All language subtitles for Inception.Extras1.Jump.Right.into.the.Action-Grym-en

A man possessed
of some radical notions.

NOLAN: Inception is a project
that I first started working on...

...about 10 years ago.

I became very interested in the idea
of doing a film about dreams...

...about the relationship of our waking life
to our dreaming life.

The idea that has always fascinated me
about dreams...

...is everything within that dream
is created by your own mind...

...as you experience it.

For a filmmaker,
it's an ideal world to be dealing with.

THOMAS: The script itself wasn't like
he wrote it eight years ago...

...and then itjust sat in a drawer
untouched.

Every couple of years,
at the end of every movie...

...he would go back to it, tweak a bit
and think a bit more.

NOLAN: Over the years, I tried to write
different versions of this.

I tried to write it as a smaller film.

And what I constantly found
was that as soon as you're entering...

...into the idea of what can the human mind
conceive of, what world could it create...

...you wanna see this on a grand scale.

The material demanded
this very large-scale approach.

Inception, certainly,
takes a lot of leaps...

...in terms of the universal experience
of dreaming.

I wrote the script very much
from my own experiences of dreaming...

...and sort of extrapolating those.

But there are certain things
that we take to be common enough...

...that people will be able to relate,
the idea that you can't die in a dream.

When you die in a dream,
effectively you wake up.

Things like the kick, the feeling of falling
snapping you awake.

That seemed a very common thing.

In talking to people, it seemed something
that people really recognized.

And it felt important to try and incorporate
any of the really familiar touchstones...

...of what it is to dream.

Any of the things that are universal
that could allow the audience...

...to relate
their own experience of dreaming...

...to this rather, you know,
fantastical set of events.

Chris often talked about
this Escher-like architecture world...

...where things are built
on top of each other...

...and layers
and this endless stream of creation.

So in that respect...

...from a character standpoint
in working with him, let's just say:

"Look, if all these dream states
are real to him...

...we have to treat them emotionally
that way."

In other words, everything needs
to be emotionally charged.

NOLAN: There are similarities
of what the filmmaking process is...

...and what the characters and the team
of characters is doing in the film itself.

They're creators,
they're people who create an entire world...

And Inception is intended to be a film
that tries to explore...

...the exciting possibilities
of the human mind...

...and the infinite potential
of the human mind.

COBB:
What is the most resilient parasite?

A bacteria? A virus?

An intestinal worm?

ARTHUR:
Uh....

What Mr. Cobb is trying to say--

An idea.

Resilient. Highly contagious.

Once an idea has taken hold of the brain,
it's almost impossible to eradicate.

DYAS: Japanese architecture
has such a unique look to it...

...and such a wonderful use of color.

So for me,
it was about creating a castle...

...that was sort of somewhere
between the 15th and 16th century...

...that had then been inhabited
by a modern man.

And I had found some examples
in Japan...

...of traditional Japanese architecture
that had been re-created as brand new...

...with all the varnish in place,
with modern lighting.

Chris saw that and thought,
"Oh, this is just weird. It's strange.

I really like it."
And that's where we started.

The castle set was interesting...

...because part of the dream
becomes this earthquake, so....

You know, normally, if you were doing
an earthquake set...

...you'd build it onto some sort of rig...

...that will shake it
so you'll get all those movements.

You know, because of the size of this set,
it wasn't feasible to do that.

Wally Pfister,
he's a tremendous creative ally...

...in terms of how the story
is gonna unfold visually.

VVelooked
at a lot of different earthquake devices...

...camera devices for shaking the camera.

But really, testing them,
they all look a little mechanical...

...and so all of the shaking
and shuddering effects for the earthquake...

...are done in old-fashioned way,
just by shaking the camera.

We combined that
with a lot of Chris Corbould...

...our special effects supervisor,
his expertise in destruction.

CORBOULD:
We always had to keep in our minds...

...there was an earthquake going on,
so throughout...

...we were pulling over statues,
pulling over vases, bits of dressing.

We were able to get up above
and put big drop boxes, which--

And when we push the button,
it would open up some trapdoors...

...and add lots of lightweight debris.

We pretested everything so we knew
it was safe for Leo.

We had him running through soft debris,
you know, dropping on him...

...and beams are dropping beside him,
and glass blowing behind him.

And because Leo is very focused...

...you'd know when you said you need
to be here, he is there in that position.

From A to B,
he does exactly what you choreograph.

Which makes it very easy
to put the effects around him.

NOLAN: The flood in the Japanese castle
really challenged Chris Corbould...

...to put this on film for real...

...in a massive way so that
we could really put the performers...

