The movie may be the trippiest, most mind-bending thriller in years, but it is also a hit. Director Christopher Nolan opens up in this week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly about his 10-year odyssey of getting it to the screen. The sci-fi psycho-thriller, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, about thieves who steal secrets from people’s dreams, may be too confusing to be a crowd-pleaser. “This is a real nail-biter,” Nolan says of the perception that it might be too confusing. “I really want this to work for an audience. They just need to relax and go with it. Yes, afterward there could be disagreements about what things mean. But hopefully there will be a unified response to the roller-coaster ride of it all.”

Nolan doesn’t have to worry – the movie took in $62.8 million during its opening weekend, an impressive haul for a 148-minute live-action extravaganza that isn’t a sequel or in 3-D or both. The credit can go to DiCaprio’s box office clout, Nolan’s growing reputation, an ad campaign showcasing the film’s dazzling images of crumbling skyscrapers, cityscapes, and zero-gravity fisticuffs.

The first half of Inception is dense with exposition, while the second half dives from dream to dream to dream to dream. How one feels about Inception most likely depends on how one feels about the pitch that hooked DiCaprio. Says the star: “When you hear that Chris Nolan wants to make a film that’s about four different stages of the subconscious, that’s a psychoanalysis of a character coming to terms with his past, that’s set around the world, that’s a combination of Insomnia, Memento, and studio-system spectacle, you say, ‘This is gonna be a unique experience.’”

For Nolan, Inception is a true dream project. His producer and wife, Emma Thomas, recalls that her husband has been fascinated by the subject of dreams since their days in college. Once The Dark Knight happened and his film grossed $1 billion worldwide, Nolan found himself in a position where he didn’t need to downsize his ambitions at all. “It’s hard to convince a studio to give you a large budget to shoot an epic movie,” says the director. “When you’ve done it a couple times, there’s a lot more confidence.”

And the film was very personal to him. “[The script] had a lot more emotion packed into it than anything Chris had written before,” says his longtime cinematographer Wally Pfister. “Right away, it felt much more like Memento than one of the Batman pictures.” But Nolan admits that Inception reflects an evolution of philosophy. “As a filmmaker starting out, there was a resistance to emotion, because you so often see the insincere version of it in movies,” he says. “Yet over time, and during the Batman movies in particular, I was forced to reexamine my own process of watching a film. What I realized is that what I respond to most is emotion – which is what audiences respond to the most as well.”

Nolan was lucky enough to land a leading man with a track record for helping high-minded directors connect with audiences via complex characters. “I like playing unreliable protagonists,” says DiCaprio, who spent three months working with Nolan to flesh out a credible back story for his character Cobb. “I couldn’t take a traditional approach to preparation. There were no references that I could grasp onto in the real world. To keep that story line consistent was difficult. Then again, if I’m on set, and there’s nothing to think about, that’s not a fun day at work for me.”

Now if only the hype can make Inception a certifiable hit. The opening is proof of the public’s interest, but the film still has a long way to go to recoup its production and marketing costs for Warner Bros. and co financier Legendary Pictures. Nolan believes that at a time when Hollywood studios focus on sequels and franchise reboots, they need to produce new ideas, too. “It’s definitely a risk for studios to support original material. But it’s an even bigger risk not to,” says Nolan. “Even in making a sequel, you have to be fresh. You have to be different. You have to take risks.”

Entertainment Weekly

Tags: Christopher Nolan, Entertainment Weekly, Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio