Last summer, in the depths of a Japanese castle, a camera filming Christopher Nolan’s newest sci-fi flick began shaking violently. This was no mechanical failure; it was cinematographer Wally Pfister playing with ways to capture the turbulent world of the mind. The resulting movie, Inception, stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a man who possesses coveted technology that lets him break into people’s dreams to steal their deepest secrets or to plant life-altering ideas.
Despite a budget of $150 million, Nolan insisted on creating these dreamscapes with minimal digital effects. “In the earliest conversations I had with Chris, he said, ‘Remember, this is a dream world. When you’re in a dream, it feels real and you believe it’s real,’” Pfister says. “He didn’t want the film to have an overstylized, surreal look.” For the chaotic castle scene, Pfister (who also shot Nolan’s Memento and The Dark Knight) tested three devices that mechanically shook the camera. In the end he decided just to grab the camera and jostle it himself.
Inception weaves among mental states, from wide-awake to dreaming to dreaming within a dream. “It’s an adventure movie, but in a really cerebral way,” Pfister says. The technical and visual challenges of filming dreams were much different from those of shooting Batman on the prowl, he notes. “And it’s a breath of fresh air to jump onto a project that doesn’t have a guy in pointy ears.”
