Original subtitles

A man possessed of some radical notions.

NOLAN: Inception is a project that I first started working on...

...about 10 years ago.

I became very interested in the idea of doing a film about dreams...

...about the relationship of our waking life to our dreaming life.

The idea that has always fascinated me about dreams...

...is everything within that dream is created by your own mind...

...as you experience it.

For a filmmaker, it's an ideal world to be dealing with.

THOMAS: The script itself wasn't like he wrote it eight years ago...

...and then itjust sat in a drawer untouched.

Every couple of years, at the end of every movie...

...he would go back to it, tweak a bit and think a bit more.

NOLAN: Over the years, I tried to write different versions of this.

I tried to write it as a smaller film.

And what I constantly found was that as soon as you're entering...

...into the idea of what can the human mind conceive of, what world could it create...

...you wanna see this on a grand scale.

The material demanded this very large-scale approach.

Inception, certainly, takes a lot of leaps...

...in terms of the universal experience of dreaming.

I wrote the script very much from my own experiences of dreaming...

...and sort of extrapolating those.

But there are certain things that we take to be common enough...

...that people will be able to relate, the idea that you can't die in a dream.

When you die in a dream, effectively you wake up.

Things like the kick, the feeling of falling snapping you awake.

That seemed a very common thing.

In talking to people, it seemed something that people really recognized.

And it felt important to try and incorporate any of the really familiar touchstones...

...of what it is to dream.

Any of the things that are universal that could allow the audience...

...to relate their own experience of dreaming...

...to this rather, you know, fantastical set of events.

Chris often talked about this Escher-like architecture world...

...where things are built on top of each other...

...and layers and this endless stream of creation.

So in that respect...

...from a character standpoint in working with him, let's just say:

"Look, if all these dream states are real to him...

...we have to treat them emotionally that way."

In other words, everything needs to be emotionally charged.

NOLAN: There are similarities of what the filmmaking process is...

...and what the characters and the team of characters is doing in the film itself.

They're creators, they're people who create an entire world...

And Inception is intended to be a film that tries to explore...

...the exciting possibilities of the human mind...

...and the infinite potential of the human mind.

COBB: What is the most resilient parasite?

A bacteria? A virus?

An intestinal worm?

ARTHUR: Uh....

What Mr. Cobb is trying to say--

An idea.

Resilient. Highly contagious.

Once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it's almost impossible to eradicate.

DYAS: Japanese architecture has such a unique look to it...

...and such a wonderful use of color.

So for me, it was about creating a castle...

...that was sort of somewhere between the 15th and 16th century...

...that had then been inhabited by a modern man.

And I had found some examples in Japan...

...of traditional Japanese architecture that had been re-created as brand new...

...with all the varnish in place, with modern lighting.

Chris saw that and thought, "Oh, this is just weird. It's strange.

I really like it." And that's where we started.

The castle set was interesting...

...because part of the dream becomes this earthquake, so....

You know, normally, if you were doing an earthquake set...

...you'd build it onto some sort of rig...

...that will shake it so you'll get all those movements.

You know, because of the size of this set, it wasn't feasible to do that.

Wally Pfister, he's a tremendous creative ally...

...in terms of how the story is gonna unfold visually.

VVelooked at a lot of different earthquake devices...

...camera devices for shaking the camera.

But really, testing them, they all look a little mechanical...

...and so all of the shaking and shuddering effects for the earthquake...

...are done in old-fashioned way, just by shaking the camera.

We combined that with a lot of Chris Corbould...

...our special effects supervisor, his expertise in destruction.

CORBOULD: We always had to keep in our minds...

...there was an earthquake going on, so throughout...

...we were pulling over statues, pulling over vases, bits of dressing.

We were able to get up above and put big drop boxes, which--

And when we push the button, it would open up some trapdoors...

...and add lots of lightweight debris.

We pretested everything so we knew it was safe for Leo.

We had him running through soft debris, you know, dropping on him...

...and beams are dropping beside him, and glass blowing behind him.

And because Leo is very focused...

...you'd know when you said you need to be here, he is there in that position.

From A to B, he does exactly what you choreograph.

Which makes it very easy to put the effects around him.

NOLAN: The flood in the Japanese castle really challenged Chris Corbould...

...to put this on film for real...

...in a massive way so that we could really put the performers...

...in the middle of an extremely powerful event.

Chris had had a plan...

...to have this big metal shipping containers full of water...

