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1. Who directed Inception?
Christopher Nolan
Nolan pitched the idea to Warner Bros. in 2001 and spent most of a decade on the script, waiting until he had made two Batman films to earn the budget. He wrote it alone, which is rare for him.
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2. Who plays Dom Cobb?
Leonardo DiCaprio
Brad Pitt and Will Smith were approached first. DiCaprio spent months working through the script with Nolan and asked for the emotional story to be built up, which is where much of the material about Cobb's wife came from.
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3. What's Cobb's totem?
A spinning top
If it keeps spinning he's dreaming; if it falls he's awake, and it belonged to his wife before him. The loaded die is Arthur's and the chess piece Ariadne's.
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4. Who plays Arthur, Cobb's point man?
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Gordon-Levitt did the corridor fight himself after weeks of training, with a single shot handed to a stunt double. Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy and Ken Watanabe fill out the team and the people on the other side of the job.
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5. Which city folds over on itself in Ariadne's first dream?
Paris
The scene was shot on the Pont de Bir-Hakeim and the streets around it, with the folding done by computer and the exploding café done with real air cannons. Elliot Page's Ariadne is named for the woman who guided Theseus through the labyrinth.
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6. How was the rotating hotel corridor fight filmed?
On a full-size corridor set that really rotated
A hundred-foot corridor on a rig that turned like a rotisserie, inspired by Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling in Royal Wedding. The actors learned to fight while the floor became the wall.
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7. What's the name of the target, the heir to an energy empire?
Robert Fischer
Cillian Murphy plays the son; Maurice is the dying father, and Browning is the godfather played by Tom Berenger. Saito, played by Ken Watanabe, is the man paying for the job.
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8. What's the signal that tells the dreamers it's time to wake?
A kick
A sudden fall, timed across the levels so that everyone drops at once, which is why a van goes off a bridge in slow motion for most of the film. A piece of music, slowed down, warns that it's coming.
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9. Which song, slowed down, becomes that warning and the basis of the score's famous horns?
Édith Piaf's "Non, je ne regrette rien"
Hans Zimmer stretched the opening of the song until it became the low brass heard in every trailer for the next five years. It's also what the dreamers hear through their earphones as an alarm clock.
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10. Who plays Mal, Cobb's wife?
Marion Cotillard
Cotillard had won an Oscar for playing Édith Piaf three years earlier, which Nolan says was a coincidence given the song he had already chosen. Mal is a memory that won't stay buried, and the film's real villain.
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11. What's Eames's special skill in a dream?
Forgery: he can take on another person's appearance
Tom Hardy's forger impersonates Browning and, briefly, a blonde in a bar. 'You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling,' he tells Arthur, producing a grenade launcher.
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12. How many Academy Awards did the film win?
Four
Cinematography, Visual Effects, Sound Editing and Sound Mixing, from eight nominations. It was nominated for Best Picture, but Nolan was passed over for Best Director.
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13. Where does the snowbound third level take place?
A mountain fortress
Shot near Calgary, in Alberta, where the crew built the fortress on a mountain and then waited for snow that wouldn't come, until it all came at once. The sequence is Nolan's nod to On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
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14. What's "limbo" in the rules of the film?
Unbuilt dream space where time runs for decades
Anyone who dies under heavy sedation falls into it, and Cobb and Mal once spent what felt like fifty years there, building a city. It's where the film's last act takes place.
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15. Who plays Miles, Cobb's father-in-law and teacher?
Michael Caine
Caine's rule for Nolan's films is that he only appears in scenes that are real, which he says settles the ending. Pete Postlethwaite plays the dying Maurice Fischer, and Lukas Haas is the architect who botches the first job.
