Day Dreaming
In the years since this idea inspired Nolan he’s become an Oscar- and WGA-nominated screenwriter (Memento, The Dark Knight), and if there’s one constant in his body of work, it’s his original voice. Although Nolan projects the persona of a film-school grad, his educational roots have a literary basis. He heeded his father’s advice to earn an academic degree before doing something more vocational (such as filmmaking)so he studied literature at University College in London, knowing that grounding himself in the mechanics of characters and narrative would free him up to study the technical and thematic aspects of filmmaking later. Shortly after joining the school’s film society, Nolan began making 16mmfilms, which merged his literary and filmic pursuits as his shorts began playing at small film festivals.
During his studies, Nolan read Graham Swift’s 1992 book, “Waterland,” which quickly became a favorite that still inspires his writing today. “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 of Dreams Christopher Nolan ease that, by the end, he’s literally sort of leaving sentences unfinished and you’re filling in the gaps.” Nolan also took note of the films of Nicolas Roeg and analyzed Alan Parker’s Pink Floyd The Wall. “It’s an extraordinary example of cross cutting symbols and imagery to create a narrative effect,” he says. “I always felt that 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.”
As time passed and the idea for Inception continued forming in Nolan’s mind, a series of films hit theaters in the 1990s that examined the nature of reality and reinvigorated his interest in fleshing out the story. The Matrix, Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor and, he notes, “to a certain extent even Fight Club,” moved the project away from the horror genre it had initially been percolating in. Even his own film Memento, released right after these other films, mindbendingly examined a character’s own skewed view of both himself and the chronology of events in the world around him. This was about the time the project moved into the dream realm. “Cinema for me is a very dream-like experience,” Nolan says. “I’ve always been fascinated by dreams and wanted to make a film about dreams because I felt like it was something that’s very underexplored in cinema, given the relationship I feel between the way imagination works in a dream and the stories you construct for yourself and what it’s like to watch a movie and lose yourself in a film.”
Dreams have also visually influenced Nolan’s writing over the years. “It’s usually the odd image or small element that might come to me in a dream that I might write-down as soon as I wake up,” he says. Although he admits that his dreams rarely inspire story elements, he’s quick to point out that he believes the human mind can solve problems while we’re asleep. “I get a lot out of thinking about things as I’m going to sleep,” he says. “In that state of consciousness, before you actually get to sleep, that’s often where I’ll gain insight. If you’ve been beating your head against the wall about how to fix something in a script, when you go to bed and tell yourself, ‘OK, stop thinking about it now because you have to go to sleep,’ and you’re actually trying not to think about it — quite often that frees a different part of your brain and you’ll actually come up with a solution.”


Heisting the Heist Genre
Nolan first envisioned the project as a heist film during which ideas are stolen by a team of corporate espionage thieves led by Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), who helps plan and then invade an unsuspecting person’s mind through his dreams. In itself, this would have been enough for a film, but the auteur strived for more. “What was always interesting to me is the idea that if you’re penetrating layers of somebody’s psyche, there’s only so much interest you can get out of removing something from that,” he says. So Nolan invented a wilder goal in which this group of cybernetic thieves are tasked with planting an idea in someone’s mind, one that this person would be averse to following through on during his conscious life. But with the proper planning and research, this idea would merely serve as the inception to lead that person toward the client’s desired goal. It’s a genius new twist in the narrative dynamics of mind control. “The idea that you would plot something that would have to grow in a particular way and you’d have to predict the chaotic way in which that thing might grow through somebody’s mind — it seemed a much bigger payoff for the premise,” he says.
He also decided to involve the audience as a partner in the intricate planning that goes into such a heist film — to the point of nearly making them complicit to the crime— as a way to illuminate the highest aspirations of the genre. “One of the fascinating things about the heist movie, and one of the reasons I took this as the model, is that the type of exposition that in most films is problematic, boring, tricky, hard to get through— in a heist movie becomes the meat of it,” Nolan says. “It’s part of the entertainment, simply because the process of a heist movie and that sort of procedure, the way they put things together, becomes the reason you’re watching the story.”
A staple of the genre is that, at a certain point, the audience stops receiving information about the final stages of the heist and then only experiences it later as an outsider, newly entertained and in awe of the amount of planning involved. Nolan smartly flipped this conceit on its head and instead of keeping the audience at a distance, he decided to take them along for the entire ride. The subtle reconfiguration allows for the audience and the characters to sweat together whenever any hiccups arise in the well-thought-out plan. With such a fascinating world to explore, Nolan sat down to write what he thought would be a quick script. “I would get to page80 and I would get completely stuck with‘Where does it go?’” he says. “Because it was missing something.” That was a decade ago.


