"The Man Behind the Dreamscape"

An excerpt from The New York Times' Sunday profile of Christopher Nolan and Inception.

"With these few bread crumbs Mr. Nolan and his studio are confident that their opaque and costly film will lure large crowds. They are betting that moviegoers have come to regard Mr. Nolan as a director who combines intimate emotions with outsize imagination and seemingly limitless resources — a blockbuster auteur who has made bigness his medium.

In “Inception” Mr. DiCaprio plays Cobb, the leader of a group of “extractors”: people who are able to participate in and shape the dreams of others. With these skills, extractors can teach clients how to safeguard secrets locked away in their subconscious, or how to steal them from unfortified minds. Presented with the inverse challenge of implanting an idea in someone’s head, Cobb assembles his team (including Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page) and designs an intricate mind heist that leads them through layers of dreams within dreams, and to a mysterious woman (Marion Cotillard) from Cobb’s past.

Creating the film’s multiple valences of reality took seven months of principal photography in six cities — Tokyo; Carlington, England; Paris; Tangier, Morocco; Los Angeles; and Calgary, Alberta, at an estimated cost of $160 million."

David Iztkoff

The New York Times

The trailer. July 16, 2010 - IMAX.