. "We've got just enough time."
He lifts one of the cordon-lines and invites us inside the tower. After a few moments, we find ourselves crouching in the 'basement', actually beneath the prefab flooring, boots on dry dirt. Detonating cord snakes around us. Sticks of dynamite, 40 or so, nestle in holes drilled into stanchions. And there are about a dozen 20-gallon barrels of gasoline.
"Your mobile phone is switched off, right?" Corbould asks.
READ MORE: The Prestige: Inside Christopher Nolan's Movie Magic Trick
READ MORE: Guy Pearce On His Memories Of Making Memento
Originally, the explosion was going to be achieved purely through model work. But Chrises Nolan and Corbould reasoned that if this set was going to be struck anyway, they might as well blow it up for real. The plan, Corbould explains, is that the front wall, which we're crouching just behind, will explode first. Then two more sets of charges will detonate, in sequence, just after, although still within a second. The desired effect being that the tower will fall forwards and the wreckage will cascade down the mountainside. "That's the plan," he says. " But you never know how it's going to go... " This is a one-take deal. A crewman pops his head beneath the floorboards. "You need to clear the set."
In three hours all this will be flame and dust.
"This is absolutely my Bond movie," Nolan chuckles. "I've been plundering ruthlessly from the Bond movies in everything I've done, forever. I grew up just loving them and they're a huge influence on me." So the 007 feel is utterly deliberate here in Calgary; the action we're witnessing, it transpires, takes place on one of the story's three levels of dream-reality. "When you look at being able to construct a scenario that's only bound by your imagination, I think the world of Bond movies is a natural place your mind would go," smiles Nolan.
In the case of what we've seen shooting the past three days, it's specifically the world of On Her Majesty's Secret Service. "Very much so. I think that would be my favourite Bond. It's a hell of a movie, it holds up very well. What I liked about it that we've tried to emulate in this film is there's a tremendous balance in that movie of action and scale and romanticism and tragedy and emotion. Of all the Bond films, it's by far the most emotional. There's a love story. And Inception is a kind of love story as well as anything else. I'm going soft in my old age..."
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A love story? A Bond movie? It’s seemingly a far cry from the original, cryptic promise of a sci-fi thriller set “within the architecture of the mind”, which unfolded like an origami puzzle into Nolan's own revelation on the fIlm's cavernous Cardington set in Bedfordshire last August that it's "structured somewhat as a heist movie" which "deals with levels of reality and perceptions of reality". If it is a Bond movie, it must be one that plays out in Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher's beautifully geometrically distorted etchings. A revelation illustrated rather effectively by Empire’s own disorientating experience in a revolving corridor and a hydraulically tilting bar. But even clinging on to a bar stool in a room artifIcially angled at 20 degrees (far steeper than you might think) doesn't distract us from the remaining question:
What, precisely, is Inception?
"It's something new," says Cillian Murphy, on his third Nolan collaboration. "It's genre-busting. It'll really take your breath away."
"It's about the architecture of dreams," advises producer Emma Thomas
"It's a quote, unquote large movie, an incredible spectacle," says Ellen Page, "but it also has this real, genuine, honest emotional spine of Leo's emotional journey."
“Chris has carried this story for so many years," explains Marion Cotillard. "He knows where it goes and he offers up such a complex and interesting world to explore. It's an amazing journey."
Yes, but what is Inception?
"I dunno," shrugs Tom Hardy, kitted out in arctic combat gear and at the frontline of the 007-style ski antics on Empire’s first day in Calgary. ''I'm just going around and shooting people today." He then insists that Empire knows more about the story than he does. (We almost believe him.)
Anyone else? Joseph Gordon-Levitt? "Well, here's the thing," says Gordon-Levitt, the actor tasked with tumbling around those spinning sets. "I want to respect Mr. Nolan, who I'm really grateful to be working with. He's got this really great thing that he's worked very hard on creating, and he doesn't want to give it away before it's done.”
Empire meets with Leonardo DiCaprio shortly after it is done. It's early May 2010, and we're in a Hollywood hotel a stone's throw from the Nolan editing suite, where final touches are being made and a few minutes still need to be snipped (the fInal running time, Thomas has told us, will be "over two hours, under two-and-a-half"). By this point, Inception has three trailers, the requisite viral marketing campaign and an official synopsis. The veil hasn't quite been lifted, but it's certainly become more translucent. (And if you prefer it black-out you might want to skip the next paragraph.)
