Q&A: Christopher Nolan on Dreams, Architecture, and Ambiguity

Director Christopher Nolan
Photo: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters/Corbis

Director Christopher Nolan with Leonardo DiCaprio and Joseph Gordon-Levitt on the set of Inception.
Photo by Stephen Vaughan

Joseph Gordon-Levitt on the set of Inception.
Photo by Stephen Vaughan

Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb in Inception.
Photo by Melissa Moseley

Director Christopher Nolan on the set of Inception.
Photo by Melissa Moseley

Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb in Inception.
Photo by Melissa Moseley

Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb in Inception.
Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb in Inception.
Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Arthur in Inception.
Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb in Inception.
Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

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(Spoiler alert: Details and plot points about Inception follow.)
Christopher Nolan, director of Memento, and The Dark Knight, tends to let his twisty genre deconstructions speak for themselves. But he agreed to talk to Wired about the decade-long inception of his movie Inception (on DVD December 7). We talked to him about heists, architecture, and the difference between ambiguity and a lack of answers. Hint: One is better (looking at you, Lost).
Wired: Inception has such high ambitions. What did it take to get the script to work?
Christopher Nolan: The problem was that I started with a heist film structure. At the time, that seemed the best way of getting all the exposition into the beginning of the movie—heist is the one genre where exposition is very much part of the entertainment. But I eventually realized that heist films are usually unemotional. They tend to be glamorous and deliberately superficial. I wanted to deal with the world of dreams, and I realized that I really had to offer the audience a more emotional narrative, something that represents the emotional world of somebody’s mind. So both the hero’s story and the heist itself had to be based on emotional concepts. That took years to figure out.
Wired: You mix in other genres as well. There’s a bit of noir, and in the snow scene you play with the conventions of James Bond-style action-movies.
Nolan: I’m a lover of movies, so that’s where my brain went. But I think that’s where a lot of people’s minds would go if they were constructing an arena in which to conduct this heist. I also wanted the dreams in Inception to reflect the infinite potential of the human mind. The Bond movies are these globe-trotting spy thrillers, filmmaking on a massive scale. The key noir reference is the character Mal; it was very important to me that she come across as a classic femme fatale. The character and her relationship to Cobb’s psyche is the literal mani-festation of what the femme fatale always meant in film noir—the neurosis of the protagonist, his fear of how little he knows about the woman he’s fallen in love with, that kind of thing.
Wired: In addition to genre-play, Inception is also a classic heroic epic—a Joseph Campbell The Hero with a Thousand Faces type of story.
Nolan: I’ve never read Joseph Campbell, and I don’t know all that much about story archetypes. But things like The Inferno and the labyrinth and the Minotaur were definitely in my mind.
Wired: There’s a character called Ariadne, named after the woman who helped guide Theseus through the labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur.
Nolan: Yeah, I wanted to have that to help explain the importance of the labyrinth to the audience. I don’t know how many people pick up on that association when they’re watching the film. It was just a little pointer, really. I like the idea of her being Cobb’s guide.
Wired: A common observation about your movie is that the grammar of dreams and the grammar of filmmaking have lots of overlap—Inception seems to be a movie about making movies. Saito is a producer, Cobb’s a director, Ariadne’s a writer, and so on. Was that your intention
Nolan: I didn’t intend to make a film about filmmaking, but it’s clear that I gravitated toward the creative process that I know. The way the team works is very analogous to the way the film itself was made. I can’t say that was intentional, but it’s very clearly there. I think that’s just the result of me trying to be very tactile and sincere in my portrayal of that creative process.
Wired: Have you read the online discussions of the film?
Nolan: I’ve seen some of it, yeah. People seem to be noticing the things they’re meant to notice, the things that are meant to either create ambiguities or push you in one direction or another. But I’ve also read plenty of very off-the-wall interpretations. One of the things you do as a writer and as a filmmaker is grasp for resonant symbols and imagery without necessarily fully understanding it yourself. And so there are interpretations to be imposed on the film that aren’t necessarily what I had in my head.
Wired: One of the rules in Inception is that, in a dream, you never know how you got somewhere. But in filmmaking, by necessity, you cut from one place to another—for example, from Paris to Mombasa. Does it indicate that Cobb is in a dream because you don’t see how he got to Mombasa?
Nolan: Certainly Inception plays with the relationship between films and dreaming in a number of different ways. I tried to highlight certain aspects of dreaming that I find to be true, such as not remembering the beginning of a dream. And that is very much like the way films tell their stories. But I wouldn’t say I specifically used the grammar of the film to tell the audience what is dream and what is reality.