I've recently seen "Inception" (instant review: great effects, interesting ideas, too long by half an hour, especially the snow scenes). Writer-director Christopher Nolan told MTV about his creative process:
"It felt like there's a world here that I'm just trying to understand and put together for the audience. ... You feel like it already exists, and you're kind of uncovering it."
I think we've all experienced that--but never enough.
Inception has a complex (some might say convoluted) structure but Nolan says he didn't create a bible to keep track of all the characters and story strands. "I kept thinking about doing that," he said. "But what happens is, you come up with a rule set, then you're writing the script, and you need the story to go somewhere else, you don't want to go back in and change the rule set...the rules are sort of evolutionary in a film like 'Inception.' You have to be true to them. There's no question about that. You can't cheat with them. But you don't want to sit down and put one to 10, 'OK, these are the rules."
He added: "Writing is a strange thing, because sometimes it's cart before horse," he added. "Sometimes you know there's a scene that's going to happen, but you don't quite know how you're going to get there. And that's one of the things that I really enjoy about writing."
About halfway through, I gave up trying to keep track of which dream we were in and just sat back and enjoyed it, although, as I said, the last 45 minutes drags. The other issue for me is that the idea that they were trying to implant in their target's mind never came alive as being all that important. But as summer blockbusters go, Inception has more interesting ideas underlying it than all the others put together.