...in the middle
of an extremely powerful event.

Chris had had a plan...

...to have this big metal shipping
containers full of water...

...the traditional dump-tank method
of doing this kind of scene.

But it became apparent as we looked
at the way the stunt would work...

...we wouldn't-- Certainly, wouldn't be able
the actors anywhere near it, let alone--

Really even a stunt performer.

What Chris and his guys came up with
for this film...

...was this extremely clever method
of using air cannons.

CORBOULD:
Flooding was achieved...

...by two underground pressurized
containers, which we hit sequentially.

And because they were coming
from about 20-foot up high...

...through windows...

...it sort of created this big wave
coming towards the camera.

You start dealing with, you know,
200 gallons of water is a lot of weight...

...so we were pressurizing it
to 150 pounds per square inch...

...more high-pressure water
coming into the room.

We wanted more of an atomized look...

...rather than the traditional
big dump of water, as it were.

It's those shots you have to get right
first time.

A lot of setup.
If you don't get it right first time...

...then you're into a big redress,
you know...

...because you've got three, four thousand
gallons of water now in the set.

[GRUNTS]

[HISSING]

[SAITO GROANS]

This isn't gonna work. Wake him up.

[GRUNTS]

NOLAN: The sequence in the film
when Paris disintegrates...

...the cafe disintegrates around Ariadne,
was our attempt to really portray...

...the danger of the world destabilizing,
the dream world collapsing...

...when the dreamer becomes aware
of the fact that they're dreaming.

The cafe explosion sequence
was actually challenging in two aspects.

One aspect was Chris wanted
this whole explosion sequence...

...to take place in the middle of Paris.

And the Parisians are not
too friendly toward explosions...

...in the middle of Paris...

...so when we started talking to them
about what we were gonna do...

...the faces were pretty grim.
So that was the first issue.

The second issue was
that Chris really wanted...

...to get Leonardo and Ellen
in the shot.

THOMAS:
Chris Corbould came up with this way...

...of creating an explosion
using air cannons.

We did tests with people sitting in front,
and we showed them to Leo and to Ellen...

...and said, "This is what it's gonna be."

CORBOULD: Yeah, and also
we had a car flipping over in front...

...and then a motorbike
flipping over in front.

That was all going, and all added
to the overall effect of it.

We tested and tested and tested
that whole shot.

I mean, I sat in a replica of the explosion
at least three or four times...

...just so, you know, I could give
a first-hand experience of, you know...

...what it was like.

Though I must admit when we did shoot it,
it seemed a lot different...

...having Leo and Ellen
in amongst that whole explosion.

They were
in their own little safety area...

...where even the paper cup on the table
didn't move.

NOLAN: | always knew there'd be a
massive computer-graphics component...

...to the sequence, but it was
very important to me that we shot...

...as much of it as possible in camera...

...to give the visual-effects guys
the chance to do what they do best...

...which is to build on or enhance...

...things that have existed in the real world,
things that have been photographed.

They have that for reference
and to play with.

What we do in visual effects
is we can add more destruction...

...we can add more debris.
In particular...

...we can add the kind of stuff
which just wasn't possible to do...

...on the day when we actually filmed it,
which is all the hard, rigid...

...bits of masonry and glass
and furniture and pottery...

...and things like that. So, what you see
is a combination of reality...

...and then this extra level
that we can bring to it...

...this extra level of danger
and destruction.

Chris sort of came up with
this notion of being undenNater...

...where we're watching
visual explosions...

...that have been shot
at many different speeds.

NOLAN: There is a lot of precise,
mathematical thought and design...

...that went into it from the guys
at Double Negative...

...in particular with the idea
of the almost fractal nature...

...of the destruction.
So when there's an explosion...

...things fragment into smaller pieces.
If you look at those small pieces...

...they're, in turn, fragmenting.

And I thought this was a nice way
of really tying in...

...with this idea of the potential
of the human mind to create...

...infinite levels of complexity
within a dream...

...complexity in detail.

If it's just a dream,
then why are you--?

["NON, JE NE REGRETTE RIEN" PLAYING]

COBB:
Because it's neverjust a dream, is it?

And a face full of glass hurts like hell.
When you're in it, it feels real.

ARTHUR: That's why the military
developed dream sharing.

It was a training program for soldiers
to shoot, stab and strangle each other...

...and then wake up.

ARIADNE:
How did architects become involved?

COBB: Well, someone had to design
the dreams, right?

Why don't you give us
another five minutes?

NOLAN: I've always loved the work
of MC. Escher...

...and some of his prints
do the most wonderful job...

...expressing paradox and infinity.

