Why Christopher Nolan Had to Rewrite INCEPTION After Doing his Batman Films and How Leonardo DiCaprio Helped

Even though graspable details for Warner Bros. high-concept thriller Inception are just beginning to come out as its July 16th release date draws nearer, we already know that this is something writer-director Chistopher Nolan has thought about off and on since he was a youngster of only 16-years of age, "intrigued by the way he would wake up and then, while he fell back into a lighter sleep, hold on to the awareness that he was in fact dreaming."He wrote the first draft of the script seven or eight years ago.

He has already said in the past that Inception, his first sci-fi film, is the largest scale project he's ever been involved in, "We tried to make a very large-scale film with The Dark Knight and with this one we wanted to push that even further." The film's $160-million budget and diverse globetrotting cast shooting on location in Morocco, France, Japan and three other countries would certainly attest to that. But in an interview with the LA Times' Geoff Boucher, Nolan reveals that if it weren't for the Batman films he's made, Inception would have ended up being something more akin to the fun had in Ocean's 11 rather than the high-stakes emotional thriller. 

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.

They will no doubt be strange, in the trailer we've seen a city skyline folding in on itself and Matrix-style action via Joseph Gordon-Levitt who spent bruising weeks in a corridor that spun like a giant hamster wheel. But it all comes from a very familiar and common place for Nolan, who said that in dreams... 

...you can look around and examine the details and pick up a handful of sand on the beach. I never particularly found a limit to that; that is to say, that while in that state your brain can fill in all that reality. I tried to work that idea of manipulation and management of a conscious dream being a skill that these people have. Really the script is based on those common, very basic experiences and concepts, and where can those take you? And the only outlandish idea that the film presents, really, is the existence of a technology that allows you to enter and share the same dream as someone else.

INCEPTION 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.

DiCaprio doesn't just lend star power to Hollywood's first existential heist movie, playing equal parts Neo and James Bond, Nolan explained that the star also helped shape the emotional drive added to the script and the character:

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.

I think I've heard all I need to know about the film, anymore would likely ruin the fun. Nolan himself likens it to the analogy of a maze, saying:

Think of film noir and if you picture the story as a maze, you don't want to be hanging above the maze watching the characters make the wrong choices because it's frustrating. You actually want to be in the maze with them, making the turns at their side, that keeps it more exciting . . . I quite like to be in that maze.

To read the entire interview by Geoff Boucher, who always supplies the geek community with some very in depth interviews, head on over to the LA Times. There you will find some more minor details, and some other quotes from Dicaprio and his co-star Ellen Page.

To see the device that DiCaprio and his team use to enter people's minds, Click Here.