Christopher Nolan and his co-screenwriter Jonathan Nolan used the Story Maps method to structure the screenplay of Inception. If you analyze the narrative, you will see every one of the elements of the “Basic” and “Full” Story Map.
The most important element in the Inception screenplay is the GOAL of the protagonist, COBB, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. It is so important to this particular story that it covers up potentially problematic story decisions and inhabits three of the nine main dramatic elements in the Basic Story Map…
There’s a reason why that anti-gravity hallway effect in Inception looks so amazing.
It’s because that shit is real.
No CGI. It’s a giant rig that rotates 360 degrees and it must have cost a fortune. It’s another example of how and why Christopher Nolan is this generation’s James Cameron.
Like Cameron, Nolan insists on spending millions of the studio’s money on creating real, physical spectacles, sometimes for only a single shot.
This is why those aerial IMAX shots in The Dark Knight looked so amazing; those weren’t sets, they were real skyscrapers in Chicago and Hong Kong.
When we see Batman riding his batpod motorcycle…it’s real. They didn’t just hand off the scene to a bunch of animators.
A team of engineers spent months (and a batload of Warner Brothers’ cash) designing and building a new vehicle that a stuntman could actually drive.
Let’s be clear: they invented a vehicle. For..one scene? Yes, for one scene (okay, two and a half scenes, geeks).
