“I absolutely desperately needed him”: the actor Christopher Nolan refused to make a movie without
Christopher Nolan has always been great at picking lead actors, and the likes of Cillian Murphy, Christian Bale, Anne Hathaway, and Robin Williams have delivered some of their best performances under his stewardship. When it came time to take the biggest gamble of his career on an original idea that would cost Warner Bros $170million, though, Nolan knew he needed a star capable of going above and beyond. In fact, he refused to make the movie without this actor, who he had previously tried to woo unsuccessfully for a decade.
The initial announcement of Inception, Nolan’s seventh film, called it a sci-fi thriller “set within the architecture of the mind”. It didn’t reveal much else about the movie, though, and that veil of secrecy would remain around the film for much of its production. The cast, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Tom Hardy, and the aforementioned Murphy, all struggled to keep mum during production. Intriguingly, though, the film’s leading man loved keeping audiences in the dark.
“I actually like all the secrecy,” smiled Leonardo DiCaprio to Empire magazine. “I love not to talk about movies I’ve done in great detail before they’re seen…Much of the appeal of this movie is going to be experiencing the journey with the characters and not knowing what to expect.”
Before DiCaprio signed on the dotted line to play dream thief Dom Cobb, Nolan met with him several times about previous projects. Nolan believed DiCaprio had that all-too-rare star quality that all movie idols need, but was also an incredibly skilled actor. He revealed, “I always felt he would be a great collaborator, just in sitting and talking about projects, even though nothing came of them. I was never able to convince him in the past, but just his initial take on scripts is fascinating to engage with.”
When he put Inception together, Nolan knew that the film had the potential to be something special, but he also knew it could easily go wrong if he weren’t careful. The script was intricately plotted, and he envisioned several mind-bending action set pieces which would blow the audience’s minds. Still, he was also fearful that all this pomp and circumstance would mean nothing if people couldn’t relate to the characters. He explained, “I’d written Inception as sort of a clever-clever heist movie. And heist movies tend to be deliberately superficial and glamorous.”
Nolan knew he needed a star who could ground proceedings in something real. Someone who could bring the audience along for the ride while never letting them forget about the human stakes of the story. For him, DiCaprio was the ideal man for the job, and there would be no substitutes. He revealed, “I needed him to bring the thing together, open it up to the audience and make it a human story, and he’s done that extraordinarily well.” He confessed, “I absolutely desperately needed him.”
Indeed, once DiCaprio’s casting was secured, it became obvious there truly wouldn’t have been a film without him. Nolan constructed the rest of the cast like a jigsaw puzzle based on how he felt they’d fit alongside the main part. The director told the Toronto Star, “I certainly wanted to get a young, energetic cast around him who wouldn’t make him look younger, if you know what I mean. I think it was important that Leo felt like the leader of the group; felt like the most mature.”
As for why DiCaprio finally agreed to join Nolan’s world and make an enormous blockbuster – something he’s mostly avoided in his career – the star admitted he just couldn’t get Inception out of his head. The cerebral aspects of the story convinced him that Nolan’s dream odyssey wouldn’t be a generic blockbuster like the ones he’d seen a thousand times before.
He told Empire, “It reminded me of Insomnia or Memento, but on steroids. I just became immediately intrigued by this concept, this dream-heist notion and how this character’s going to unlock his dream world and ultimately affect his real-life.”