...the traditional dump-tank method of doing this kind of scene.

But it became apparent as we looked at the way the stunt would work...

...we wouldn't-- Certainly, wouldn't be able the actors anywhere near it, let alone--

Really even a stunt performer.

What Chris and his guys came up with for this film...

...was this extremely clever method of using air cannons.

CORBOULD: Flooding was achieved...

...by two underground pressurized containers, which we hit sequentially.

And because they were coming from about 20-foot up high...

...through windows...

...it sort of created this big wave coming towards the camera.

You start dealing with, you know, 200 gallons of water is a lot of weight...

...so we were pressurizing it to 150 pounds per square inch...

...more high-pressure water coming into the room.

We wanted more of an atomized look...

...rather than the traditional big dump of water, as it were.

It's those shots you have to get right first time.

A lot of setup. If you don't get it right first time...

...then you're into a big redress, you know...

...because you've got three, four thousand gallons of water now in the set.

[GRUNTS]

[HISSING]

[SAITO GROANS]

This isn't gonna work. Wake him up.

[GRUNTS]

NOLAN: The sequence in the film when Paris disintegrates...

...the cafe disintegrates around Ariadne, was our attempt to really portray...

...the danger of the world destabilizing, the dream world collapsing...

...when the dreamer becomes aware of the fact that they're dreaming.

The cafe explosion sequence was actually challenging in two aspects.

One aspect was Chris wanted this whole explosion sequence...

...to take place in the middle of Paris.

And the Parisians are not too friendly toward explosions...

...in the middle of Paris...

...so when we started talking to them about what we were gonna do...

...the faces were pretty grim. So that was the first issue.

The second issue was that Chris really wanted...

...to get Leonardo and Ellen in the shot.

THOMAS: Chris Corbould came up with this way...

...of creating an explosion using air cannons.

We did tests with people sitting in front, and we showed them to Leo and to Ellen...

...and said, "This is what it's gonna be."

CORBOULD: Yeah, and also we had a car flipping over in front...

...and then a motorbike flipping over in front.

That was all going, and all added to the overall effect of it.

We tested and tested and tested that whole shot.

I mean, I sat in a replica of the explosion at least three or four times...

...just so, you know, I could give a first-hand experience of, you know...

...what it was like.

Though I must admit when we did shoot it, it seemed a lot different...

...having Leo and Ellen in amongst that whole explosion.

They were in their own little safety area...

...where even the paper cup on the table didn't move.

NOLAN: | always knew there'd be a massive computer-graphics component...

...to the sequence, but it was very important to me that we shot...

...as much of it as possible in camera...

...to give the visual-effects guys the chance to do what they do best...

...which is to build on or enhance...

...things that have existed in the real world, things that have been photographed.

They have that for reference and to play with.

What we do in visual effects is we can add more destruction...

...we can add more debris. In particular...

...we can add the kind of stuff which just wasn't possible to do...

...on the day when we actually filmed it, which is all the hard, rigid...

...bits of masonry and glass and furniture and pottery...

...and things like that. So, what you see is a combination of reality...

...and then this extra level that we can bring to it...

...this extra level of danger and destruction.

Chris sort of came up with this notion of being undenNater...

...where we're watching visual explosions...

...that have been shot at many different speeds.

NOLAN: There is a lot of precise, mathematical thought and design...

...that went into it from the guys at Double Negative...

...in particular with the idea of the almost fractal nature...

...of the destruction. So when there's an explosion...

...things fragment into smaller pieces. If you look at those small pieces...

...they're, in turn, fragmenting.

And I thought this was a nice way of really tying in...

...with this idea of the potential of the human mind to create...

...infinite levels of complexity within a dream...

...complexity in detail.

If it's just a dream, then why are you--?

["NON, JE NE REGRETTE RIEN" PLAYING]

COBB: Because it's neverjust a dream, is it?

And a face full of glass hurts like hell. When you're in it, it feels real.

ARTHUR: That's why the military developed dream sharing.

It was a training program for soldiers to shoot, stab and strangle each other...

...and then wake up.

ARIADNE: How did architects become involved?

COBB: Well, someone had to design the dreams, right?

Why don't you give us another five minutes?

NOLAN: I've always loved the work of MC. Escher...

...and some of his prints do the most wonderful job...

...expressing paradox and infinity.

I wanted to try and look at the concept of the Penrose steps...

