Leo learns to steal thoughts (From The Northern Echo)

Leo learns to steal thoughts

1:21pm Thursday 15th July 2010 in

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Steve Pratt ventures into a dream world to discover how Leonardo DiCaprio and Joseph Gordon Levitt acted out Inception.

WITH a film like Inception – complex, convoluted, brilliant – it’s always good to hear from the actors that they had as much trouble understanding the script as you did.

Writer-director Christopher Nolan’s new film demands that the audience pay attention in a bid to comprehend the story of dream thief Leonardo DiCaprio, who “breaks into”

other people’s dreams and steals information while they’re asleep. “It certainly took a couple of readings but it was really the interaction with Chris one-on-one that helped me,” explains DiCaprio. “This is a concept that has been locked in his mind for eight years now. For me a lot of preparation of what he was trying to accomplish was being able to sit down with him and understand that he had this extremely ambitious concept of doing a highly entertaining Hollywood film, but is existential and cerebral and surreal.”

Co-star Joseph Gordon- Levitt took a similiar view.

“Normally when you read a script you know exactly what’s going to happen and it doesn’t really take much thought to figure everything out,” he says.

“I enjoy a challenge or provocation, something to think about, to talk about after it’s done. So yeah, first time I read it I found it posed a challenge and that’s enjoyable to me rather than just reading through something that I’ve seen before.

“Then seeing the final movie, with so many of these ideas you’re reading in the script I can go back and figure them out, but when visually rendered just become visceral and much more emotional.”

Being in a movie so concerned with dreams must have caused the cast to consider their own sleeping thoughts. Not, it seems, in DiCaprio’s case. He’s not a big dreamer, he says.

He tried to take a very traditional approach to research on the film by reading the analysis of dreams and trying to pick on the psychology of what things represent in the dream world. Then he had second thoughts.

“I quickly realised this is a whole new type of preparation and I basically talked to Chris at great length about this therapy session my character goes on, this psychoanalysis. Doing that created this powerful emotional journey.

“As far as the analysis of the dreams in this movie and how Chris was going to make four different states of human subconscious into a cohesive plot structure, I left entirely up to him and didn’t want to get involved. He’s obviously very capable of pulling off complex narratives like this and making emotionally engaging films out of it.”

On the subject of dreams, the Titanic actor reckons his professional dream is to continue being a working actor. As for personal dreams, his wish “that we can co-exist with this planet a little better” reflects his work on environmental issues.

For DiCaprio, Inception comes only a few months after his starring role in Martin Scorsese’s thriller Shutter Island, which also deal with similiar themes of dream-like states.

“They had similiar character attributes but the execution couldn’t have been more far apart. It’s something Chris and I talked about, but there was such a unique through line with this character in Inception. He’s addicted to the dream world and to an alternate reality. He keeps escaping to that reality to come to terms with the truth about his past trauma.

The two films couldn’t have been further apart as far as experiences were concerned,”

he says.

He knows he’s being playing “some pretty intense”

characters lately, which he thinks is therapeutic in a way.

“It’s amazing to completely focus on something for four, five, six months and have it completely consume your life and constantly be thinking about somebody else’s set of circumstances and how you emotionally react to something. I find it fascinating and it’s rewarding on a personal and professional level.”

Levitt-Gordon, who starred in the award-winng (500) Days Of Summer after finding success as a teenager on TV comedy Third Rock From The Sun, faced physical challenges on revolving sets designed to create the effect of zero gravity. Before fiming began, Nolan joked that there was going to be some pain involved. “It was a little painful occasionally, but no more than just playing a hard game of football or whatever.

American football, that is,”

says the actor.

“Honestly, it was just about as much fun as I’ve ever had on a set. I felt like a little kid playing in the backyard, playing pretend ,but it was really happening.

“I love the fact it wasn’t done in front of a green screen because that really would be just playing pretend. But because he’d had built these enormous contraptions and had various devices and techniques, the floor really was spinning out from under my feet and I really was ten storeys up in the air with nothing beneath me.

“That makes the scenes a lot more compelling because I don’t have to fool the audience into feeling I’m offbalance because I really was off-balance. And that comes across – there are sequences that look really different to digitally-created action scenes and that’s a big part of why it’s so much fun to watch.”

For Nolan, those zero gravity fight scenes were the most challenging scenes in the film to shoot in some ways. “We were very fortunate to have Joe doing them because he’s not only naturally very acrobatic but is dedicated to making that illusion.

“I think he underplayed slightly in his answer – the difficulty of what he was doing was extraordinary. He was hanging upside down for hours at a time with choreographed fight scenes.

But he makes it look extremely natural, extremely easy and that’s why those illusions work.

“It was a huge risk building these sets. If Joe hadn’t wanted to do it or hadn’t been as good as he was we’d have been in terrible trouble.

“What turned out to be the hardest scenes to film, because in some ways it was the most ambitious, was we had to shoot all these scenes in heavy rain but we had to shoot in Los Angeles in the middle of summer. We put rain towers at the top of buildings. Dealing with any kind of conditions like that makes everything tricky in terms of the equipment and keeping people dry when they need to be dry.”