Christopher Nolan’s filmography is full of great contributions to the history of cinema. From the ‘Dark Knight’ trilogy, through ‘Interstellar’ or the Oscar-winning ‘Oppenheimer’. However, none of these is, for the filmmaker, his greatest film. The director spoke about it, saying that it took him no less than a decade to get it off the ground.
The truth is that, as he himself admitted, from the moment he began to make his first sketches about the film until it reached cinemas around the world, 10 years passed. The problem, according to him, is that he was terrified that the project, because of its size, would not turn out as he expected.
‘Tenet’, Christopher Nolan’s headache
The film in question is ‘Inception’, which saw the light of day in 2010. However, the first time the studio heard about it was in 2002, when Christopher Nolan, after the release of ‘Insomnia’ in 2002, sat down with them and showed them the idea he was working on. However, the importance of the film, as well as his involvement in ‘The Dark Knight’, ended up delaying everything.
“They were quite enthusiastic about what I was proposing to them, but I realised that I wasn’t ready to develop it. I wasn’t ready to write it at that time,” he told Collider. He added: “For the last 10 years it stayed in my head (…) But I think I didn’t know how to get emotionally involved with it. I didn’t know how to finish the script emotionally in a sense.”
The key point for ‘Inception’ to end up in the cinema and be a success, according to Nolan, was the signing of Leonardo DiCaprio. “Leo’s involvement was really the end of that process for me because with his attention to the emotional life of the character and what that should mean for the audience, I think I finally found that emotional connection with the material that I depend on as a filmmaker.”