...this infinite staircase and look at-- How could you build it in the real world?

Is there some real-world equivalent of it?

And what we found through a lot of model building...

...just physically, you know, building them...

...is there are different ways to achieve that illusion.

They're all cheats, obviously.

This isn't something that can exist in the real world, so....

l devised a sequence...

...whereby you would present it from one angle...

...the angle of optical illusion where it works.

DYAS: Chris had already done some research...

...and had decided how he wanted these Penrose steps to be.

His first question to me is:

"Can you build a Penrose step that actually works?"

And I said, "Well, of course, you can."

But actually, ha, ha, it's almost impossible.

We had fitted the set into a location...

...which was sort of a disused games-company facility...

...that was sort of constructed of steel and glass...

...you know, a typical modern, beautiful building.

And we had designed the staircase...

...in the same wood as the stairs that they had at this facility.

So it almost looked like it was part of the environment.

The steps must be built in a way that when you view them...

...the topmost level of the staircase lines with the bottommost level of the staircase.

And so what Visual Effects was able to do...

...is we were able to make computer models of all of this...

...and work out exactly the dimensions of the steps that have to be built...

...and where the camera has to be in three-dimensional space...

...to be able to film it.

It had to be done mathematically perfect.

And in that, it had to be a particular lens at a particular height and distance...

...and the camera had to drop...

...in a particular way to hide the trickery.

The visual effects-- Only requirement on them was to remove the rig...

...which supported the staircase...

...because the structure would've been probably a little dangerous...

...had they not had a rig on it.

It's visually quite dramatic and very carefully thought-out.

See?

Paradox.

So a closed loop like that...

...will help you disguise the boundaries of the dream you create.

But how big do these levels have to be?

It could be anything from the floor of a building to an entire city.

They have to be complicated enough that we can hide from the projections.

-A maze? -Right, a maze.

And the better the maze....

Then the longer we have before the projections catch us?

Exactly.

-My subconscious seems polite enough. -Ha, ha. You wait, they'll turn ugly.

NOLAN: At some point in rewriting the script and in talking about it with Leo...

...I realized the image of the freight train was gonna be an important one.

And whilst you don't want the dreams to become anarchic...

...you don't want them to be chaotic.

You do wanna introduce the danger of Cobb's subconscious...

...the danger that he can be bringing...

...strange elements into these dreams at the worst time imaginable.

It was very much the sort of grand-scale physical effect...

...that I think can make an action film go to that next level.

PFISTER: When I first saw in the script...

...that there's a train driving through a downtown street...

...I thought this is gonna be phenomenal.

I knew right away that it was gonna be 90 or a hundred percent in camera.

STRUTHERS: It's gonna be a little tough downtown LA...

...to find a train track. So ljust said to myself:

"What would I do to get a physical mechanical sequence?"

And the answer is, literally, prefab...

...a train on the outside of a huge semi and drive it down the street.

Well, originally, we were gonna look at a bus.

But there is no place to weld to a bus and we needed a bigger carriage.

So I started doing some investigation on semi tractors, what we ended up using.

We bought a Sterling tractor and then we stretched the frame...

...and all the drivetrain to 36 feet from the front axle to the back axle.

DYAS: The sides of the truck are actually made of plywood...

...very simple, light material.

The lower part of this train was all manufactured from fiberglass...

...molds taken from real train wheels and real train parts.

Everything had the correct texture and look.

The front half of this structure was built in sort of a mild steel.

I think we had about a ton and a half of steel...

...actually in front of the truck's cab...

...in order to make sure...

...that when this train impacted certain things...

...in the film, it hits a number of cars...

...it didn't just shatter. lt pushed the cars, smashed them up...

...did what it needed to do, and is very nightmarish.

NOLAN: I felt the challenge of the scene was to try and get across the incongruity...

...the strangeness of the images, so it didn't feel like a regular train crossing.

One of the ways we did is we--

At the last minute, we ordered a lot more cars for it to smash through.

You know, we had been doing one or two, we realized...

...we really needed to smash a whole row of these cars.

And we realized...

...that if we could chew the pavement up with the wheels...

...you would notice not only are there no rails...

...but that actually, these wheels shouldn't be running down this asphalt.

So we put it to Paul and the D-neg guys at the last minute:

"Can you add in these sort of cracks in the pavement...

...this kind of asphalt being churned up by the wheels?"

It was a last-minute addition, they did an incredible job...

...just putting this little bit of damage.

It's a subtle thing, but it really helps you realize...

...the train should not be there.

There's $500 in there. The wallet's worth more than that.

You might at least drop me at my stop.

I'm afraid that it doesn't--

[GUNFIRE THEN EAMES GRUNTS]

[TIRES SCREECHING]

-Cover him! EAMES: Down! Down now!

What the hell is going on?

ARIADNE: This wasn't in the design.

Cobb?

Cobb?

[GUNFIRE]

NOLAN: In all of the outdoor, downtown sequences...

...we had to shoot in Los Angeles during the summer...

...which we always knew was gonna be a challenge.

Chris insisted on shooting this scene in rain in daylight...

...which is not a very common thing to do, really.

Typically in movies, it's at night. It looks the best with a backlight...

...and it shows the rain. You know, you watch a football game and they say:

"Look how much it's raining," and you don't see anything.

And that's kind of the daytime rain problem.

Making rain is one of the most difficult things you can do...

...in a picture.

You know, we're doing large chase sequences.

This isn't two people walking.

NOLAN: Chris Corbould and his guys, they mounted rain towers...

...on a scale that I hadn't seen before.

They were able to make it rain for two or three city blocks at a time...

...and really created a very, very convincing downpour with real depth.

The filming in LA. posed a particular challenge for me in terms of lighting.

To try to make it look like it was an overcast day...

...when it's sunny out.

Chris knew I was sweating this out.

And after I stopped praying for it to be overcast...

...for, you know, months and months and months...

...I finally gave up on that and started doing my homework...

...to try to figure out exactly where the sun was gonna be...

...at what time of day, and do my best to shoot around it.

And I had wonderful help from a fantastic key grip, Ray Garcia...

...who plotted the course of the sun and who managed to block the sun out...

...with a number of different devices, with Condors and cherry pickers...

...and getting on roofs and putting up flags.

And that contributes to the look of the film in a way that's hard to describe.

Certain times we had to embrace the sun a little bit...

...and ourjoke was, "Okay, well, it's a dream, anyway."

It doesn't rain a lot in LA. As soon as you do get rain...

...the streets are super slippery because of the amount of oil...

...and exhaust fumes on the streets.

So it's very slippery, it's very dangerous.

None of their cars slid out of control on it.

We didn't break anything that we didn't wanna break...

...so it went very well.

NOLAN: It's important to me that we go to the limit of what is possible to shoot.

And so, shooting in a massive city environment and creating rain...

...we've really tried to put ourselves through it...

...to emerge through that with an experience for the audience...

...that feels real and tactile to them so they care about it.

COBB: Get Fischer in the back room now.

-Get him in the back room. Move. ARTHUR: What the hell happened?

COBB: Has he been shot? Is he dying?

ARTHUR: I don't know. -Jesus Christ.

ARTHUR: What happened to you? -Blocked by a freight train.

Why put a train in a downtown intersection?

-I didn't. ARTHUR: Where'd it come from?

Why the hell were we ambushed?

Those were not normal projections. They'd been trained, for God's sakes.

DYAS: The tilting bar.

There was all sorts of talk about how we would do this...

...and the usual sort of green screen...

...smoke screen was thrown up. "Let's just do this in post."

And we all knew that we couldn't.

Itjust had to be done properly in order for it to be a believable thing.

CORBOULD: We built a complete hotel bar and lobby...

...which tilted to 20, 25 degrees.

But it wasn't to get the traditional effect where you expect...

...everything to go slide from one side to the other.

Chris didn't want anything to move, all he wanted was to see...

...these weird things happening.

So, like, the liquid in the glass would all of a sudden tilt to a strange angle.

Light fixings hanging from the ceiling would all of a sudden tilt to a strange angle.

DYAS: It was basically a seesaw...

...that just seesawed back and forth on this central point.

But if you've ever tried standing on that, it's very hard.

MAN: And shooting.

OTERO: We had auditions for extras...

...and about a third of the people were physically unable to do it.

Which is why we had the auditions.

What I didn't wanna do is bring everybody in on the day...

...which is often the way it's done...

...and say, "Welcome to the 45-degree floor. Don't worry, you'll be fine"...

...then watch them turn green on camera.

PFISTER: And of course, the image on the screen is very subtle.

It's far less dramatic than what we were going through on the set...

...trying to hold it all together while the set was tilting.

MAN: The set is tilting now, okay? Hold down the cameras.

PFISTER: We had to ratchet the camera down and bolt the camera down.

I had to physically hold on myself...

...as the set tipped, and try to keep everything from sliding away.

COBB: You feel that? You've actually been trained for this, Mr. Fischer.

Pay attention to the strangeness of the weather, the shift in gravity.

None of this is real. You're in a dream.

Now, the easiest way for you to test yourself...

...is to try and remember how you arrived at this hotel. Can you do that?

Yeah, I....

COBB: No, breathe, breathe. Remember your training.

CORBOULD: The horizontal rotating corridor was an early concept...

...that was in the script which started off...

...as like a 40-foot corridor, and then stretched to a 60-foot corridor.

Then Chris Nolan felt he needed a 100-foot corridor.

DYAS: After we'd determined the methodology for rotating the sets...

...which was basically suspending the set in these huge rings...

...Chris Corbould had one of his engineers work with us initially...

...on what size the rings needed to be and how they were going to function...

...because there was an enormous amount of structural steel...

...that needed to be welded and formed...

...months ahead of when the set needed to be built.

CORBOULD: There was a series of eight 30-foot diameter rings...

...which were all joined together, and each one of those rings was rotated...

...using an electric motor, via camshafts and drive wheels.

The whole thing had to be built to closed tolerances...

...because if it was out or if the rings weren't totally round...

...you know, it would've given us all sorts of problems.

It would've created vibrations and bumps.

The main thing about it was the accuracy in actually fabricating the rig.

NOLAN: I mean, the idea of using a centrifuge to...

...manipulate gravity, it's been done on various films...

...most notably, Kubrick's 2001.

And I like the idea of repurposing that technology, and really...

...trying to choreograph into a fight sequence and camera movement...

...and all the rest. Really do something that could be completely...

...in camera in a way that, you know, I hadn't seen before.

With any of the sets that required this movement...

...all the equipment had to be locked into the set.

It either had to rotate with it if it made sense...

...or the set would rotate out of the light...

...so it did require a lot of planning...

....on my part in order to determine what was gonna happen...

Is the camera separate from the set or is it actually rotating with the set?

GORDON-LEVITT: If you lock the camera on the ground...

...the audience doesn't see the room spinning.

The audience just sees us moving all over the place.

It looks like we're jumping on the ceiling and stuff.

In order to actually get it done, I couldn't think of it that way.

I had to think of it as, "This is the ground.

Okay, now this is the ground. Okay, now this is the ground."

-Bring on the double. -No!

Joseph Gordon-Levitt had, I think, only two weeks' rehearsal.

And he honestly was fantastic...

...and he attacked it with such excitement and enthusiasm...

...and he was determined to do it all himself...

...and it really, really pays off.

You have to have the right mindset and physicality.

If you start looking outside, you get motion sickness...

...you do physically get disoriented.

So it's keeping inside of this environment.

And, I mean, the director tried it, I tried it. It was not easy...

...and he far exceeded what we did.

GORDON-LEVITT: So many action movies now, it's all done on computers later...

...whereas these scene that we did...

...it was so well thought out. Just the thing is revolving...

...and it's up to me to keep my balance. And we did the performance...

...and they shot it and that's that.

I love that. There's no substitute for real human energy in performance.

That was the most fun. It was the most challenging and the most fun.

I remember when I saw the footage from that scene.

It really is stunning. And we did elect to play it in one shot...

...simply because our immediate response...

...when you first see the footage is it just doesn't look possible.

It's very clever.

GORDON-LEVITT: Once we fall into the hotel room...

...the game is very different than when we were in the corridor.

It was easier but it was more dangerous...

...because if you mess up and get behind the rotation...

...you can fall and really hurt yourself.

Whereas, in the corridor, you're only falling eight feet or something...

...and have pads, so it didn't feel great...

...but it's not a big deal. When you fall 20 or 30 feet...

...that's bad. So we had to take more care to not make any mistakes...

...in the hotel room.

CORBOULD: We designed it to rotate at six revs per minute.

We got the stunt people in there because it had one long side...

...and one short side. It quickly became apparent...

...they couldn't get across the long side, as it were, at six rpm.

They were really struggling. So we had to gear it down.

In actual fact, when we do that shot...

...we speed up and slow down the revolution...

...wherever they're on the rig. If they're going along the long side...

...we slow it down. Then when they go across the short side...

...we speed it up.

