Geoff Boucher, you lucky bastard. Info on Chris Nolan’s INCEPTION has been a closely guarded secret thus far, but now we’re getting a report on the first visit to the set by the LA Times’ Boucher, who got to talk to the cast and crew of the film in England last year. He’s just released this very long article about his visit, which has a lot of info, including a few revelations about which actors are playing what exactly in the film. Here Nolan describes how he abused DiCaprio “Dream Team” partner Joseph Gordon-Levitt on set.
One of the film’s stars, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, spent long, bruising weeks learning to fight in a corridor that spun like a giant hamster wheel.
“It was like some incredible torture device; we thrashed Joseph for weeks,” Nolan said. “But in the end we looked at the footage, and it looks unlike anything any of us has seen before. The rhythm of it is unique, and when you watch it, even if you know how it was done, it confuses your perceptions. It’s unsettling in a wonderful way…we want an extraordinary thing that happens in an ordinary way. That’s always been the goal.”
There are a lot of great quotes and info in this piece, too many to list here, but one of my favorite sections has to be the concluding paragraph which sums up Nolan’s approach to film noir, a genre that only a few directors have a handle on these days, and far less have mastered it to the degree Nolan has.
“I always find myself gravitating to the analogy of a maze,” he said. “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.”
Check out the rest of the article over at the LA Times.