I wanted to try and look at the concept
of the Penrose steps...

...this infinite staircase and look at--
How could you build it in the real world?

Is there some real-world equivalent of it?

And what we found
through a lot of model building...

...just physically, you know,
building them...

...is there are different ways
to achieve that illusion.

They're all cheats, obviously.

This isn't something that can exist
in the real world, so....

l devised a sequence...

...whereby you would present it
from one angle...

...the angle of optical illusion
where it works.

DYAS:
Chris had already done some research...

...and had decided how he wanted
these Penrose steps to be.

His first question to me is:

"Can you build a Penrose step
that actually works?"

And I said, "Well, of course, you can."

But actually, ha, ha,
it's almost impossible.

We had fitted the set into a location...

...which was sort of a disused
games-company facility...

...that was sort of constructed of steel
and glass...

...you know,
a typical modern, beautiful building.

And we had designed the staircase...

...in the same wood as the stairs
that they had at this facility.

So it almost looked like it was part
of the environment.

The steps must be built in a way
that when you view them...

...the topmost level of the staircase lines
with the bottommost level of the staircase.

And so what Visual Effects
was able to do...

...is we were able to make
computer models of all of this...

...and work out exactly the dimensions
of the steps that have to be built...

...and where the camera has to be
in three-dimensional space...

...to be able to film it.

It had to be done mathematically perfect.

And in that, it had to be a particular lens
at a particular height and distance...

...and the camera had to drop...

...in a particular way to hide the trickery.

The visual effects-- Only requirement on
them was to remove the rig...

...which supported the staircase...

...because the structure would've been
probably a little dangerous...

...had they not had a rig on it.

It's visually quite dramatic
and very carefully thought-out.

See?

Paradox.

So a closed loop like that...

...will help you disguise the boundaries
of the dream you create.

But how big do these levels have to be?

It could be anything from
the floor of a building to an entire city.

They have to be complicated enough
that we can hide from the projections.

-A maze?
-Right, a maze.

And the better the maze....

Then the longer we have
before the projections catch us?

Exactly.

-My subconscious seems polite enough.
-Ha, ha. You wait, they'll turn ugly.

NOLAN: At some point in rewriting
the script and in talking about it with Leo...

...I realized the image of the freight train
was gonna be an important one.

And whilst you don't want the dreams
to become anarchic...

...you don't want them to be chaotic.

You do wanna introduce the danger
of Cobb's subconscious...

...the danger that he can be bringing...

...strange elements into these dreams
at the worst time imaginable.

It was very much the sort of grand-scale
physical effect...

...that I think can make an action film
go to that next level.

PFISTER:
When I first saw in the script...

...that there's a train driving through
a downtown street...

...I thought this is gonna be phenomenal.

I knew right away that it was gonna be
90 or a hundred percent in camera.

STRUTHERS: It's gonna be a little tough
downtown LA...

...to find a train track.
So ljust said to myself:

"What would I do
to get a physical mechanical sequence?"

And the answer is, literally, prefab...

...a train on the outside of a huge semi
and drive it down the street.

Well, originally,
we were gonna look at a bus.

But there is no place to weld to a bus
and we needed a bigger carriage.

So I started doing some investigation
on semi tractors, what we ended up using.

We bought a Sterling tractor
and then we stretched the frame...

...and all the drivetrain to 36 feet
from the front axle to the back axle.

DYAS: The sides of the truck
are actually made of plywood...

...very simple, light material.

The lower part of this train
was all manufactured from fiberglass...

...molds taken from real train wheels
and real train parts.

Everything had the correct texture
and look.

The front half of this structure was built
in sort of a mild steel.

I think we had
about a ton and a half of steel...

...actually in front of the truck's cab...

...in order to make sure...

...that when this train impacted
certain things...

...in the film, it hits a number of cars...

...it didn't just shatter.
lt pushed the cars, smashed them up...

...did what it needed to do,
and is very nightmarish.

NOLAN: I felt the challenge of the scene
was to try and get across the incongruity...

...the strangeness of the images,
so it didn't feel like a regular train crossing.

One of the ways we did is we--

At the last minute, we ordered
a lot more cars for it to smash through.

You know, we had been doing one or two,
we realized...

...we really needed to smash
a whole row of these cars.

And we realized...

...that if we could chew the pavement up
with the wheels...

...you would notice
not only are there no rails...

...but that actually, these wheels
shouldn't be running down this asphalt.

So we put it to Paul and the D-neg guys
at the last minute:

"Can you add in these sort of
cracks in the pavement...

...this kind of asphalt being churned up
by the wheels?"

