Christopher Nolan: “The Man Behind the Dreamscape”
A good profile of Christopher Nolan in the NYT in advance of the 7/16 unleashing of Nolan’s latest movie Inception:
“When somebody’s spent years making a film and spent massive amounts of money — crazy amounts of money, really, that get spent on these huge films — then you want to see something extremely ambitious in every sense,” Mr. Nolan, 39, said a few weeks ago, sitting outside the garage that is now his editing suite.
“Of course,” he added with a dry chuckle, “there are all kinds of extremely ambitious failures as well.”
Imagine the type of personality it takes to still have a sense of humor after spending a reported $160M of Warner Bros. money on a movie you wrote and directed. But per Nolan, the budget is based strictly on creative concerns tied to the story’s plot:
“What I found is, it’s not possible to execute this concept in a small fashion,” he said, sipping tea at a picnic table in his backyard.
“As soon as you’re talking about dreams,” he added, “the potential of the human mind is 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.”
After The Dark Knight which grossed over $1B worldwide, what do you do for an encore?
After a monthlong vacation in Florida, he returned to the “Inception” screenplay he began almost a decade ago.
Though dreams have always been a staple of cinema, Mr. Nolan said that movies too often treat them like “a little TV program that we watch when we’re asleep.”
He went back to an original idea that maintained a grip on his imagination for nearly 10 years. Also note that he had a ‘similar but different’ insight, wanting to make a movie that delved more deeply into the possibilities of the realm of dreams. And after years of letting the idea simmer, Nolan had a breakthrough:
The crucial breakthrough to completing his “Inception” script was considering what could happen if multiple people could share the same dream. “Once you remove the privacy,” Mr. Nolan said, “you’ve created an infinite number of alternative universes in which people can meaningfully interact, with validity, with weight, with dramatic consequences.”
What if “multiple people could share the same dream”? And that single insight not only opened the door to the movie Inception would become, it became Nolan’s thematic touchstone for the story:
“It’s really, at its core, a big action heist movie, and it’s a movie that doesn’t try to bamboozle the audience continuously,” he said.
Takeaway?
* Every so often, return to some of your older ideas, especially ones that you can’t seem to shake. Perhaps there’s a diamond-in-the-rough there just waiting for you.
* Since most stories are variations on preexisting ones, be sure to look for ways to make them different ala Nolan and his approach to dreams.
* Think about your story to see if you can identify its essential what if element (e.g., what if multiple people can share one dream). And if you do discover it, keep one eye on it at all times to help keep your story focused.
You can go here for the official movie site for Inception.
UPDATE: The first review of Inception is in from THR and here it is. The lede:
Bottom Line: A devilishly complicated, fiendishly enjoyable sci-fi voyage across a dreamscape that is thoroughly compelling.
Yeah!