So that was interesting. There was a whole testing process.

[GUNSHOT]

[GUNFIRE]

DYAS: Fortress Mountain was certainly the biggest set.

But more importantly than the set...

...is the setting, for Chris. He wanted to be able to look out a window...

...and see these absolutely beautiful backdrops of mountains...

...that could not be achieved digitally.

I was shooting a commercial the year before we began Inception.

And I was up in Calgary filming, and while I was up there...

...Chris said, "Hey, keep an eye out.

We're looking for a place to shoot this snow sequence."

I said, "Look, there's a closed-down ski resort here...

...and you gotta check it out."

NOLAN: We gambled with our location. We were told we might get early snow...

...because we were shooting relatively early in the year. November.

We had to take an early gamble, because with the set...

...as big as the one that Guy envisaged for this, he had to start building in August.

THOMAS: About a week before we went to Canada, there was no snow.

The whole thing was built around snow. And so we were very, very tensed.

NOLAN: In the end, it dumped massively. Right before we got up there...

...we had more snow than we've had for 30 years in that time of year...

...which was essential for the amount of action we had to stage there.

With the action in this level of the dream...

...we wanted it to be expansive, cinematic action.

And, for me, the place I immediately go to is the Bond films.

The idea of a ski chase in an exotic location.

An extraordinary, sort of, bad guy's lair, some big complex in the mountains.

That kind of thing. I grew up watching these films with extraordinary stunt work in them.

In recent years, I felt like I was seeing films...

...where they didn't bother to do those things anymore...

...where they immediately go into some kind of visual-effects solution...

...whereas all the stunt guys I knew who I'd worked with...

...were chomping at the bit to do these things they know how to do.

And so Tom Struthers, the stunt coordinator on the film...

...he really took it on board as a challenge...

...working hand in hand with Chris Corbould...

...the special effects coordinator, making it work on set.

They really took me at my word in terms of:

"Okay, how can we film these things in-camera?"

GOLDBERG: We tried to do as many things in-camera as possible...

...which is very difficult when you're in Calgary...

...where it's gonna be freezing cold. There's gonna be extreme temperatures...

...and extreme weather. One of the big components...

...in this particular sequence was the avalanche.

I would suspect it's very hard to do an avalanche.

We went out and did several of them...

...which required a series of professional avalanche-makers...

...to fly around, dropping timed explosions...

...on top of mountains and setting them off.

OTERO: It's unique working in snow.

I mean, this was a week. It was fantastic.

It looked like the roof of the world.

I'd look up from my immediate task, and I'm looking down...

...a mountain range. It was like a shot...

...out of National Geographic, from the Himalayas.

It was an extraordinary thing to be doing.

Did Eames add any features?

I don't think I should tell you.

We don't have time for this. Did he add anything?

He added an air-duct system...

-...that can cut through the maze. -Good. Explain it to them.

NOLAN: What I wanted to do for the zero-gravity sequences...

...was to take an ordinary environment...

...and achieve this very incongruous zero-gravity effect.

We did it through a number of different rigs...

...and in the final edit what you see is, shot to shot to shot...

...it tends to be a different orientation, a completely different rig in each shot.

And I think that, more than anything else...

...really stops the audience in seeing the trick...

...of how these things are done.

The vertical corridor is the same as the horizontal.

It's an identical set.

The difference, it has been built vertically...

...so it's standing on its end.

And this means we can drop actors, stunt performers on wires...

...down into the set, and the camera looks up at them.

And they can then be raised or lowered...

...they can swing around inside the set...

...and it looks like they're floating in zero gravity.

In real zero-g, and I've spoken to people that have been in real zero-g...

...and what they told me is, they never felt so relaxed in their life.

What I did is the exact opposite of that.

In order to make it look like that was the case...

...I actually had to keep every muscle tight...

...because I was supporting myself.

I didn't had to worry about making myself look as if I was having a hard time.

I was having a hard time. Ha, ha.

WOMAN [ON RECORDING]: If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try again.

If you need help, hang up....

How do I drop you without gravity?

Arthur has a couple minutes, and we have about 20.

NOLAN: The look of limbo was a complicated design issue.

Myself and Guy Dyas spent a long time talking about it, about what it might be.

DYAS: As depicted in the script, Cobb and Mal...

...were architects who were using this dream landscape...

...as sort of practice ground, as their playground.

It needed to appeal to architects, you know...

