I recently had the sexy pleasure of interviewing Dileep Rao for New York Magazine. A lot of great stuff came from it, although some of it got a little too side-tracked or surreal for a coherent interview. Thus, I proudly present, A Nerd Contest with Inception’s Dileep Rao:
Can we talk about the subjective time in each level? I mean, the intercutting between dream levels and the subjective time between them is crazy
The technical term for that is “effing bananas.” But seriously, that takes vision. Movies are like pointillism. You make each pixel moment by moment and then it’s all put up on the canvas to fulfill the vision you saw at first, and you see it suddenly, how it all comes together. So that process took so long, so many shooting days in so many locations. That’s why the director is the guiding force, the captain of the ship. And you have to ask yourself those crucial acting questions: “Where did I just come from? What just happened? What matters right now?”
It actually sounds a lot one of the ideas in the film, how you just appear in a dream. On set, someone says “action” and you’re in a scene with no idea how you got there, no connection to what came before.
Except in both cases, it will be edited into sense.
Either by the mind, or by the director/editor.
Exactly.
Mal’s ideas reminded me of this kooky thought experiment called Quantum Immortality. The idea is that your consciousness can’t die. If you put a gun to your head and pulled the trigger, to every other observer you would die, but you’d be transported to a universe where the gun would jam. That idea has the same sort of unfortunate unverifiability that Mal proposes to Cobb: “Take a leap of faith with me… by dying?”
Quantum Immortality is such a dipshit idea that exploits the utterly unverifiable idea of quantum conflation and says, as a syllogism, that you would experience the one universe where the gun jams, because in every other one you are annihilated. That seems like pretty thin evidence to go on for such a crazy-ass proof. It’s a misappropriation of concepts from quantum theory about observers being essential to collapsing Schrödinger equations, or something.
But I think that’s part of what’s so intriguing/disturbing about Mal’s idea. There’s no real way to know if you’re dreaming or not. You can’t step outside the system. You’d just keep getting Gödel-pwn3d.
Well in that sense, without a totem, it’s utterly unverifiable whether or not you’re dreaming. It’s non-disclosable from within the system.
There’s some cool “unverifiable” analogues going on, like with Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the freefall hotel. He’s facing the classic thought experiment that lead to general relativity. There’s no way to tell if you’re in a gravitational field–
–or in an elevator being accelerated against. That comes from the basic equality of acceleration and gravity, and it led to us knowing they’re equivalent. Someone in the elevator can never know if it’s accelerating or if it’s gravity. Unverifiable, just like the dream-states.
But that’s where the totem saves the day, right?
Again, I think the fact that all these discussions are happening are a great testimony to peoples’ reactions to original ideas and original filmmaking. I’m just so glad that that’s being rewarded. It isn’t just about visual pyrotechnics or emotional pornography like some of the other summer movies are. The idea that we’re going to live in a world of Transformers and G.I. Joe for an elongated period of time is a fallacy. I just don’t think people treat those movies like they’re watching a movie that has real humanity in it. I honestly don’t think those movies really stimulate 25 or 35-year-old people. But this movie does. Two or three days later people are saying “I have to see it again I have to see it again.” It’s like we performed an inception on them.
Did you perform an inception on the people at the 8:20 Arclight showing, where the air conditioning broke and they stopped the showing halfway through? A.K.A. The Rodney King of movie screenings?
Oh God. No, I was outside with Chris Nolan though, just by coincidence. I was coming to watch the end of the 8:20. But people thought we were coming to fix it, like we’re AC guys or HVAC guys. They didn’t know at first. I mean, it was like Apocalypto. This movie would be the worst movie ever to see half of.
Maybe Nolan could have spun it like that was the intended experience. He’s the John Cage of filmmakers.
Or we could have pumped the theater full of ether and knocked everyone out fifty minutes in…
…Incept them with the ending, only make half a movie, and save half the budget?
Yeah, but why does that sound like a lawsuit waiting to happen?
