it's only fear
I am tiiiired, oh my goodness - unwontedly and unwarrantedly so, really. But I do this thing where I wear myself out thinking of all that I need to do, mentally retreading my to-do list and bullet-pointing lots of anxiety under each item on it. It doesn't help that I tend to procrastinate more when I'm afraid, and there's very little I dislike more
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JN: Let's go back to the process of it. Ten years. What brought you back to the project?
CN: After I finish every film, I look at what I might do next. I would get the draft for Inception out and would read it, again. I would show it to Emma [Emma Thomas] and sometimes show it to you to get more thoughts on it. But I never quite knew how to finish it until I realized that the antagonist of the film should be the guy's wife.
JN: The antagonist had originally been his partner.
CN: Yes, it originally had been his partner. The heist movie conceit. His partner in crime, who had betrayed him and so forth. But that didn't lead anywhere emotionally. It didn't have any resonance. And as soon as it became his wife, that flipped the whole thing for me. That made it very, very relatable.
JN: Kind of unlocked the end of the film for you.
CN: It completely unlocked the end of the film. It completely unlocked how you could make something that a wider audience might care about. Because to me, whenever you deal in the world of esoteric or overly complex science fiction, or heist movies, or film noir, you're working for a smaller audience. If you're going to do a massive movie, though, you've got to be able to unlock that more universal experience for yourself as well as for the audience. That's what it took for me. As soon as I realized that Mal would be his wife, it became completely relatable.
JN: [laughs] Someone suggested to me-someone who had seen the film and admired it-that being married to one of your characters is a very, very bad idea. And when you tally it up, pretty much every film of yours has a dead wife in it. Dead wife. Dead girlfriend. Dead fiancee.
CN: I've written quite a few dead wives, that's true. But you try to put your relatable fears in these things. That's what film noir is, and I do view Inception as film noir. You take things you are actually worried about in real life, or things you care about in real life, and you extrapolate that into a universal...
JN: ...domestic drama-painted as large as possible.
CN: You turn it into melodrama. People always talk about melodrama as a pejorative but I don't know what other word there is.
JN:It's fuel. That's why so many of these things always come back to it. And how it still manages to seem fresh each time. Hopefully.
CN: Well, yeah, hopefully.
Re: recs, I hope you find something you enjoy. :)
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