Cracking It
The missing element became clear as Nolan continued to mature as both a filmmaker and a person. “I learned that my idea about what motivates me to make a film has changed over the years,” he says. “I wrote Memento very much as a puzzle box. I was fascinated by the ideas of structure. I was fascinated with my brother’s [Jonathan] short story.” But Nolan credits actor Guy Pearce for bringing a heightened level of emotion to the character and the film. “I had written the emotional passages in Memento and I really tried to think as that character,” he continues,“but that hadn’t been my primary fascination with the material, and I think a lesser actor, who didn’t get the pathos of the situation or the general emotion of the character, would have made it a very sterile movie, and I think people wouldn’t respond to it.” What Nolan realized when watching the finished film is that Pearce’s performance opened the material up with an unexpectedly emotional perspective that drew audiences in even more than he anticipated. “What really connected me with it was not the ideas of it or cleverness of structural tricks; it was just in feeling something for this character,” he says. “Over the films I’ve made, even as they’ve gotten bigger and bigger, I’ve realized that I need a very strong emotional connection with the characters in the film to stay interested and passionate about a project over the years it takes to make it.” Such was also the case with Inception, which he continually returned to after completing his other films. “What I realized when I came back to it was that I was missing that emotional connection with the material because I had changed.”
Ultimately, one of the problems plaguing Nolan early in his writing was Cobb’s motivation. He was planning the heist both for financial reasons and to be able to return home. It seems the concept of what home meant to Cobb was initially too vague, and, as time marched on while Inception sat in a drawer, Nolan became a husband and a father. “As my life changed, the things that are important to me changed,” he says. Once Nolan realized that change, new emotional stakes were added to Cobb’s plight of trying to reclaim his life and return to his family. As Nolan explains, “Those are the highest emotional stakes I could imagine.”
Embracing Emotional Writing
One of the greatest difficulties screenwriters face when it comes to emotional writing is that it requires enough balance so that the boundaries between drama and melodrama stay well defined. While plot points can be outlined and carded, emotional writing needs to come from another place. “There are certain passages in my films where I’ve had to sit down and write almost stream of consciousness— just blurt [things] out in a very emotional way and then spend a long time editing them and making them practical,” Nolan says. “I have to feel it as I write it in that initial burst. Then you have to get cold and analytical and start splitting it up and structuring it for a movie. What it’s about to me is sincerity. The only guide I have is that if I really feel it myself — if you can really get that feeling in your gut of responding to something emotional as you write it — then you know that for you at least it’s true.” As Nolan explains, he doesn’t feel that all filmmakers approach this terrain as purely. “What I react against in other people’s work, as a filmgoer, is when I see something in a movie that I feel is supposed to make me feel emotional, but I don’t believe the filmmaker shares that emotion,” he says. “They just think that the audience will. And I think you can feel that separation. So any time I find myself writing something that I don’t really respond to, but I’m telling myself, ‘Oh yes, but the audience is going to like this,’ then I know I’m on the wrong track and I just throw it out.”