...and people who would know about this stuff.

We determined that we would have...

...buildings maybe from the '20s and '303...

...buildings that were, you know, very strongly inspired...

...by Corbusier and all the great architects from Bauhaus.

And those buildings would slowly transition...

...into buildings from the '503 to the '603...

...to the '70s, the '80s, and so on and so forth.

And then beyond where we are now...

...into the new generation of green self-sufficient buildings...

...and so, suddenly you ended up with this world of limbo...

...with buildings that were laid out in grids...

...that just got taller and taller and taller and taller.

FRANKLIN: Limbo city was a really interesting challenge...

...because this is where I think we were really pushed the hardest creatively.

In the script it's described that they emerge out of the sea...

...and they are confronted with what appears to be...

...a giant crumbling cliff face, but then it's made of buildings.

This was something we spent quite a lot of time...

...working on concepts for and designing and developing ideas...

...and looks and feels for how this thing might work.

NOLAN: The ultimate thing we settled on...

...was the idea of a sort of an architectural glacier, really.

All these architectural forms that are collapsing into the sea.

To achieve it, we knew there would be a massive visual-effects burden.

We had Paul Franklin and his guys at Double Negative...

...come on and study footage of glaciers caving...

...dropping into the sea.

And look at ways we could replace those with architectural forms.

We were going to Morocco anyway.

First scouting, they're driving from the airport and passed...

...some very strange enormous architectural forms...

...these housing estates, these buildings in the middle of nowhere...

...which we thought might give us a great basis...

...and give Paul a great basis to build out his architectural creations.

And so we shot the actors down in Morocco.

We shot them walking through this extraordinary set of buildings...

...which the visual-effects guys then built out.

Then we had the special-effects guys, Chris Corbould and his team...

...actually bring water into the foot of these buildings...

...and create waves and so forth.

So that the line between visual effects and practical photography...

...was as blurred as we could make it.

The idea, really, there is that Cobb and Mal have created...

...this enormous amount of architecture...

...over the very long time they're trapped in this state.

And the water, for me, the ocean represents the subconscious.

It represents the subconscious over time...

...eating away at this vision of theirs, and it being...

...gradually lost, gradually eroding.

NOLAN: With Chris Corbould, once we'd built this enormous set...

...he was determined that we should blow it up.

Even though we had a miniature shoot scheduled to do that particular effect.

But I thought it might be interesting.

It's always great to get something full-size, if you can.

CORBOULD: It's a proper structure, about-- To be honest, itjust lends itself...

...so perfectly to blowing up. The whole thing was built on stilts...

...so, technically, if we blow those stilts away, there's nothing holding it up.

If it had been concrete foundations, that sort of thing...

...it would've been a lot more difficult.

NOLAN: So he packed it full of explosives and the last thing we shot on the film...

...was blowing it up. But unfortunately the charges...

...on the front wall didn't go off, so the tower fell the wrong way.

We still got a very nice couple of usable shots of explosions...

...that are in the film. We then combined that...

...with a very large-scale miniature shoot back in Los Angeles.

FRANKLIN: It's about 45 feet high, the miniature...

...and that was an amazing construction in its own right, existing--

Completely filled the car park at New Deal Studios in Marina del Rey.

New Deal's car park these days is now surrounded by condominiums.

And so all the kids in the condo were sitting out on their balconies, you know...

...waiting for us to blow this thing up.

NOLAN: Ironically, the first time they blew that miniature, the same thing happened.

The tower fell in the wrong direction. So we actually had to redo that.

In the finished film, it's a combination...

...of the full-scale destruction and the miniature.

NOLAN: I've always liked working with composers, with Hans in particular...

...in a way where you wanna free them from the constraints of the picture.

You want them to be inspired by it, but I like Hans to be able to write freely...

...and not be trying to hit cuts, not be trying to squeeze things...

...into the tightest edits that we're gonna wind up with for certain sequences.

I wanna kind of hear where his imagination will go...

...work completely free to just interpret the ideas of the script.

And then, based on that, we take that in the edit suite, and we start...

...finding interesting points of synchronization between picture...

...and the music he's written.

[SUSPENCEFUL MUSIC PLAYING ON SPEAKERS]

NOLAN: Hans is one of the great masters of finding the sound of things.

Not just what the tunes are, not just what the notes are...

...but how they're played, what the voices are of the thing.

ZIMMER: What seemed to work well in this movie...

