“The only job that was ever of interest to me other than filmmaking is architecture.”
—Christopher Nolan
Nolan has a legacy of constructing his films from an architect’s point of view. His storytelling relies more heavily on structure than character development or action. He shuffles his narratives as puzzle films — typically unfolding his stories in a non-linear presentation, very similar to the work of Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel, Biutiful).
In a sense, Inception is about that act of architecture and creation. The creation of worlds, which also is ultimately the role of the filmmaker: to create a world for the audience in which a theme (or inception) is dramatized.
In his November 2010 interview for Wired magazine with Robert Capps, Nolan explains:
“The important thing in Inception is the mental process. What the dream-share technology enables them to do is remove physicality from that process. It’s about pure creation. That’s why it’s a film about architects rather than soldiers.”
Nolan is not unlike his main protagonist Cobb, planning a film as though he were working on a heist:
“I’m a visual thinker, so I’ll put up a big sheet of paper on the wall and I’ll start drawing Venn diagrams…I had to do a lot of timelines in terms of pyramid shapes and things like that.”
Creative Screenwriting
This time around, Nolan also employs another lesser known structural technique — that of the frame story. A frame story works very much like a Russian Matryoshka doll, in which a doll exists inside a doll wherein another doll exists and so forth. An excellent prior example in cinema (also noticed by the insightful Gregory Crosby of Monkey Goggles) is the obscure cult-classic, The Saragossa Manuscript by Wojciech Has, based on the novel of the same name. The author’s castle is also the subject of a recent stop-motion animated film, Inventorium Sladów, by the legendary Brothers Quay (best known for their short film, Street of Crocodiles).
As revealed in Nolan’s interview with Jeff Goldsmith at Creative Screenwriting, Nolan was highly influenced by Graham Swift’s 1983 book, Waterland:
“It opened my eyes to something I found absolutely shocking at the time,” Nolan says. “It’s structured with a series of parallel timelines and effortlessly tells a story using history — a contemporary story and various timelines that were close together in time (recent past and less recent past), and it actually cross cuts these timelines with such ease that, by the end, he’s literally sort of leaving sentences unfinished and you’re filling in the gaps.”
He also took inspiration from the cross-cutting and visual imagery of Pink Floyd: The Wall and the films of Nicholas Roeg:
“I’ve tried to stand on the shoulders of giants, in terms of these experiments in both literature and film, and to try and take those techniques and actually give a more mainstream experience to an audience while using those kinds of freedoms. It’s incredibly liberating to be able to tell a story without feeling that you’re bound by the convention of telling it chronologically, which is a convention that really only exists in movies.”
And that’s exactly what Nolan does. He makes art films for the masses — in between a Batman film here and there. In the case of Inception, he pulls it off by packing in a load of genre and stylistic conventions (heist, action, film-noir) that give audiences a familiar environment for a starting point. From there, he then utilizes nested timelines to maintain suspense and cross-cutting between them in order to give a sense of urgency — an illusion of action. In the end though, as Nolan himself admits, it’s a film about architects instead of soldiers.
Sources:
Q&A: Christopher Nolan on Dreams, Architecture, and Ambiguity
Wired Magazine
Robert Capps
The Architect of Dreams
Creative Screenwriting July/August 2010, Vol. 17, No. 4
Jeff Goldsmith