Inception - The Movie (Released 2010)

What is Inception means?

According to Cambridge Online Dictionary, Inception is the beginning of an organization or official activity.

Is it sound like another movie's concept like "Matrix" Series?

Christopher Nolan, who famous on his work, Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008), had directed this film. According to him, the idea was based on the notion of "exploring the idea of people sharing a dream space - entering a dream space and sharing a dream. That gives you the ability to access somebody’s unconscious mind. What would that be used and abused for?" Furthermore, he thought "being able to extract information from somebody’s brain would be the obvious use of that because obviously any other system where it’s computers or physical media, whatever – things that exist outside the mind – they can all be stolen ... up until this point, or up until this movie I should say, the idea that you could actually steal something from somebody’s head was impossible. So that, to me, seemed a fascinating abuse or misuse of that kind of technology". He had thought about these ideas on and off since he was 16 years old, intrigued by how he would wake up and then, while falling back into a lighter sleep, hold on to the awareness that he was dreaming, a lucid dream. He also became aware of the feeling that he could study the place and alter the events of the dream. He said, "I tried to work that idea of manipulation and management of a conscious dream being a skill that these people have. Really the script is based on those common, very basic experiences and concepts, and where can those take you? And the only outlandish idea that the film presents, really, is the existence of a technology that allows you to enter and share the same dream as someone else".

Originally, he had envisioned Inception as a horror film but eventually wrote it as a heist film even though he found that "traditionally [they] are very deliberately superficial in emotional terms". Initially, Nolan wrote an 80-page treatment about dream-stealers. Upon revisiting his script, he decided that basing it in that genre did not work because the story "relies so heavily on the idea of the interior state, the idea of dream and memory. I realized I needed to raise the emotional stakes". Nolan worked on the script for nine to ten years. When he first started thinking about making the film, the director was influenced by "that era of movies where you had The Matrix, you had Dark City, you had The Thirteenth Floor and, to a certain extent, you had Memento, too. They were based in the principles that the world around you might not be real". He first pitched the film to Warner Bros. in 2001 but in retrospect felt that he needed more experience making large scale films like Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. He soon realized that a film like Inception needed a large budget because "as soon as you’re talking about dreams, the potential of the human mind is infinite. And so the scale of the film has to feel infinite. It has to feel like you could go absolutely anywhere by the end of the film. And it has to work on a massive scale". After making The Dark Knight, Nolan decided to make Inception and spent six months completing the script. For the director, the key to completing the script was wondering what would happen if several people shared the same dream. He said, "Once you remove the privacy, you’ve created an infinite number of alternative universes in which people can meaningfully interact, with validity, with weight, with dramatic consequences".

Leonardo DiCaprio was the first actor to be cast in the film. Nolan had been trying to work with the actor for years and met him several times but was unable to convince him to appear in any of his films until Inception. DiCaprio finally agreed because he was "intrigued by this concept - this dream-heist notion and how this character's gonna unlock his dreamworld and ultimately affect his real life". He read the script and found it to be "very well written, comprehensive but you really had to have Chris in person, to try to articulate some of the things that have been swirling around his head for the last eight years". He and Nolan spent months talking about the screenplay. Nolan took a long time re-writing the script in order "to make sure that the emotional journey of his character was the driving force of the movie".