Inception

[Fernando]

^^ yes please.

Christopher Nolan is the Nelson Mandela of xixax.

Nelsopher Nolandela.

[Sleepless]

I had a dream last night that I saw a download of this and all I thought was the Xixax guys are gonna be pissed I watched this on my laptop.

[The Perineum Falcon]

that's their new marketing campaign: viral dreams.

[cronopio 2]

^^ yes please.

Christopher Nolan is the Nelson Mandela of xixax.

Nelsopher Nolandela.

you just baptized my first born.

[modage]

via @ThePlaylist

[cronopio 2]

 this could be like the time i watched the matrix for the first time.

[MacGuffin]

Nolan, DiCaprio play mind games with 'Inception'

LOS ANGELES - It's no rarity for blockbuster Hollywood directors to dream big. Dreaming big and smart, though, is Christopher Nolan's specialty.

Nolan elevated the superhero thriller to high art with "The Dark Knight," his followup to "Batman Begins." He pushed the bounds of illusion and perception in the thrillers "Insomnia" and "The Prestige."

Now Nolan is casting audiences into the subconscious of Leonardo DiCaprio and his co-stars with "Inception" — essentially, a heist movie taking place in people's dreams.

The scale, action and visual effects are as grand as those in the biggest summer popcorn flick. "Inception" also offers a depth in theme, story and characters seldom seen in huge Hollywood spectacles.

"I view the film first and foremost as a large-scale thrill ride. That's what it's always been intended to be for me," Nolan said in an interview. "If it's got more interesting ideas in it and whatever, that's all intended to just rattle around in your brain and make you want to think a little bit more about this world that the film creates. That for me is a lot of fun in a summer blockbuster, really."

Nolan and distributor Warner Bros. have played coy about "Inception," only gradually revealing plot points to stoke the imagination of fans, who inevitably are interested in the next project from the man behind the biggest opening weekend ever with the $158.4 million debut of "The Dark Knight."

The movie's trailers have been artful teases loaded with wild images — a train barreling through traffic down a city street, characters hurtling about the walls and ceiling of a hotel hall in a gravity-defying fight scene, a section of Paris tilting up and folding in on itself.

It's fair to say "Inception" is the most-anticipated original film — something not based on a book, comic, game or other source — since James Cameron's "Avatar."

"There's a lot riding on `Inception,'" said Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who co-stars as DiCaprio's right-hand man in an operation to sneak into people's dreams and steal their secrets.

"This is going to really send a very strong signal to the mainstream movie industry that if this movie does really well, you don't need to have some sort of prepackaged, market-researched brand in order to make a big hit movie. What people really respond to is good storytelling and compelling human drama."

While DiCaprio's Dom Cobb makes his living as a corporate raider of the mind, the heart of "Inception" is centered around a new challenge — planting an idea in a man's subconscious so he will awaken and act on it as if it were his own. The characters tumble through layers of dreams within dreams, the action challenging both them — and the audience — to ponder what's real and what's illusion.

The film co-stars Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page and past Nolan collaborators Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy and Michael Caine.

Writer-director Nolan, who turns 40 two weeks after "Inception" premieres, said he dreamed up the idea about a decade ago, as his independent hit "Memento" was opening studio doors for him.

The British filmmaker said he has been toying with how to use dreams in movies since his teens, though.

"I've become over the years more and more interested in the creative potential of the mind and the way that every night we're able to create entire worlds," Nolan said.

"The idea that you can be completely convinced while you're asleep that you're in a real situation, and you've created this room or whatever, and I've created you as a person, everything you're saying I'm putting as words in your mouth, but I feel that I'm hearing them for the first time. That to me suggests infinite potential for human creativity, an infinite mystery to the way the human mind works."

Such sentiments kind of define the highest aspirations of Hollywood blockbusters, considering the resources that go into them, Nolan said.

Hollywood has always been known as the land of dreams, but filmmakers now have technology at their disposal to hurl audiences into worlds approaching the limitless possibilities of their unconscious projections.

"The closest film for me would probably be the first `Star Wars' that did this for my generation. Create a world not just where you literally forget the world you came from, but you want to lose yourself in that world so much that you watch the film again and again," Nolan said.

"I really think that that's when the tools of large-scale Hollywood filmmaking are being used to serve their best ends. Really, it's just creating an alternate reality for people to explore that they could never have imagined themselves. With `Inception,' that is certainly my attempt to try and do that."

Nolan is returning to the franchise that made him a Hollywood heavyweight. His brother is writing the screenplay for a new "Batman" movie, but the director declined to discuss the prospects of an "Inception" sequel.

"I refuse to answer the question on the grounds that I don't want to jinx the film," Nolan said. "My fingers are crossed, and I'm hopeful that the film is going to be a success for the studio, because they really supported me making a film that I'm very, very passionate about. But I'm very, very superstitious."

Nolan's also a bit incredulous about his climb from unknown indie filmmaker to top Hollywood director. He occasionally wonders if it's all been a dream.