Although the planting of the “inception” in the mind of the unsuspecting businessman involves breathtaking technology, the job ultimately came down to an examination of the businessman’s emotional makeup and the way it could push him toward acting against his own interests, a fascinating concept that only occurred to Nolan once he examined his material from an emotional perspective. “I think it just crept up on me, in terms of exploring the world of dreams and the meaning of dreams because it’s such an intimate experience,” he says. “It also felt like more of a narrative experience. The idea of a team of people having to construct a narrative, much the way filmmakers get together and construct a story — maybe just because it’s been a process that I’ve engaged in myself, I can relate to it more.” Rather than relying only on the technology to plan the crime, the caper became more of personal invasion.“It would have to be a human experience rather than a classic technical MacGuffin that has something to do with corporate espionage,” he says. “I grew into the script and was able to finish it because I now knew what I cared about in the story and how I wanted to connect with the story emotionally.”
Active vs. PASIV Writing
Exposition has long remained a tricky obstacle for writers, as important plot points or character information needs to be explained, hopefully in an entertaining fashion. Nolan admits battling this as well and believes the key to making expository sequences interesting lies in keeping the writing active rather than passive. Amusingly, in the film — either on purpose or subconsciously — the device used to invade people’s dreams is known as the Portable Automated Somnacin Intra Venous, or PASIV device. “Exposition is such a massive demand,” he admits. “It’s something you have to just try and imbue in the relationships of the characters. You never want to find yourself in a scene where characters are passively receiving information in some way, because you don’t want the audience passively receiving information. You want them engaged with that dramatization.”
Helpful to Nolan’s process was his collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio, who combed through the script, scene by scene, in order to examine his character’s emotional truths and motivations. “One of the things it really forced me to do was to truly dramatize every beat of exposition so that the sum character reason for getting information is that the information means something,” Nolan says. “There’s certainly a beat in the film where there’s an important idea about being trapped inside the dream and about not being able to wake up from it. I had always put it in there as fairly neutral exposition [where] the characters were being fairly passive, and then after thrashing it over with Leo, I was pushed to the conclusion of dramatizing it through conflict. It made it work in a way it was not working before. It made the expositional scene into something that was important to the characters.”
A heightened importance of inanimate objects as personal icons or totems reappears throughout Nolan’s writing. “It’s not something I’ve been that conscious of,” he says.“Following is probably the first I’ve ever really dealt with it — right from the get-go with the idea of a person having a box and having these objects that signify them.” In this, Nolan’s debut feature, a thief (also named Cobb) relishes in showing a voyeur the relics of strangers, which are generally useless objects that would have no significance to anyone else in the world except their owner; objects that Cobb steals for his own amusement.“I’m interested in the idea that you can have an inanimate object that’s imbued with all kinds of emotional resonance and nostalgia,” Nolan says.
In Memento, Leonard (Pearce) uses a collection of his wife’s belongings, placed near him as he falls asleep, in hopes of reliving what happened on the night of her murder. When he fails to glean anything from the re-creation, Leonard purges the objects by burning them in a fire. Such a scene allowed Nolan to convey character exposition through action and visual signifiers rather than explanation, as Leonard’s disintegrating disconnect with both his memory of that night and the memories he believed the objects may hold are subtly reinforced. “It’s something that is fundamentally cinematic because a visual icon is probably the most resonant example of how you imbue experience, memory and emotion into an object,” he says.
In Inception, Nolan takes the use of personal icons a step further. Tasked with keeping their heads straight while experiencing multiple versions of reality, the heist team carries objects, the true physical nature of which only they know, as a way of identifying whether the “reality” they inhabit is real or fabricated.


The Unreliable Narrator
Inception, like much of Nolan’s other work, has a distinct film noir influence. “I’ve always enjoyed film noir more than any other genre,” he says. “One of the reasons I’ve always loved it is because so much of it is about the misapprehensions on the part of the protagonists. Often in film noir, the protagonist is his own worst enemy. Not necessarily in specific terms like in Memento, where it’s literally kind of self-sabotage, but simply in terms of paranoia, misunderstanding what’s going on, projecting their values or their ethics or perception onto other characters, like the femme fatale. These characters literally become projections of one’s own self.”
Inspired by the concept of the unreliable narrator from film noir, Nolan has Cobb assemble his team for a risky mission and, after all the prep work he assigns them, he forgets to mention that he may be the mission’s greatest liability. “Well, he doesn’t forget,” Nolan says. “That was very much the direction Leo wanted to push it, in terms of him actually actively hiding it in a sense.” The director and actor talked about using Hitchcock’s Vertigo as a reference, in which the audience inherently trusts the film’s protagonist based on the likeable actor playing the role and the character’s expertise — even though they shouldn’t. “You trust them,” Nolan continues, “because they’re confident and knowledgeable and an expert and all the rest and then, in Vertigo, there’s just that point where you realize, ‘Wow, this guy’s really, really cracked. This guy’s not who I thought he was.’ That’s a really fascinating journey to take the audience on. Lawrence of Arabia is another classic example. He’s such a winning, heroic figure for so much of the film that you always forget the second half of the film and how dark that character becomes. It’s pretty fascinating because it defies the conventional wisdom about sympathetic protagonists. It’s a tough thing to pull off and you need an actor who’s really up for it. Hopefully, we’ve achieved it in this film. There are certainly moments where I see what Cobb is doing and think, ‘Wow, he’s really being extraordinarily manipulative and extraordinarily anti-heroic,’ but somehow Leo keeps me on his side.”


The End?
A signature of Nolan’s writing lies in his ability to craft memorable endings. In Memento, he presented an “ignorance is bliss”-styled ending for Leonard that didn’t have any bearing on whether he actually accomplished his goal, because he’s happy with the results either way — results that he may even eventually repeat. “Memento is much more explicitly ambiguous and is about somebody lying to themselves and creating their own reality,” Nolan says. “When I was at the end of Memento, he’s just saying, ‘I think I know what’s going on,’ but you’ve just seen him lie to himself.”
With Inception, Nolan again delivers a distinctly unique ending that’s entirely organic to the story. “Endings are important to me, and I always want something in the ending to surprise me,” he says, “not necessarily in a big twist sort of way. I’m always looking for a fine balance of an emotional inevitability but with some slight shift in things that I haven’t seen coming. That, for me, is what constitutes the most satisfying ending as something that both fulfills your expectations and surprises you at the same time.”

