Before he creates a character, Leonardo DiCaprio likes to immerse himself in the facts.
Who was this person, before the story started? What was his background? What are his loves, his hates, his fears?
In movies set in a specific period, like Gangs of New York or Shutter Island, it means researching the era. If the character’s a real-life one — young Howard Hughes in The Aviator, the FBI chief in the upcoming Hoover — the hunt goes deeper.
But when he got the script for Inception — a metaphysical mystery set in parallel dreamscapes debuting Dec. 7 on On Demand — the actor felt as if he were wandering in director Christopher Nolan’s unconsciousness.
Without a map.
“Usually, films I’m a part of, there’s tons of stuff to research,” DiCaprio said this summer, shortly before the picture opened. “There are multiple books to refer to, documentaries that give me frames of reference, people to meet. But all this sprang straight from Chris’ mind. It’s something he’s been thinking about for the last eight years. And as an actor, I just had to take this leap of faith.”
The risk paid off.
By the time it had ended its American run, Inception had sold nearly $300 million in tickets. It had also done something hardly any blockbuster does any more — simultaneously thrill fanboys with its startling effects, impress critics with its topsy-turvy plot and send audiences out to their cars still heatedly debating what they’d seen.
There was a lot to debate, too. In the picture, DiCaprio plays the leader of a team of mind thieves, spies-for-hire who slip into people’s dreams in order to pilfer corporate secrets. They’re like highly trained and expensive safecrackers, although in this case, that vault they’re trying to blow open is your subconscious.
It’s a tough job — until a mysterious client makes it even tougher by asking the team to go inside a young mogul’s mind and, instead of extracting information, this time plant an idea he’ll think is his own, a daring act of psychic sabotage.
It becomes even more dangerous when DiCaprio’s Cobb realizes that, as he steps into dreams within dreams within dreams — with, at one point, four fantasies unfolding at once — he’s also going to be reliving his own painful, deeply personal nightmares.
Still, the idea of the unhappy, untrustworthy hero is familiar to dedicated DiCaprio fans. Over the last decade he’s specialized in characters who often seem to be acting in their own private movies, full of complicated motives even they may not be fully aware of.
The pickpocket in Gangs of New York is secretly looking for revenge. The undercover cop in The Departed is trying to infiltrate the mob. The unhappy husband in Revolutionary Road is struggling to hold on to the fiction of his happy suburban life. The fractured detective in Shutter Island only wants to keep his own sanity long enough that he can figure out who on this haunted isle has lost theirs.
They are all unreliable narrators, as adept in lying to the audience as to themselves. They are not to be taken at face value, ever. But they are beacons of stability compared to Cobb, a man who wanders through the labyrinth of strangers’ fantasies and his own twisted guilt, both avoiding and indulging in the past.
“What Chris did here, brilliantly, was twofold,” DiCaprio enthuses. “He set up this situation where there’s sort of this ticking time bomb, this deadline they have to stick to, so you have this sense of urgency. And — really rather masterfully — he created these characters that take you on a journey with them.”
Going along for the trip is an excellent cast, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt as one of DiCaprio’s cohorts, Ellen Page as the “dream architect” who builds their castles in the sky, and the terrific Marion Cotillard as the mysterious woman of DiCaprio’s nightmares. Two supporting actors from Nolan’s Batman films — Michael Caine and Cillian Murphy — also drop by for solid, slightly nostalgic appearances.
Yet it’s the cleverly worked-out script that’s the star here — even if DiCaprio isn’t quite convinced of the science behind it all.
“The interpretation of dreams, it seems sort of like a made-up science to me,” he says. “I know it was sort of a cultural revolution at the time; it influenced so many people artistically — Hitchcock, Dalí. And it meant a lot so far as unlocking who we are as people and what we suppress. But — well, I’m no scientist, but it seems to me a lot of dreams are just this random firing of ideas in our subconscious, you know, our brains just trying to process all this information. I don’t know that dreams really have any more meaning than that.”
So what’s his most vivid dream?
“I don’t have one,” he blurts out. “I really wish I had some interesting, compelling childhood dream I could relate to my life in some abstract way, but I can’t. I guess I should have come up with one before I sat down to do these interviews.” He laughs. “Maybe we can make one up now …”
“Inception” is now showing on Video On Demand. Check your cable system for availability.
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© 2010 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.