“‘Inception’ breaks into dreams”
Geoff Boucher of the LA Times yesterday with this story on screenwriter-director Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Warner Bros. movie Inception. Some excerpts:
“Inception,” the 39-year-old director’s seventh feature film and his first foray into science fiction, combines the perception riddles of “Memento” and the sheer scale of “Dark Knight” with its $160-million budget and location shoots in Morocco, France, Japan and three other countries. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as 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. The problem, though, is the land of nod can be volatile — as can DiCaprio’s character, Dom Cobb, who is a wounded dreamer after the loss of his beloved wife.
The movie may be Hollywood’s first existential heist movie, and though that may not sound like typical fare for the air-conditioning months, Warners and Legendary Pictures are banking on the movie catching on as a brainy “Mission: Impossible” by way of “The Matrix”; the globe-trotting movie may have had its subconscious baggage packed by Sigmund Freud, in other words, but it also carries a passport stamped by Ian Fleming. DiCaprio says Nolan is the perfect director to turn that unlikely combination into a July hit.
“Complex and ambiguous are the perfect way to describe the story,” DiCaprio said in a recent phone interview. “And it’s going to be a challenge to ultimately pull it off. But that is what Chris Nolan specializes in. He has been able to convey really complex narratives that work on a multitude of different layers simultaneously to an audience and make it entertaining and engaging throughout. You look at ‘ Insomnia’ or ‘Memento,’ these movies are working on so many different levels. That’s his expertise; it’s what he does best, as a matter of fact.”
“Existential thriller.” Hm. A new sub-sub-genre?
This I found interesting:
It was the success of “The Dark Knight” (which broke records as a home video release and now stands as the bestselling Blu-ray ever) that allowed Nolan to put his most ambitious idea on the screen. The presence of DiCaprio not only gave Nolan a major movie star, it led to changes in the film that may make it more accessible to moviegoers.
“I’ve incorporated a huge number of his ideas,” Nolan said. “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.”
Critics of Nolan say that he makes frosty films with no detectable human heartbeat, just the clicks and whirls of his intricate story gears. It’s interesting, then, to consider that contributions by DiCaprio (who is coming off another dark fever dream of a movie, Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island”) and how they meshed with Nolan’s own revised view of his original “Inception” story.
“I originally wrote it as a heist movie, and heist movies traditionally are very deliberately superficial in emotional terms,” Nolan said. “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.”
“It’s the emotionalism that best connects the audience with the material.” In other words, you can have the most finely crafted plot in the world and the most expensive CGI effects, but if the viewer doesn’t connect to the story emotionally, then you’re almost assuredly not going to have a successful movie. And how does a viewer connect with a movie or a reader connect with a script? How about these three narrative elements:
Compelling situation: The story’s set-up and push into the ‘extraordinary world’ of Acts Two and Three should be something that the reader finds interesting and — depending upon the genre — fun (comedy), scary (horror), edgy (thriller), etc.
Protagonist identification: The reader should have be able to relate to and empathize with the Protagonist character on some core emotional level.
Rich interior life: The story’s characters, especially the Protagonist, should have multiple layers to their psychological / emotional / spiritual make-up, resulting in a series of personal revelations that provide the reader with more and more insight into the characters’ interior lives.
Your thoughts?
The website for Inception here.
Wikipedia page here.
Trailer #2 here.
The movie opens in a zillion theaters July 16th.
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