帮忙翻译一下，俺英语不好

很多写作者都有一个躺在抽屉里的半成品，他们希望这些作品能够在某天重见天日然后大功告成，但是很少的人做到。
     这也是为什么，看见创作型导演诺兰长时间的草创变成这个夏天最好的电影乃至今年最好的原创电影剧本，感到那么的欢欣鼓舞。“很久以前，大概是我十六岁的时候，我开始尝试去构建这个故事”，诺兰说，“那个时候，我想要把它弄成一个恐怖片。后来它又被弄成了其他的类型，大概十年前，我最终了解了我怎么去完成它，然后《盗梦空间》应运而生了。
     在这个想法鼓舞诺兰的那些年里，他成为了一个被奥斯卡和编剧工会提名的编剧（《记忆碎片》，《蝙蝠侠前传2——黑暗骑士》），如果说他的作品有一个不变的东西，那就是他的原创精神。虽然诺兰有着电影学院毕业生的背景，但是他的教育却植根于文学基础。他听从了他父亲的建议，在做任何更加职业化的事情之前（比如电影），先获得一个学位。所以他开始在伦敦大学学院学习文学，文学的人物技巧和叙述方法为他日后学习电影的技巧和主题方面都奠定了基础。不久以后诺兰加入了学校的电影社团，他开始拍摄16mm的电影，这些杂糅了文学和电影的短片开始在一些短片电影节亮相。
     在学生时代，诺兰读了格雷厄姆·斯威夫特的《沃特兰》（1992）这本书立刻成了他最喜欢的书一直影响着他。诺兰说：“当时，这本书向我展示的东西让我非常惊奇，他采用了非常严密的平行叙事结构，轻松的描述了一段历史--而同时代的书都还是采用时间叙事的方法（最近发生的事情接在更早发生的事情之后），这种平行叙事手法就类似于诺兰的《盗梦空间》的叙事手法（这句翻的好像不对），同时这本书最后也采用了开放式结局让读者自己去想象。”同时诺兰也提到了尼古拉斯·尼格和艾伦帕克的《pink Floyd The Wall》“那是一个非常棒的穿越叙事创作的作品，我经常觉得是站在巨人的肩上——无论文学作品还是电影——然后尝试用这种技术和自由的叙事方法来向观众展示一个更为主流的题材，真的难以想象你可以完全脱离只有在电影产业中才会有的必要多时间叙事方法，自由的讲述一个故事。”
     随着时间的推移《盗梦空间》的雏形也在诺兰的脑子里渐渐成型，90年代各种各样的电影冲击着剧场，这些现实主义的电影重新唤起了他想拍《盗梦空间》的想法。但电影《黑客帝国》《移魂都市》《十三度凶间》包括《搏击俱乐部》让他打消了最初想拍成恐怖题材的电影的想法，之后上映的他自己的《记忆碎片》，扭曲的思想测试了他和他同时代的实际扭曲的视角（不理解，不会翻译）。当时诺兰想到应该把它设计成一个梦的世界。“电影对我来说就是一个做梦的过程。我一直对梦境很有兴趣并且想拍一部有关于梦的电影，因为我觉得那是一种非常非常值得探索的电影，它将你的想象出来的东西和你自己为自己创造的故事连在一起，就好像你看着自己迷失在自己的电影之中”