It was a last-minute addition,
they did an incredible job...

...just putting this little bit of damage.

It's a subtle thing,
but it really helps you realize...

...the train should not be there.

There's $500 in there.
The wallet's worth more than that.

You might at least
drop me at my stop.

I'm afraid that it doesn't--

[GUNFIRE THEN EAMES GRUNTS]

[TIRES SCREECHING]

-Cover him!
EAMES: Down! Down now!

What the hell is going on?

ARIADNE:
This wasn't in the design.

Cobb?

Cobb?

[GUNFIRE]

NOLAN: In all of the outdoor,
downtown sequences...

...we had to shoot in Los Angeles
during the summer...

...which we always knew
was gonna be a challenge.

Chris insisted on shooting this
scene in rain in daylight...

...which is not a very common
thing to do, really.

Typically in movies, it's at night.
It looks the best with a backlight...

...and it shows the rain. You know,
you watch a football game and they say:

"Look how much it's raining,"
and you don't see anything.

And that's kind of
the daytime rain problem.

Making rain is one of
the most difficult things you can do...

...in a picture.

You know, we're doing
large chase sequences.

This isn't two people walking.

NOLAN: Chris Corbould and his guys,
they mounted rain towers...

...on a scale that I hadn't seen before.

They were able to make it rain
for two or three city blocks at a time...

...and really created a very, very
convincing downpour with real depth.

The filming in LA. posed a particular
challenge for me in terms of lighting.

To try to make it look like
it was an overcast day...

...when it's sunny out.

Chris knew I was sweating this out.

And after I stopped praying
for it to be overcast...

...for, you know, months
and months and months...

...I finally gave up on that
and started doing my homework...

...to try to figure out exactly
where the sun was gonna be...

...at what time of day,
and do my best to shoot around it.

And I had wonderful help from
a fantastic key grip, Ray Garcia...

...who plotted the course of the sun
and who managed to block the sun out...

...with a number of different devices,
with Condors and cherry pickers...

...and getting on roofs
and putting up flags.

And that contributes to the look of the film
in a way that's hard to describe.

Certain times we had to
embrace the sun a little bit...

...and ourjoke was,
"Okay, well, it's a dream, anyway."

It doesn't rain a lot in LA.
As soon as you do get rain...

...the streets are super slippery
because of the amount of oil...

...and exhaust fumes on the streets.

So it's very slippery, it's very dangerous.

None of their cars slid out of control on it.

We didn't break anything
that we didn't wanna break...

...so it went very well.

NOLAN: It's important to me that we go to
the limit of what is possible to shoot.

And so, shooting in a massive
city environment and creating rain...

...we've really tried to
put ourselves through it...

...to emerge through that with
an experience for the audience...

...that feels real and tactile to them
so they care about it.

COBB:
Get Fischer in the back room now.

-Get him in the back room. Move.
ARTHUR: What the hell happened?

COBB:
Has he been shot? Is he dying?

ARTHUR: I don't know.
-Jesus Christ.

ARTHUR: What happened to you?
-Blocked by a freight train.

Why put a train
in a downtown intersection?

-I didn't.
ARTHUR: Where'd it come from?

Why the hell were we ambushed?

Those were not normal projections.
They'd been trained, for God's sakes.

DYAS:
The tilting bar.

There was all sorts of talk about
how we would do this...

...and the usual sort of green screen...

...smoke screen was thrown up.
"Let's just do this in post."

And we all knew that we couldn't.

Itjust had to be done properly
in order for it to be a believable thing.

CORBOULD: We built
a complete hotel bar and lobby...

...which tilted to 20, 25 degrees.

But it wasn't to get the traditional effect
where you expect...

...everything to go
slide from one side to the other.

Chris didn't want anything to move,
all he wanted was to see...

...these weird things happening.

So, like, the liquid in the glass would
all of a sudden tilt to a strange angle.

Light fixings hanging from the ceiling
would all of a sudden tilt to a strange angle.

DYAS:
It was basically a seesaw...

...that just seesawed back and forth
on this central point.

But if you've ever tried standing on that,
it's very hard.

MAN:
And shooting.

OTERO:
We had auditions for extras...

...and about a third of the people
were physically unable to do it.

Which is why we had the auditions.

What I didn't wanna do
is bring everybody in on the day...

...which is often the way it's done...

...and say, "Welcome to the 45-degree floor.
Don't worry, you'll be fine"...

...then watch them turn green
on camera.

PFISTER: And of course, the image
on the screen is very subtle.

It's far less dramatic than
what we were going through on the set...

...trying to hold it all together
while the set was tilting.

