Inception

Inception is a 2010 science fiction action heist film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, who also produced it with Emma Thomas, his wife. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a professional thief who steals information by infiltrating the subconscious of his targets. He is offered a chance to have his criminal history erased as payment for the implantation of another person's idea into a target's subconscious. The ensemble cast includes Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Elliot Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, Dileep Rao, and Michael Caine.

After the 2002 completion of Insomnia, Nolan presented to Warner Bros. a written 80-page treatment for a horror film envisioning "dream stealers," based on lucid dreaming. Deciding he needed more experience before tackling a production of this magnitude and complexity, Nolan shelved the project and instead worked on 2005's Batman Begins, 2006's The Prestige, and 2008's The Dark Knight. The treatment was revised over six months and was purchased by Warner in February 2009. Inception was filmed in six countries, beginning in Tokyo on June 19 and ending in Canada on November 22. Its official budget was $160 million, split between Warner Bros. and Legendary. Nolan's reputation and success with The Dark Knight helped secure the film's US$100 million in advertising expenditure.

Inception's premiere was held in London on July 8, 2010; it was released in both conventional and IMAX theaters beginning on July 16, 2010. Inception grossed over $837 million worldwide, becoming the fourth-highest-grossing film of 2010. Considered one of the best films of the 2010s, Inception, among its numerous accolades, won four Oscars (Best Cinematography, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, Best Visual Effects) and was nominated for four more (Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Original Score) at the 83rd Academy Awards.

Dom Cobb and Arthur are "extractors" who perform corporate espionage using experimental dream-sharing technology to infiltrate their targets' subconscious and extract information. Their latest target, Saito, is impressed with Cobb's ability to layer multiple dreams within each other. He offers to hire Cobb for the ostensibly impossible job of implanting an idea into a person's subconscious; performing "inception" on Robert Fischer, the son of Saito's competitor Maurice Fischer, with the idea to dissolve his father's company. In return, Saito promises to clear Cobb's criminal status, allowing him to return home to his children.

Cobb accepts the offer and assembles his team: a forger named Eames, a chemist named Yusuf, and a college student named Ariadne. Ariadne is tasked with designing the dream's architecture, something Cobb himself cannot do for fear of being sabotaged by his mind's projection of his late wife, Mal. Maurice Fischer dies, and the team sedates Robert Fischer into a three-layer shared dream on an airplane to America bought by Saito. Time on each layer runs slower than the layer above, with one member staying behind on each to perform a music-synchronized "kick" (using the French song "Non, je ne regrette rien") to awaken dreamers on all three levels simultaneously.

The team abducts Robert in a city on the first level, but his trained subconscious projections attack them. After Saito is wounded, Cobb reveals that while dying in the dream would usually awaken dreamers, Yusuf's sedatives will instead send them into "Limbo": a world of infinite subconscious. Eames impersonates Robert's godfather, Peter Browning, to introduce the idea of an alternate will to dissolve the company.

Cobb tells Ariadne that he and Mal entered Limbo while experimenting with dream-sharing, experiencing fifty years in one night due to the time dilation with reality. After waking up, Mal still believed she was dreaming. Attempting to "wake up," she committed suicide and framed Cobb for her murder to force him to do the same. Cobb fled the U.S., leaving his children behind.

Yusuf drives the team around the first level as they are sedated into the second level, a hotel dreamed by Arthur. Cobb persuades Robert that Browning has kidnapped him to stop the dissolution and that Cobb is a defensive projection, leading Robert to another third level deeper as part of a ruse to enter Robert's subconscious.

In the third level, the team infiltrates an alpine fortress with a projection of Maurice inside, where the inception itself can be performed. However, Yusuf performs his kick too soon by driving off a bridge, forcing Arthur and Eames to improvise a new set of kicks synchronized with them hitting the water by rigging an elevator and the fortress, respectively, with explosives. Mal then appears and kills Robert before he can be subjected to the inception, and he and Saito are lost in Limbo, forcing Cobb and Ariadne to rescue them in time for Robert's inception and Eames's kick. Cobb reveals that during their time in Limbo, Mal refused to return to reality; Cobb had to convince her it was only a dream, accidentally incepting in her the belief that the real world was still a dream. Cobb makes peace with his part in Mal's death. Ariadne kills Mal's projection and wakes Robert up with a kick.