What Chris accomplishes here is this constant, unrelenting feeling of suspense and infinite possibility. – Leonardo DiCaprio
It goes something like this: DiCaprio is Dom Cobb, a man who presents himself to Murphy's business magnate Fischer as an expert in "subconscious security" – he uses clandestine technology to enter, explore and manipulate people's dreams, and extract ideas. The ultimate in corporate espionage. In truth, though, Cobb has been hired by a rival of Fischer's, Saito (Ken Watanabe), to insert an idea; the job also somehow offering the dream thief some kind of personal redemption, connected to the fate of his wife, Mal (Cotillard). So Cobb assembles a team, including Arthur (Gordon-Levitt), Eames (Hardy), and young architecture student Ariadne (Page) – named rather significantly after the girl in Greek myth who aids Theseus' escape from the Minotaur's labyrinth –who's recommended to Cobb by her professor, played by Nolan's "good luck charm", Michael Caine. (If you're going to be constructing realities, reasons Nolan, who better to have on your team than an architect?) All that, naturally, is not the half of it.
"I actually like all the secrecy," smiles DiCaprio. "I love not to talk about movies I've done in great detail before they're seen. It's great not to have to put a label on something. Much of the appeal of this movie is going to be experiencing the journey with the characters and not knowing what to expect. What Chris accomplishes here, besides the emotional journey, is this constant, unrelenting feeling of suspense and infinite possibility. You never know what's gonna happen next. It's hard to do that. And even having worked on the movie and knowing the plot, when I watched the movie I was like, 'Wow, what the hell am I gonna see next? I have no idea what's possible.'"
Nolan has been trying to work with DiCaprio for some years. "I've met with him a bunch of times," says the director. "He's a very rare combination of movie-star charisma and tremendous acting skill. I always felt he would be a great collaborator, just in sitting and talking about projects, even though nothing came of them. I was never able to convince him in the past, but just his initial take on scripts is fascinating to engage with. In fact, I'm sure I've stolen ideas from him in the past, based on those conversations!"
The director praises DiCaprio for bringing to Inception an invaluable emotional edge: “I absolutely desperately needed him," he admits, comparing DiCaprio's contribution to that of Guy Pearce in Memento: bringing the life to the fiendishly intricate plotting. "I'd written Inception as sort of a clever-clever heist movie. And heist movies tend to be deliberately superficial and glamorous. I needed him to bring the thing together, open it up to the audience and make it a human story, and he's done that extraordinarily well."
So why did DiCaprio say yes to this project as opposed to any of Nolan's previous movies (you can't help but wonder if, just as he nearly played Bateman in the ultimately Christian Bale-starring American Psycho, he was ever asked to be Batman)? He'd just made Shutter Island, another movie about distortions of reality and perception, albeit with vast differences in tone, genre and setting. But it was the connection of Inception to Nolan's previous work that hooked him, as well as his conviction he could really bring something to the character of Cobb. "It reminded me of Insomnia or Memento, but on steroids. I just became immediately intrigued by this concept – this dream-heist notion and how this character's gonna unlock his dreamworld and ultimately affect his real life."
It's not often we see DiCaprio in a balls-out summer blockbuster –for that is exactly what Warner Bros., and Nolan himself, want Inception to be. Of course, the actor's quick to point out that this isn't your usual balls-out summer blockbuster. "Yes, this is a summer blockbuster, and it's being marketed as such, but to me, some of those films have themes or sequences I've seen a hundred times before. This is definitely something I’ve not seen a hundred times before. This is unique in every aspect. It is cerebral.”
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It is, we have to admit, refreshing to cover a gargantuan summer release which isn’t based on a TV show, comic book or plastic plaything. There’s no brand to hang it on (unless you could its relationship to The Dark Knight), no built-in audience…
"Stop saying that!" cries Emma Thomas, laughing, when we talk at the Nolan edit suite in early April. Having worked with Nolan, her husband, since his first movie, Following (which keen-eyed Nolan fans will notice shares a character name with Inception: the thief in Following, played by Alex Haw, is named Cobb), Thomas has observed at first hand how his lucid-dream beach stroll germinated into the story outline for Inception eight years ago, which then grew into 80 pages of script that sat in the proverbial drawer for the next five years.