"At the risk of sounding cheesy and cliche, the truth is, I love what I do and I love my job, and there is an aspect of that being dreamlike. It's hard for me to credit the fact that I've managed to be able to do what I love doing, I mean, even get paid for it," Nolan said.

"There's certainly some weird fear in the back of my mind that I'm going to wake up and find myself back where I started. But at least then I'd have all my scripts worked out."

[MacGuffin]

'Inception' is no dream for marketers
Unusual summer bow for such a cerebral pic
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Consumers may wish more original films were wedged into the usual summer mix of remakes and sequels, but marketing executives know enough to be careful what they wish for.

Case in point: Warner Bros.' soon-to-bow thriller "Inception." Directed by Christopher Nolan, the Leonardo DiCaprio starrer has stimulated prerelease buzz simply on the basis of its A-list creatives.

Which is fortunate, as the pic's cerebral mix of brain-teasing plot points and effects-driven fantasy defies easy characterization in a one-sheet tagline or even a trailer, judging from materials released to date. Its online campaign similarly is based more on tease than glimpses into the narrative.

Studio marketing always aims to raise pic awareness and stoke must-see interest among prospective patrons, goals most easily achieved when moviegoers have a sense of what to expect from a film. With early -- and solidly positive -- reviews of "Inception" trickling out, word has circulated that the movie has something to do with industrial espionage and the invasion of dreams.

Well, that clears things up.

"I have heard everything from 'awesome' to 'a bit confusing' from those who went to the screening," one industryite said after a showing of the film at the recent Cinema Expo confab in Amsterdam.

In other words, the pic seemed to play well with the audience, but even the subsequent word-of-mouth tended to be vague, albeit positive. Even the movie's name fails to conjure anything specific.

"Nobody thinks it's a bad movie," an exec from a rival studio stressed. "The question is whether it's going to be the real breakout picture that everybody seems to think or just the darling of the East and West coasts and miss the rest of the country."

There lies the rub: how to entice Middle America without a lot of complicated explication? It obviously helps that "Inception" was helmed by Batman's favorite director and stars a maturing American heartthrob.

But what's a marketing challenge like this doing in the middle of popcorn-pic season?

"We're in the moneymaking business," a Warners insider said. "So when you have a great cast and a great movie, why not go when you can do the most business? This movie will play to moviegoers 15 to 50, and you have all those people going to the movies in the summer."

The studio sought to build awareness and buzz early by select media buys. Promos keying on complexity and vagueness of the pic's plot include Verizon Wireless' "Inception: Mind Crime" game, which is promised to help moviegoers "unlock some of the secrets of the story both before and after they see the film."

Studio execs are counting heavily on core support from Nolan's and DiCaprio's fan bases. Awareness has been slow to spread, but a high percentage of those with knowledge of the film show a "definite interest" in seeing "Inception."

Execs around town offer an unusually wide range of projections for the PG-13 pic's opening weekend, at $40 million-$60 million.

Nolan's penchant for cinematic riddles has some suggesting the pic basically is a big-ticket art film. Cost estimates run upward of $160 million on "Inception," which totes a 148-minute running time.

"It's the most expensive version of 'Memento' you could ever make," an exec from a rival studio quipped. "But it is unique in the marketplace, and I credit them for that."

But the question remains: Will Warners' good -- and original -- deed go unpunished by the marketplace?

"You really haven't seen that 18- to 35-year-old crowd mobilized this summer," a marketing exec from another studio said. "So this could become the cool and hip movie to see -- kind of like 'The Matrix.'"

But Warners opened its leggy 1999 hit in March, with "Matrix" topping out at $171.5 million domestically. To do much better, Warners might have to sustain pricey pic marketing longer than usual if word-of-mouth proves as vague as prerelease buzz.

"Inception" opens wide a week from today. Disney family adventure "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" -- that session's only other wide opener -- bows two days earlier and should ring up at least $30 million through its first five days.

[modage]

Fuck you, lowest common denominator. 

[polkablues]

"I worked on Marmaduke, and shit, that was easy.  Hell, I've been putting sunglasses on dogs since 1974. But with this here Nolan picture, where do I put the glasses?  Hell, there ain't even a record scratch.  It's the damnest thing you ever saw."

[MacGuffin]

Christopher Nolan's dim view of a Hollywood craze: 'I'm not a huge fan of 3-D'
Source: Los Angeles Times

Night 2 of the Hero Complex Film Festival was a great success as Christopher Nolan took time from applying the finishing touches to "Inception" to sit for a lively Q&A session. There's plenty to tell you about, but I've broken out an entire article on his enlightening comments on the 3-D craze of the moment.

Christopher Nolan, speaking at the Hero Complex Film Festival, was cheered loudly by the audience when he made a moviegoer confession: "I'm not a huge fan of 3-D."

The director of "The Dark Knight" added that, after doing 3-D tests, his new film "Inception" will not be released in the trendy stereoscopic format because "we didn't have time to do it to the standards that I would be happy with."