...is to turn even more towards electronics.

Dark Knight was already pretty heavy on the electronics...

...but this one, somehow, pushing that whole thing a little bit further.

We took things which were created completely electronically...

[SUSPENCEFUL MUSIC PLAYING ON SPEAKERS]

...these ambiences, these atmosphere tracks...

...and put them in front of the orchestra and said:

"Okay, now I want the orchestra to go and imitate...

...synthesize electronic sounds."

[SUSPENCEFUL MUSIC PLAYING ON SPEAKERS]

I booked the craziest, biggest brass section...

...I think, ever assembled in the studio.

[PLAYING SUSPENCEFUL MUSIC]

Six bass trombones, six tenor trombones.

Four tubas in the middle...

...and six French horns above.

The force when they were really blowing.

[PLAYING SUSPENCEFUL MUSIC]

You know, it's a physical force. You know, it hits you.

[PLAYING SUSPENCEFUL MUSIC]

ZIMMER: Early on, I had just started writing and I was thinking, you know...

...l'd love to have one other color in the score and I was thinking, guitars.

Then I was thinking, there's a hideous thing...

...that happens when you have guitars and orchestra.

I was sitting there and playing around with bad sampled guitar sounds...

...and started coming up with this little tune.

And it was like, I knew at that moment...

...who I was writing for.

MARR: Okay, so it goes up again then, right?

NOLAN: He said he was gonna get somebody, "somebody like Johnny Marr"...

...was how he said it, you know, with a smile on his face.

Which meant that was exactly who we were gonna have. Which I was excited about...

...from knowing Johnny Marr's music from The Smiths.

MARR: That was quite a good run. -Yeah.

NOLAN: He's a bit of a legend.

[PLAYING MELLOW MUSIC]

NOLAN: Hans is a sort of minimalist composer...

...with a sort of maximalist production sense.

[PLAYING MELLOW MUSIC]

So he'll write these incredibly specific and simple pieces.

But the way in which he'll then record them and produce that is on...

...such a colossal scale. And with so much movement and drive...

...that there's a point where, particularly in reels six and seven...

...we just let the music take over everything.

And make them just turn the music Iouderandloudenn

...because you realize the momentum of the film...

...is entirely defined by the structure of the music...

...as the film sort of snowballs towards the end.

Welcome home, Mr. Cobb.

Thank you, sir.

NOLAN: I think that the department heads on the film were just great collaborators...

...on the rules of the world...

...because they where helping me to define those things.

Their interpretations to the script, along with the actors'.

Everybody is coming at it from:

"Okay, how are they going to execute their end of what needs to take place?"

And in doing that, in examining the rules...

...whether it's, you know, Jeffrey, you know, talking about...

...what the actors are wearing and at what point they change...

...and at what point, you know, the clothes are the same or different.

Whether it's Wally talking about the different photographic looks of the dream...

...or Guy Dyas with the design of things...

...really everybody had something to say or something to bring...

...in terms of making the rules of the piece as concrete as possible.

It's a great part of the production process, which is that in preproduction...

...as all of the departments are looking for answers...

...they're looking for concrete answers...

...about what they have to provide for a particular scene:

where that scene comes in the timeline...

...in this script, sort of what level of reality we're dealing with.

They become excellent creative collaborators...

...because they're real logic filters.

They have a lot of interesting questions about the rules of the world...

...and how those might be defined.

And so it was an extremely productive part of the process.

We put together an incredible crew, but also an incredible cast...

...to portray the team on screen.

And it was fascinating watching the sort of chemistry between them...

...and see them evolve as a crew very much the way the characters do in the story.

It really brought a richness, a Iiveliness to their scenes together...

...that on the page, you know, you hope for that kind of chemistry.

But it's not until you get on the floor...

...and you see the actors making it their own.

And in doing that and in working with great people, as we have...

...terrific team on Inception...

...you start to build up a very complicated world.

You start to build a lot of interesting complexity, a lot of interesting density...

...because of all the thought that's come from different people...

...into the finished product.

And certainly for me, when I look at the finished film...

...I see a lot of different things in there...

...that I hadn't known were going to be in there when I was working on the script.

There's just huge input from a very large group of people...

...lending their talents to it.

And I think there is a lot of detail in the film, there's a lot of density to it...

...and I think that if people care to take another look at it...

...if they've been interested in doing that...

...they will find different things, interesting detail...

...that people have put into the film.