MAN: The set is tilting now, okay?
Hold down the cameras.

PFISTER: We had to ratchet the camera
down and bolt the camera down.

I had to physically hold on myself...

...as the set tipped, and try
to keep everything from sliding away.

COBB: You feel that? You've actually
been trained for this, Mr. Fischer.

Pay attention to the strangeness
of the weather, the shift in gravity.

None of this is real. You're in a dream.

Now, the easiest way
for you to test yourself...

...is to try and remember how you arrived
at this hotel. Can you do that?

Yeah, I....

COBB: No, breathe, breathe.
Remember your training.

CORBOULD: The horizontal rotating
corridor was an early concept...

...that was in the script
which started off...

...as like a 40-foot corridor,
and then stretched to a 60-foot corridor.

Then Chris Nolan felt he needed
a 100-foot corridor.

DYAS: After we'd determined
the methodology for rotating the sets...

...which was basically suspending the set
in these huge rings...

...Chris Corbould had one of his engineers
work with us initially...

...on what size the rings needed to be
and how they were going to function...

...because there was an enormous
amount of structural steel...

...that needed to be welded and formed...

...months ahead of when the set
needed to be built.

CORBOULD: There was a series of eight
30-foot diameter rings...

...which were all joined together,
and each one of those rings was rotated...

...using an electric motor,
via camshafts and drive wheels.

The whole thing had to be built
to closed tolerances...

...because if it was out
or if the rings weren't totally round...

...you know, it would've given us
all sorts of problems.

It would've created
vibrations and bumps.

The main thing about it was the accuracy
in actually fabricating the rig.

NOLAN: I mean, the idea of using
a centrifuge to...

...manipulate gravity,
it's been done on various films...

...most notably, Kubrick's 2001.

And I like the idea of repurposing
that technology, and really...

...trying to choreograph into
a fight sequence and camera movement...

...and all the rest. Really do something
that could be completely...

...in camera in a way that, you know,
I hadn't seen before.

With any of the sets that required
this movement...

...all the equipment
had to be locked into the set.

It either had to rotate with it
if it made sense...

...or the set would rotate
out of the light...

...so it did require a lot of planning...

....on my part in order to determine
what was gonna happen...

Is the camera separate from the set
or is it actually rotating with the set?

GORDON-LEVITT:
If you lock the camera on the ground...

...the audience doesn't see
the room spinning.

The audience just sees us
moving all over the place.

It looks like we're jumping
on the ceiling and stuff.

In order to actually get it done,
I couldn't think of it that way.

I had to think of it as,
"This is the ground.

Okay, now this is the ground.
Okay, now this is the ground."

-Bring on the double.
-No!

Joseph Gordon-Levitt had,
I think, only two weeks' rehearsal.

And he honestly was fantastic...

...and he attacked it with such excitement
and enthusiasm...

...and he was determined to do it
all himself...

...and it really, really pays off.

You have to have the right mindset
and physicality.

If you start looking outside,
you get motion sickness...

...you do physically get disoriented.

So it's keeping inside of
this environment.

And, I mean, the director tried it, I tried it.
It was not easy...

...and he far exceeded what we did.

GORDON-LEVITT: So many action movies
now, it's all done on computers later...

...whereas these scene that we did...

...it was so well thought out.
Just the thing is revolving...

...and it's up to me to keep my balance.
And we did the performance...

...and they shot it and that's that.

I love that. There's no substitute
for real human energy in performance.

That was the most fun. It was
the most challenging and the most fun.

I remember when I saw
the footage from that scene.

It really is stunning.
And we did elect to play it in one shot...

...simply because
our immediate response...

...when you first see the footage
is it just doesn't look possible.

It's very clever.

GORDON-LEVITT:
Once we fall into the hotel room...

...the game is very different
than when we were in the corridor.

It was easier
but it was more dangerous...

...because if you mess up
and get behind the rotation...

...you can fall
and really hurt yourself.

Whereas, in the corridor, you're only
falling eight feet or something...

...and have pads, so it didn't feel great...

...but it's not a big deal.
When you fall 20 or 30 feet...

...that's bad. So we had to take
more care to not make any mistakes...

...in the hotel room.

CORBOULD: We designed it
to rotate at six revs per minute.

We got the stunt people in there
because it had one long side...

...and one short side.
It quickly became apparent...

...they couldn't get across the long side,
as it were, at six rpm.

They were really struggling.
So we had to gear it down.

In actual fact,
when we do that shot...

...we speed up and slow down
the revolution...

...wherever they're on the rig.
If they're going along the long side...

...we slow it down.
Then when they go across the short side...

