Where to watch Inception (2010)

Trivia & production notes

• Christopher Nolan spent nine to ten years developing the Inception script, initially conceiving it as a horror film before pivoting to a heist structure.
• Nolan deliberately delayed making Inception after pitching it to Warner Bros. in 2001, first directing Batman Begins and The Dark Knight to gain experience with large-scale filmmaking.
• Leonardo DiCaprio had turned down multiple Nolan projects before agreeing to star in Inception, which intrigued him enough to commit after Nolan explained the concept in person.
• The central creative breakthrough for Inception's script came when Nolan considered the dramatic possibilities of multiple people sharing the same dream.
• For the zero-gravity hotel corridor sequence, filmmakers built a 100-foot hallway suspended on eight concentric rings powered by electric motors that rotated a full 360 degrees, inspired by a technique from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• Joseph Gordon-Levitt trained for several weeks to choreograph fight scenes inside the rotating corridor, which Nolan compared to a giant hamster wheel.
• Nolan minimized computer graphics in Inception, preferring practical effects whenever possible, resulting in approximately 500 visual effects shots compared to up to 2,000 in contemporary effects-heavy films.
• The Limbo city sequence was created by building a basic glacier model and then using a computer program designed to automatically generate organic-looking urban elements like roads, intersections, and ravines.
• For the fortress sequence, visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin built miniatures of the mountain set and then physically destroyed them for the film.
• The Paris-folding sequence was planned using rough computer animations that Nolan later referenced while directing actors on set during principal photography.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Inception, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.