Six Movies That Are (Not So) Secretly About Their Directors
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Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)
“Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.”
No, really. Inception. Unlike the previous two films on this list, director Christopher Nolan didn’t cast himself in thelead role. No, he instead cast Leonardo DiCaprio, who actually looks identical to Nolan. Inception is not, as it may appear on first impressions, a film about dreams: it’s a film about the power of ideas, and what better way for a filmmaker to explore this than with a heavy filmmaking metaphor?
It was film critic Devin Faraci who first noted the comparisons. Watch it again, and consider this: DiCaprio as director, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as producer, Ellen Page as screenwriter, Tom Hardy as the actor, Dileep Rao as the technical guy, Ken Watanabe as the studio exec, and Peter Postlethwaite as the audience. Read Faraci’s article, and you’ll see that quotes from Nolan and DiCaprio confirm that this isn’t just some crazy internet theory: Inception really is about filmmaking.