...we speed it up.

So that was interesting.
There was a whole testing process.

[GUNSHOT]

[GUNFIRE]

DYAS: Fortress Mountain
was certainly the biggest set.

But more importantly than the set...

...is the setting, for Chris.
He wanted to be able to look out a window...

...and see these absolutely beautiful
backdrops of mountains...

...that could not be achieved digitally.

I was shooting a commercial
the year before we began Inception.

And I was up in Calgary filming,
and while I was up there...

...Chris said, "Hey, keep an eye out.

We're looking for a place
to shoot this snow sequence."

I said, "Look, there's a closed-down
ski resort here...

...and you gotta check it out."

NOLAN: We gambled with our location.
We were told we might get early snow...

...because we were shooting
relatively early in the year. November.

We had to take an early gamble,
because with the set...

...as big as the one that Guy envisaged for
this, he had to start building in August.

THOMAS: About a week before we went
to Canada, there was no snow.

The whole thing was built around snow.
And so we were very, very tensed.

NOLAN: In the end, it dumped massively.
Right before we got up there...

...we had more snow than we've had
for 30 years in that time of year...

...which was essential for the amount
of action we had to stage there.

With the action in this level
of the dream...

...we wanted it to be expansive,
cinematic action.

And, for me, the place I immediately go to
is the Bond films.

The idea of a ski chase
in an exotic location.

An extraordinary, sort of, bad guy's lair,
some big complex in the mountains.

That kind of thing. I grew up watching these
films with extraordinary stunt work in them.

In recent years,
I felt like I was seeing films...

...where they didn't bother
to do those things anymore...

...where they immediately go into
some kind of visual-effects solution...

...whereas all the stunt guys
I knew who I'd worked with...

...were chomping at the bit to do
these things they know how to do.

And so Tom Struthers,
the stunt coordinator on the film...

...he really took it on board
as a challenge...

...working hand in hand
with Chris Corbould...

...the special effects coordinator,
making it work on set.

They really took me
at my word in terms of:

"Okay, how can we film
these things in-camera?"

GOLDBERG: We tried to do as many things
in-camera as possible...

...which is very difficult
when you're in Calgary...

...where it's gonna be freezing cold.
There's gonna be extreme temperatures...

...and extreme weather.
One of the big components...

...in this particular sequence
was the avalanche.

I would suspect it's very hard
to do an avalanche.

We went out and did several of them...

...which required a series of professional
avalanche-makers...

...to fly around,
dropping timed explosions...

...on top of mountains
and setting them off.

OTERO:
It's unique working in snow.

I mean, this was a week.
It was fantastic.

It looked like the roof of the world.

I'd look up from my immediate task,
and I'm looking down...

...a mountain range. It was like a shot...

...out of National Geographic,
from the Himalayas.

It was an extraordinary thing
to be doing.

Did Eames add any features?

I don't think I should tell you.

We don't have time for this.
Did he add anything?

He added an air-duct system...

-...that can cut through the maze.
-Good. Explain it to them.

NOLAN: What I wanted to do
for the zero-gravity sequences...

...was to take an ordinary environment...

...and achieve this very incongruous
zero-gravity effect.

We did it through a number
of different rigs...

...and in the final edit what you see is,
shot to shot to shot...

...it tends to be a different orientation,
a completely different rig in each shot.

And I think that,
more than anything else...

...really stops the audience
in seeing the trick...

...of how these things are done.

The vertical corridor is the same
as the horizontal.

It's an identical set.

The difference,
it has been built vertically...

...so it's standing on its end.

And this means we can drop actors,
stunt performers on wires...

...down into the set,
and the camera looks up at them.

And they can then be raised
or lowered...

...they can swing around inside the set...

...and it looks like they're floating
in zero gravity.

In real zero-g, and I've spoken to people
that have been in real zero-g...

...and what they told me is,
they never felt so relaxed in their life.

What I did is the exact opposite of that.

In order to make it look
like that was the case...

...I actually had to keep
every muscle tight...

...because I was supporting myself.

I didn't had to worry about making myself
look as if I was having a hard time.

I was having a hard time. Ha, ha.

WOMAN [ON RECORDING]: If you'd like to
make a call, please hang up and try again.

If you need help, hang up....

How do I drop you without gravity?

Arthur has a couple minutes,
and we have about 20.

NOLAN: The look of limbo
was a complicated design issue.

Myself and Guy Dyas spent a long time
talking about it, about what it might be.

DYAS: As depicted in the script,
Cobb and Mal...

...were architects who were
using this dream landscape...

...as sort of practice ground,
as their playground.