Then, the professorial 39-year-old filmmaker, who burst on the scene a decade ago with "Memento," launched into a clinic on the entire topic of 3-D conversion and filmmaking that left some fans in the audience scratching their heads even as the film-school crowd leaned forward to catch every word. First off, he said, he resented the suggestion that cinema was somehow flat without those special glasses.

"The truth is, I think it's a misnomer to call it 3-D versus 2-D. The whole point of cinematic imagery is it's three-dimensional. ... You know, 95% of our depth cues come from occlusion, resolution, color and so forth, so the idea of calling a 2-D movie a '2-D movie' is a little misleading."

Nolan was speaking at the Los Angeles Times-sponsored festival, staged at the Mann Chinese 6 in Hollywood, between screenings of his 2002 thriller "Insomnia" and "The Dark Knight."

The festival is continuing Sunday with an appearance by Ridley Scott and screenings of "Alien" and "Blade Runner."

On Friday, the special guest was Leonard Nimoy and the film was "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home."

Nodding to the movie screen behind him, Nolan told the audience of 500 that he, literally, had a dim view of the 3-D releases he'd watched: "The truth of it is when you watch a film in here, you're looking at 16 foot-lamberts, When you watch through any of the conventional 3-D processes you're giving up three foot-lamberts. A massive difference. You're not that aware of it because once you're 'in that world,' your eye compensates, but having struggled for years to get theaters get up to the proper brightness, we're not sticking polarized filters in everything."

After the massive success of James Cameron's "Avatar" and Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" (they have a staggering $3.7 billion in combined worldwide grosses since December), there is a studio stampede toward 3-D, which is seen as the type of singular spectacle now needed to lure consumers away from the comfort of their home-theater sofas.

But filmmakers have reservations. The sword-and-myth adventure "Clash of the Titans" -- which, like "Inception," was produced by Legendary Pictures and distributed by Warner Bros. -- was quickly converted into a 3-D film, and in the eyes of many critics, the post-production "rush job" showed. "Clash" director Louis Leterrier was beside himself as his movie came under fire, and he won't be back to direct the sequel; still, "Clash" has made $487 million worldwide and, domestically, stands as the fifth-highest-grossing release of 2010.

Leterrier chose his public comments on the 3-D issue carefully for the simple reason that it won't be easy to make another studio blockbuster without a studio. Nolan, who scored a billion-dollar success with "The Dark Knight," is as secure as any director in Hollywood at the moment. But he made it clear Saturday night that although he was captain of his own destiny, it was the studios that built the ship.

"Well, let me put it this way: There is no question if audiences want to watch films in stereoscopic imaging, that's what the studios will be doing, and that's what I'll be doing."

Nolan said "Inception," the July 16 dream-world heist film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, could have ended up as a 3-D release. "We did tests on 'Inception' with the different post-conversion processes, and they all went very well. It's quite easy to do, in fact.  But it takes a little time, and we didn't have time to do it to the standards that I would be happy with."

Nolan said the craft of making a modern big-budget blockbuster with visual effects involved many of the same approaches needed for 3-D conversion. So, as a technical exercise, he finds it compelling but, as moviegoer, he has little interest in sitting in the dark with the finished product -- at least in most cases so far.

"It's all based on all the visual-effects technology, you know, that we're currently most engaged in with match moving, so forth, and rendering 2-D imagery into a 3-D space. ... On a technical level, it's fascinating, but on an experiential level, I find the dimness of the image extremely alienating."

What about shooting in 3D -- as opposed to the post-production conversion approach? Nolan said that approach necessitated shooting in video, with big, bulky gear and a beam-splitter that required trade-offs with optics he was not eager to make. "There are a lot of problems with it ... the idea of shooting a whole film through a massive beam-splitter and so forth -- there are enormous compromises. Post-conversion technologies probably, for me, are definitely the future, but really it is up to the audiences what they want to see and how they want to watch their films."

Nolan is due to start filming a third Batman film in March, and he and Emma Thomas, his producing partner and wife, will be the producers of a Superman film, adding a new cinematic chapter to the superhero property that launched the comic-book industry in the summer of 1938. Nolan didn't say it, but it wasn't a leap to infer that Warner Bros. would be putting pressure to make those movies into 3-D releases for 2012 and beyond -- and that the filmmaker was hoping new 3-D advances would come to light by then.   

"I'm certainly quite pleased with 'Inception' as presented -- it's very bright and very clear, so as the technology improves, those differences may change, and that is what I hope for."

[modage]

Christopher Nolan's dim view of a Hollywood craze: 'I'm not a huge fan of 3-D'

This title implies he's an idiot. 

The LA Times is an idiot.

[children with angels]

Christopher Nolan's dim view of a Hollywood craze: 'I'm not a huge fan of 3-D'

This title implies he's an idiot. 

The LA Times is an idiot.

'Dim view' just means 'low opinion'.

[Pubrick]

I took it to mean that he's an idiot.

But I think you might be right..

[modage]

Yeah I get what they meant, that's just not how it reads.