Christopher Nolan Answers Essential Questions About INCEPTION

This is actually an info from this past week but I haven’t gotten around to share it with you til today because a certain gobble gobble weekend kept me busy. Do people still discuss INCEPTION these days? of whether or not the ending was a dream at all or if the spinning top fall down? The movie was released in the summer but is the discussion still going on? Do people still talk about it around the water cooler or during a moment of caramel frap at Starbucks? Wired interviewed the great director Christopher Nolan who answered most of the essential questions asked about INCEPTION. You’re gonna wanna check out the article in its entirety OVER THERE.. but Excerpt after the jump..

About the structure and the script..

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.

Is INCEPTION about filmmaking?

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.

About how it’s open to interpretation..

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.

Were the kids at the end wearing the same clothes that they had on in Cobb’s dream?

“No, they’re not. I’m not giving anything away there. Also I’ve read a lot of misunderstanding or misremembering of the way those kids are portrayed onscreen. But on the Blu-ray, people will be able to check, say, the ages of the kids.”

About the spinning top..

“Sometimes I think people lose the importance of the way the thing is staged with the spinning top at the end. Because the most important emotional thing is that Cobb’s not looking at it. He doesn’t care.”

Are there answers to all this?

“Oh yeah. I’ve always believed that if you make a film with ambiguity, it needs to be based on a sincere interpretation. If it’s not, then it will contradict itself, or it will be somehow insubstantial and end up making the audience feel cheated. I think the only way to make ambiguity satisfying is to base it on a very solid point of view of what you think is going on, and then allow the ambiguity to come from the inability of the character to know, and the alignment of the audience with that character.”