Revived into the third level, Robert discovers the planted idea: his dying father telling him to create something for himself. While Cobb searches for Saito in Limbo, the others ride the synced kicks back to reality. Cobb finds an aged Saito and reminds him of their agreement. The dreamers all awaken on the plane, and Saito makes a phone call. Arriving in Los Angeles, Cobb passes the immigration checkpoint, and his father-in-law accompanies him to his home. Cobb uses Mal's "totem" – a top that spins indefinitely in a dream – to test if he is indeed in the real world, but he chooses not to observe the result and instead joins his children.

Initially, Christopher Nolan wrote an 80-page treatment about dream-stealers. Nolan had originally envisioned Inception as a horror film, but eventually wrote it as a heist film even though he found that "traditionally [they] are very deliberately superficial in emotional terms." Upon revisiting his script, he decided that basing it in that genre did not work because the story "relies so heavily on the idea of the interior state, the idea of dream and memory. I realized I needed to raise the emotional stakes."

Nolan worked on the script for nine to ten years. When he first started thinking about making the film, Nolan was influenced by "that era of movies where you had The Matrix (1999), you had Dark City (1998), you had The Thirteenth Floor (1999) and, to a certain extent, you had Memento (2000), too. They were based in the principles that the world around you might not be real."

Nolan first pitched the film to Warner Bros. in 2001, but decided that he needed more experience making large-scale films, and embarked on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. He soon realized that a film like Inception needed a large budget because "as soon as you're talking about dreams, the potential of the human mind is infinite. And so the scale of the film has to feel infinite. It has to feel like you could go anywhere by the end of the film. And it has to work on a massive scale." After making The Dark Knight, Nolan decided to make Inception and spent six months completing the script. Nolan said that the key to completing the script was wondering what would happen if several people shared the same dream. "Once you remove the privacy, you've created an infinite number of alternative universes in which people can meaningfully interact, with validity, with weight, with dramatic consequences."

Nolan had been trying to work with Leonardo DiCaprio for years and met him several times, but was unable to recruit him for any of his films until Inception. DiCaprio finally agreed because he was "intrigued by this concept—this dream-heist notion and how this character's going to unlock his dreamworld and ultimately affect his real life." He read the script and found it to be "very well written, comprehensive but you really had to have Chris in person, to try to articulate some of the things that have been swirling around his head for the last eight years." DiCaprio and Nolan spent months talking about the screenplay. Nolan took a long time re-writing the script in order "to make sure that the emotional journey of his [DiCaprio's] character was the driving force of the movie." On February 11, 2009, it was announced that Warner Bros. purchased Inception, a spec script written by Nolan.

Principal photography began in Tokyo on June 19, 2009, with the scene in which Saito first hires Cobb during a helicopter flight over the city.

The production moved to the United Kingdom and shot in a converted airship hangar in Cardington, Bedfordshire, north of London. There, the hotel bar set which tilted 30 degrees was built. A hotel corridor was also constructed by Guy Hendrix Dyas, the production designer, Chris Corbould, the special effects supervisor, and Wally Pfister, the director of photography; it rotated a full 360 degrees to create the effect of alternate directions of gravity for scenes set during the second level of dreaming, where dream-sector physics become chaotic. The idea was inspired by a technique used in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Nolan said, "I was interested in taking those ideas, techniques, and philosophies and applying them to an action scenario". The filmmakers originally planned to make the hallway only 40 feet (12 m) long, but as the action sequence became more elaborate, the hallway's length was increased to 100 ft (30 m). The corridor was suspended along eight large concentric rings that were spaced equidistantly outside its walls and powered by two massive electric motors.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays Arthur, spent several weeks learning to fight in a corridor that spun like "a giant hamster wheel". Nolan said of the device, "It was like some incredible torture device; we thrashed Joseph for weeks, but in the end we looked at the footage, and it looks unlike anything any of us has seen before. The rhythm of it is unique, and when you watch it, even if you know how it was done, it confuses your perceptions. It's unsettling in a wonderful way". Gordon-Levitt remembered, "it was six-day weeks of just, like, coming home at night battered ... The light fixtures on the ceiling are coming around on the floor, and you have to choose the right time to cross through them, and if you don't, you're going to fall." On July 15, 2009, filming took place at University College London for the sequences occurring inside a Paris college of architecture in the story, including the library, Flaxman Gallery and Gustav Tuck Theatre.