It needed to appeal
to architects, you know...

...and people who would know
about this stuff.

We determined that we would have...

...buildings maybe
from the '20s and '303...

...buildings that were, you know,
very strongly inspired...

...by Corbusier and all the great
architects from Bauhaus.

And those buildings would
slowly transition...

...into buildings from the '503
to the '603...

...to the '70s, the '80s,
and so on and so forth.

And then beyond where we are now...

...into the new generation
of green self-sufficient buildings...

...and so, suddenly you ended up
with this world of limbo...

...with buildings that were
laid out in grids...

...that just got taller and taller
and taller and taller.

FRANKLIN: Limbo city
was a really interesting challenge...

...because this is where I think we were
really pushed the hardest creatively.

In the script it's described that
they emerge out of the sea...

...and they are confronted
with what appears to be...

...a giant crumbling cliff face,
but then it's made of buildings.

This was something
we spent quite a lot of time...

...working on concepts for
and designing and developing ideas...

...and looks and feels
for how this thing might work.

NOLAN:
The ultimate thing we settled on...

...was the idea of a sort of
an architectural glacier, really.

All these architectural forms
that are collapsing into the sea.

To achieve it, we knew there would be
a massive visual-effects burden.

We had Paul Franklin
and his guys at Double Negative...

...come on and study footage
of glaciers caving...

...dropping into the sea.

And look at ways we could replace
those with architectural forms.

We were going to Morocco anyway.

First scouting, they're driving from
the airport and passed...

...some very strange
enormous architectural forms...

...these housing estates,
these buildings in the middle of nowhere...

...which we thought might give us
a great basis...

...and give Paul a great basis to build out
his architectural creations.

And so we shot the actors
down in Morocco.

We shot them walking through
this extraordinary set of buildings...

...which the visual-effects guys
then built out.

Then we had the special-effects guys,
Chris Corbould and his team...

...actually bring water into
the foot of these buildings...

...and create waves and so forth.

So that the line between visual effects
and practical photography...

...was as blurred
as we could make it.

The idea, really, there is
that Cobb and Mal have created...

...this enormous amount
of architecture...

...over the very long time
they're trapped in this state.

And the water, for me, the ocean
represents the subconscious.

It represents the subconscious
over time...

...eating away at this vision of theirs,
and it being...

...gradually lost, gradually eroding.

NOLAN: With Chris Corbould,
once we'd built this enormous set...

...he was determined that
we should blow it up.

Even though we had a miniature shoot
scheduled to do that particular effect.

But I thought it might be interesting.

It's always great to get
something full-size, if you can.

CORBOULD: It's a proper structure, about--
To be honest, itjust lends itself...

...so perfectly to blowing up.
The whole thing was built on stilts...

...so, technically, if we blow those stilts
away, there's nothing holding it up.

If it had been concrete foundations,
that sort of thing...

...it would've been a lot more difficult.

NOLAN: So he packed it full of explosives
and the last thing we shot on the film...

...was blowing it up.
But unfortunately the charges...

...on the front wall didn't go off,
so the tower fell the wrong way.

We still got a very nice couple
of usable shots of explosions...

...that are in the film.
We then combined that...

...with a very large-scale miniature shoot
back in Los Angeles.

FRANKLIN:
It's about 45 feet high, the miniature...

...and that was an amazing construction
in its own right, existing--

Completely filled the car park
at New Deal Studios in Marina del Rey.

New Deal's car park these days
is now surrounded by condominiums.

And so all the kids in the condo were
sitting out on their balconies, you know...

...waiting for us to blow this thing up.

NOLAN: Ironically, the first time they blew
that miniature, the same thing happened.

The tower fell in the wrong direction.
So we actually had to redo that.

In the finished film, it's a combination...

...of the full-scale destruction
and the miniature.

NOLAN: I've always liked working
with composers, with Hans in particular...

...in a way where you wanna free them
from the constraints of the picture.

You want them to be inspired by it,
but I like Hans to be able to write freely...

...and not be trying to hit cuts,
not be trying to squeeze things...

...into the tightest edits that we're gonna
wind up with for certain sequences.

I wanna kind of hear
where his imagination will go...

...work completely free to just interpret
the ideas of the script.

And then, based on that,
we take that in the edit suite, and we start...

...finding interesting points
of synchronization between picture...

...and the music he's written.

[SUSPENCEFUL MUSIC PLAYING
ON SPEAKERS]

NOLAN: Hans is one of the great masters
of finding the sound of things.

Not just what the tunes are,
not just what the notes are...

...but how they're played,
what the voices are of the thing.

ZIMMER: What seemed to work well
in this movie...