     最后的是，一个在诺兰早期写作当中困扰他的问题是cobb的动机。他之所以盗梦是因为经济原因和回家。家对cobb来说意味着什么是模糊的，随着时间过去，《盗梦空间》被锁住抽屉，诺兰成为了一个丈夫和一个父亲。”我的生活改变了，对我重要的事情改变了，“他说。一旦诺兰意识到了这种变化，拯救他的生活回归他的家庭加入到了cobb的情感考量中去。像诺兰说的，“那些都是我能想象到的最高级的情感考虑。”
     对于一个电影编剧来说，他们面临的最大问题之一是在描写情感的时候如何明确的定义出戏剧和音乐剧的界限，情节部分可以被突出，但感情部分的写作只能从别处得来。“在我电影中有很多段落我都不得不坐下来完全靠下意识的来写出一些东西—一些完全从情感世界蹦出来的东西，然后在慢慢的把它编辑成可以用的东西，我只能考感觉来写，然后你要冷静下来仔细分析他们，将他们揉碎了再加入到电影当中去。最终要的是发自内心，唯一能引导我的就是一些我自己的感情—你对于某种感情的第一本能反应。——这些灵感至少是对你来说是真实的。”就想诺兰所说的那样，他不认为所有的电影人都把这种方法做为唯一的方法。“我也常常作为一个影迷去看其他人的作品，我能够感觉到有些部分是试图传达情感给我的，但是我却感觉电影制作者不愿意传达这种感情。他们只是认为观众可能可以感受到，但观众只能感受到一些零星的感情，所以当我发现我自己在写到某处并不是本能反应而写下去的时候，我就会告诉自己，“恩，观众也不会这样反应”然后我就必须重写去写。”
     虽然在给那个毫无防备的商人植入一个“想法”的过程中，用到了大量令人惊叹的科技，但这项工作最重要的部分还是情感，让这个商人能够去做自己想做的事的情感,这个有趣的观念只在诺兰探索他自己的情感世界的时候出现过一次。诺兰说：“这种感觉是一种非常私密的情感，只有当我开始探询梦和梦的意义的时候我才感觉到他从某个地方慢慢的蔓延出来。那更像是一种叙述的感觉，一群家伙将一个想法叙述成故事，一群电影制作者聚集到一起来创作一个故事——或许只是我一个人在进行这样的过程，但我确实可以感觉的到。”相比依靠高科技来计划这次行动，它更象是一次个人入侵。“它必须是一次带有一些感性的过程而不是传统的用高科技武装起来的团体间谍活动，我能够写下并完成这个剧本，是因为我知道这个故事真正的重点在哪里，并且我也知道如何将他们与故事的情感部分完美结合”


《盗梦空间》，这部具有诺兰风格的电影，拥有与众不同的写实电影（灰色电影）影响。“比起其他类型，我更喜欢写实电影。”他说，“我喜欢它的原因之一是很多写实电影讲的都是发生在主人公身上的误解。在很多写实电影里，主人公就是他自己最大的敌人。不必要用专业术语说，比如在《记忆碎片》里，它看上去像是某种自虐，不过简单来说就是偏执，误解了发生的一切，把它们的价值或事实、认识强加到另外的人身上，像蛇蝎美人（人妖？）。这些人物实际上是一个人自身的部分。
     被写实电影不确定的叙事概念启发之后，诺兰要cobb为了一个危险的任务集合他的团队，在他集合他们的事先工作完成之后，他忘记了他可能是这个任务最大的敌人。“好的，他没有忘记”，诺兰说。“在很多方面里奥想要推倒它，不过在某种程度上他都在积极的躲藏。”导演和演员讨论将希区柯克的《眩晕》当做参考，观众固有的信任可爱的演员和角色的技术专长所创造出来的主人公，虽然他们本不应该。“你信任他们”，诺兰说，“因为他们自信并且知识广博，而且全都是专家，在《眩晕》里，你只能意识到一点。哦，这个家伙真是，真是狡猾。这个家伙不是我想当然的那样。那对观众来说实在是非常神奇的旅程。《阿拉伯的劳伦斯》是另一个经典案例。他在这部影片里大半是这样一个胜利的英雄形象以至于你会忘记影片的第二半段他变成了那么阴暗的角色。它很迷人，因为它蔑视传统上对于主角的同情。这是非常棘手的事情，你需要一个演员能够真正驾驭他。幸好，在这部片子里我们做到了。很多时侯，我看到cobb在做的在想的时候，会说，“wow，他真是巧妙又非同寻常的反英雄。不过有时候里奥会把我的注意力牵到他那边。”
     诺兰的作品特征在于他总是有能力写出令人难忘的结局。在《记忆碎片》里，他提出了“无知是幸福的结局”-在结尾处莱昂纳多完全没有认识到他是否完成了他的目标，因为无论是哪种结局他都很开心-他甚至会最终重蹈覆辙。“《记忆碎片》是明确的模棱两可，它关于一个人是对自己撒谎，创造自己的真相，”诺兰说， “我在《记忆碎片》的最后，他只是想说，我想我知道了这到底是怎么回事，但是你刚刚见到他说谎。”
     在《盗梦空间》里，诺兰再次提供了一个独特的结局，这对整个故事是锦上添花的。“结局对我来说非常重要，我需要那种让我为之一震的结局。”他说， “这部见得是大概的那种方式。我一直在寻找一个完美的平衡，在情感的必然性和一些我没看见的轻微的转变之间。对我来说，最令人满意的结局是它能够同时满足你的期望，并且带给你惊喜。”


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