"Every time we got to the end of a film he would say, 'What shall I do next?' We'd both sort of pull it out, re-read it and either he hadn't got it quite right, or something else came up. Then at the end of The Dark Knight, Chris was like, 'I know 'what I can do to finish it'. I think it was the right time because we've learnt so much over the years about making big action movies."
Thomas' other half concurs. "I've been fortunate that my films have grown in scale, to the point where this is by far the biggest film I've made – physically and technically. It's an interesting fusion of things I've been interested in for a long time. There's a little of Memento in it, there’s a lot of The Dark Knight.”
For Nolan, the slow development held another advantage. "I started to write it at a time when there was sort of a little subgenre of movies that dealt with the idea of 'how can you trust the world around you? How can you distinguish reality from an alternative reality?' Memento was very much one of those films, but The Matrix was the prime one. I think also Dark City, which actually came out first, and The Thirteenth Floor.”
He is pleased, in retrospect, that Inception now enjoys some distance from that subgenre's late-'90s heyday. There are key differences to the likes of The Matrix, perhaps its closest bedfellow. For example, there are no stylistic demarcations between the ‘real’ world and the ‘dream’ worlds – no Matrix-style binary rain here. “The notion Chris had was that when you’re in a dream it feels very real,” explains Wally Pfister, who’s been Nolan’s Director Of Photography since Memento. "So, with notable exceptions where they're manipulating the dreams, he really didn't want any sort of tip-off that we're inside of a dream in terms of the lighting and the camerawork. The idea is that it all feels real."
There's also an essential conceptual difference. Says Nolan: “Inception was born for me as a process of saying, 'I don't wanna make a film where we just pull the rug from under the audience.' That's been done so many times. What I want to do is look down the other end of the telescope and say to the audience, 'Be a part of this team, construct a reality, confuse these things for somebody else...'"
Besides, he says, had he done the "$30-million version" of Inception as his follow-up to 2002's Insomnia, it would have been a stripped-down thriller rather than a full-on action movie. "And that never worked for me. It took me a long time to figure out why, but what I realised is incredibly simple: as soon as you say this film is about dreams, it has to be on the grandest scale possible or you're not addressing it correctly. Because what's fascinating about the potential of the human mind is that it's infinite, and infinitesimal."
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It’s almost 2pm. Five cameras are set up, a sixth on the chopper circling above. The paramedic are on standby. Almost everyone has cleared the mountain. We stand, gathered at the edge of the small city of trailers that is base camp. The walkie-talkies "go dark". There's a hum of excitement as we stare up at the doomed fortress, silhouetted ominously against grey, stampeding clouds. "This is insane!" one crew member trills. "It's sooo James Bond!" Warnings are shouted to watch the sky. For falling debris.
"Stand by… Here we go. Cameras rolling!"
An almighty BOOM thunders around the valley, and fire and smoke roll impressively up into the air from the tower's base. But something is amiss. Only the front charges have gone off. And the tower topples... backwards.
Yet this is no mood-destroying anti-climax. "How long to reset?" someone jokes. This is Nolan's world, after all. Everything's under control, even when it isn't.
"It did not go quite as planned," he admits four months later. "But we're still using the shot… We got a very spectacular initial blast, and we had always planned a massive miniature shoot, because the set you saw only represents about a tenth of the actual complex in the film. So then we did an enormous miniature explosion... And exactly the same thing happened: the tower fell the wrong way!" He laughs. "So we did it again."
He could have done this effect purely with computer graphics. He could have entirely avoided constructing a set on a mountainside and shooting there during a Canadian winter. But just as he was convinced he could feel every grain of sand in his hand while he slept at the University College of London all those years ago, Christopher Nolan needs to feel the reality of his creations, so we can be convinced, too. To quote Leonardo DiCaprio: "He sure as hell knows what he's doing."
He could do this in his sleep.
Originally printed in Empire Magazine in July 2010.