Christopher Nolan, a few years back (an Interview)

Christopher Nolan, whose new film Inception (2010) is making a little history these days, was always an interesting screenwriter. Ever since his debut feature film, Following (1998), Nolan had his interest in morals, and in the situations those morals are twisted again and again.

Nolan also loves to play with structure and time, and with the subjective perception vs. the reality, or the outside 'objective' world. In Memento (2000) it was the man with the lost memory who is trying to find the truth about his past, and now he enhanced this idea in Inception, with the spectator being almost the protagonist himself. More on that point later, but the spiral-like structure of Inception is inherent to the very basic idea, or theme, of the movie.

I read once an interview with Nolan, where he talked about his films Memento and Insomnia. Nolan said:

I think it has a fascinating and very evocative psychological situation. A great moral dilemma that is taken one direction in the original movie, and I think its a great movie, but as I saw it, it occurred to me that you could by changing the characters take the same situation, the same intense psychological relationship between the two main characters and take it in a rather different direction and create a different kind of moral paradox.

A moral paradox, that is what we get in many of his films, and to an account in all of Nolan's films. But like David Lynch's Mullholland Drive was in a way his best work, or perhaps the movie that summarizes in the best cinematic way Lynch's ideas - the same happens here with Nolan and Inception. Theme, cinematic language, narrative twists: all those motives that made Christopher Nolan the auteur he is, they all exist in Inception, and in a much purer, clearer way.