Christopher Nolan Talks More 'Inception,' Says Film Is In The Same Ballpark As 'The Matrix' & 'Dark City'

With the July 16th release date of “Inception” looming, director Christopher Nolan has slowly stepped out from behind the veil of secrecy surrounding the project and has slowly let several cats out of the bag on his forthcoming existential heist film. Be warned, if you don’t want to know anything about the movie, move along somewhere else.

As early as last summer, a fairly comprehensive plot leak hit the web and as more and more details are confirmed by Nolan the more accurate that picture is becoming. Speaking with the LA Times, Nolan has spilled a few more beans about the upcoming film.

As has been previously confirmed, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb “a specialist in the new branch of corporate espionage — he’s a dream thief who plucks secrets from the minds of tycoons after pumping them full of drugs and hooking them up to a mysterious contraption.” He is also “a wounded dreamer after the loss of his beloved wife” who, if earlier plot leaks are correct, is played by Marion Cotillard who commits suicide in the dream world in an attempt to return to reality only to be found dead. Cobb is subsequently charged with her murder and is forced to go on the run with his children.

Also confirmed is Cillian Murphy’s role as Fischer, one of “Cobb’s targets” in the film who is being sought so that Cobb’s team can implant an idea into Fischer’s mind that will compel him to separate his company into two smaller firms.

One of the more talked about aspects of the film has been the staggering special effects including gravity-defying fight scenes. But if you’re expecting CGI, think again. For those sequences, Nolan and special effects supervisor Chris Corbould (who also worked on “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight”) “built giant rotating hallways and a massive tilting nightclub set to film the startling “Inception” scenes when dream-sector physics take a sharp turn into chaos.” Joseph Gordon-Levitt apparently spent weeks being tossed around the spinning sets into order to get those sequences in the can.

But while the film is certainly set to dazzle the eye, some of have said Nolan’s films are emotionally distant, but from day one, the director realized that without an emotional spine, the film would be a difficult one for audiences to enjoy. “I originally wrote it as a heist movie, and heist movies traditionally are very deliberately superficial in emotional terms. They’re frivolous and glamorous, and there’s a sort of gloss and fun to it. I originally tried to write it that way, but when I came back to it I realized that — to me — that didn’t work for a film that 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. What we found in working on ‘Batman’ is that it’s the emotionalism that best connects the audience with the material. The character issues, those are the things that pull the audience through it and amplify the experience no matter how strange things get.”

To that end he also incorporated ideas put forth by the meticulous DiCaprio in helping shape the main character of Cobb, “I’ve incorporated a huge number of his ideas. Leo’s very analytical, particularly from character point of view but also how the entire story is going to function and relate to his character . . . It’s actually been an interesting set of conversations, and I think it’s improved the project enormously. I think the emotional life of the character now drives the story more than it did before.” Certainly for DiCaprio, who has visited themes of family and loss in his most recent outings of “Revolutionary Road” and “Shutter Island,” it appears he brought those experiences and insights to Nolan’s film.

But never fear, Nolan’s film is still very much a blockbuster and for fanboys, he places the film directly in the camp of the late 1990s run of the reality breaking films, “I think ours is of an older school, ours is more of ‘The Matrix’ variety and the concepts of different levels of reality….I think when I first started trying to make this film happen it was very much pulled from 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.”

As we previously reported, attendees of ShoWest got a look at new, previously unseen footage some of which should be in the next trailer for the film which is rumored to be attached to the front of “Iron Man 2.” Until then, keep dreaming.