Nolan Revealed Inception Was Based on...His Own Experience
You read it correctly: Christopher Nolan’s iconic mind-bending dream heist movie was inspired by the director’s own life in a way that’s hard to predict from the outside.
While Christopher Nolan ’s entire filmography is exceptional, there are a few movies that stand out the most — namely, Inception, Interstellar, and the most recent addition to the director’s portfolio, Oppenheimer. Interstellar is a sci-fi film; Oppenheimer is a biopic; and Inception is the pinnacle of Nolan’s unique style.
When Inception came out back in 2010, it was sensational — a movie unlike any other, something so spectacular and mind-bending that the global audience was completely lost in awe. Building upon the director’s very own way to shape reality, Inception became his magnum opus at the time; honestly, it still is.
The main feature of the movie is the dream world and the ability to infiltrate it. It’s essentially a heist within the everchanging reality of someone else’s mind, and to grasp all the layers of truth and fiction in it, you need to keep a notebook at hand. Fans still argue about the true meaning of Inception, especially its finale, to this day.
It may sound insane, but the inspiration for the movie came from Christopher Nolan’s own life and his own experience with lucid dreams which happened when he was still a student, as the director shared during a talk with his acclaimed colleague James Cameron.
“A lot of the inspiration for Inception was from a period of my life when I was in university and didn’t have much money, and breakfast was free. I would go to bed at four in the morning or something, set my alarm, wake up to get breakfast, and go back to sleep. So, then you’re in this sleep state where it became possible to be very aware of the fact that you are dreaming,” shared Christopher Nolan.
Though unintentional at first, soon, the young man started experimenting with lucid dreaming and trying to take control of his drifting mind’s visions. It was…frustrating.
“I would experiment with trying to control the dream and trying to make something. It was frustrating, and the occasional moment where you get something to work and you’re able to actually channel your dreaming, lucid dreaming…that’s the superpower,” explained the director.
It makes perfect sense that Nolan was impressed with his mind’s ability to control lucid dreams, granted that it was inconsistent. But forward quite a few years, it was thanks to the director’s genius that he managed to turn that experience into the phenomenal mind-bending movie that Inception came to be.
Source: AMC+ via YouTube