...is to turn even more towards electronics.

Dark Knight was already
pretty heavy on the electronics...

...but this one, somehow,
pushing that whole thing a little bit further.

We took things which were
created completely electronically...

[SUSPENCEFUL MUSIC PLAYING
ON SPEAKERS]

...these ambiences,
these atmosphere tracks...

...and put them in front
of the orchestra and said:

"Okay, now I want the orchestra
to go and imitate...

...synthesize electronic sounds."

[SUSPENCEFUL MUSIC PLAYING
ON SPEAKERS]

I booked the craziest,
biggest brass section...

...I think, ever assembled in the studio.

[PLAYING SUSPENCEFUL MUSIC]

Six bass trombones,
six tenor trombones.

Four tubas in the middle...

...and six French horns above.

The force when they were really blowing.

[PLAYING SUSPENCEFUL MUSIC]

You know, it's a physical force.
You know, it hits you.

[PLAYING SUSPENCEFUL MUSIC]

ZIMMER: Early on, I had just started writing
and I was thinking, you know...

...l'd love to have one other color
in the score and I was thinking, guitars.

Then I was thinking,
there's a hideous thing...

...that happens
when you have guitars and orchestra.

I was sitting there and playing
around with bad sampled guitar sounds...

...and started coming up
with this little tune.

And it was like, I knew at that moment...

...who I was writing for.

MARR:
Okay, so it goes up again then, right?

NOLAN: He said he was gonna get
somebody, "somebody like Johnny Marr"...

...was how he said it, you know,
with a smile on his face.

Which meant that was exactly who we were
gonna have. Which I was excited about...

...from knowing Johnny Marr's music
from The Smiths.

MARR: That was quite a good run.
-Yeah.

NOLAN:
He's a bit of a legend.

[PLAYING MELLOW MUSIC]

NOLAN:
Hans is a sort of minimalist composer...

...with a sort of
maximalist production sense.

[PLAYING MELLOW MUSIC]

So he'll write these incredibly specific
and simple pieces.

But the way in which he'll then
record them and produce that is on...

...such a colossal scale.
And with so much movement and drive...

...that there's a point where,
particularly in reels six and seven...

...we just let the music
take over everything.

And make them just turn the music
Iouderandloudenn

...because you realize
the momentum of the film...

...is entirely defined
by the structure of the music...

...as the film sort of snowballs
towards the end.

Welcome home, Mr. Cobb.

Thank you, sir.

NOLAN: I think that the department heads
on the film were just great collaborators...

...on the rules of the world...

...because they where helping me
to define those things.

Their interpretations to the script,
along with the actors'.

Everybody is coming at it from:

"Okay, how are they going to execute
their end of what needs to take place?"

And in doing that,
in examining the rules...

...whether it's, you know,
Jeffrey, you know, talking about...

...what the actors are wearing
and at what point they change...

...and at what point, you know,
the clothes are the same or different.

Whether it's Wally talking about the different
photographic looks of the dream...

...or Guy Dyas
with the design of things...

...really everybody had something
to say or something to bring...

...in terms of making the rules of
the piece as concrete as possible.

It's a great part of the production process,
which is that in preproduction...

...as all of the departments
are looking for answers...

...they're looking for concrete answers...

...about what they have to provide
for a particular scene:

where that scene
comes in the timeline...

...in this script, sort of what level of reality
we're dealing with.

They become excellent
creative collaborators...

...because they're real logic filters.

They have a lot of interesting
questions about the rules of the world...

...and how those might be defined.

And so it was an extremely
productive part of the process.

We put together an incredible crew,
but also an incredible cast...

...to portray the team on screen.

And it was fascinating watching
the sort of chemistry between them...

...and see them evolve as a crew very much
the way the characters do in the story.

It really brought a richness,
a Iiveliness to their scenes together...

...that on the page, you know,
you hope for that kind of chemistry.

But it's not until you get on the floor...

...and you see the actors
making it their own.

And in doing that and in working
with great people, as we have...

...terrific team on Inception...

...you start to build up a very
complicated world.

You start to build a lot of interesting
complexity, a lot of interesting density...

...because of all the thought
that's come from different people...

...into the finished product.

And certainly for me,
when I look at the finished film...

...I see a lot of different things in there...

...that I hadn't known were going to be
in there when I was working on the script.

There's just huge input
from a very large group of people...

...lending their talents to it.

And I think there is a lot of detail in the film,
there's a lot of density to it...

...and I think that if people care
to take another look at it...

...if they've been interested
in doing that...

...they will find different things,
interesting detail...

...that people have put into the film.