Interview: Leonardo DiCaprio & Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Q: Leo, this movie is all about a fixation on dreams. Are your own dreams a special fascination for you?

LD: Um, you know that was interesting, being a part of this film, because I’m not a big dreamer and never have been. I do remember fragments of my dreams. I tried to take a traditional sort of approach in getting into this project. I read books on dream analysis and, you know, Freud’s book on the analysis of dreams. But I realize that this is Chris Nolan’s dream world. It has its own structure, and its own set of rules that he’s created. So in doing that, it was basically being able to sit down with Chris for like two months every other day and talk about the structure of this dream world and the rules that apply in it. But you know, the only thing I’ve extracted from the research is that I don’t think there’s a specific science that can be put on dream psychology. I think that it’s up to the individual. Obviously, we suppress things; we suppress emotions during the day, things like that. Thoughts that we obviously haven’t thought through enough. In the state of sleep in our subconscious, our minds can randomly fire off these sort of surreal story structures, and when we wake up, we should pay attention to those things.

Q: Did either of you ever get confused about whether you’re in somebody else’s dream or your own?

JL: If you’re doing it right, you spend a lot of time thinking about every scene in any movie you do! So I enjoy having to put some thought into that, before we’re on camera.

LD: What was very interesting for me was reading the original screenplay. Obviously this story structure was extremely ambitious, just the fact that it was simultaneously four different states of the human subconscious that represented different dream states, and each one, you know, affected the other. What Chris talked about very early on with us was being able to go to these six different locations around the world. But what was startling to me in how sort of complicated the screenplay seemed was seeing it in a visual format. That’s the sort of magic of moviemaking—you clearly identify one scenario with the other. You start to, you know, it’s a completely different experience, like when you’re at the snow-capped mountains of Canada, or whether you’re in a van or elevator shaft, or in Paris or London, you experience it, and you have a visual reference. But it was a lot easier to understand than I ever thought it would be and that’s a testament to how engaging movies are and the visual medium is.

Q: Now Joe, while the others only pretended to be sleeping on the job, you were totally doing your own stunts and getting knocked around pretty bad. What was that like?

JL: It was just about the most fun I ever had on a movie set. It’s also probably the most pain I’ve ever been in on a movie set! Physically, but you know, pain in a good way. In the way, I guess, athletes must get when they have to put on their pads and wrap up their ankles and they get a little beat up throughout the day. But that’s just, you know, slamming yourself into walls and jumping around all day. I was really grateful to the whole stunt team. That whole team of guys really brought me in and taught me a lot and just let me do it. I’ve had the opposite experience, where stunt teams can be a little demeaning. Not demeaning, but just…exclusionary! You know, towards actors. But yeah, I came up with a certain analogy to Fred Astaire. It’s sort of how Sesame Street and Star Wars both use like Jim Henson puppetry. So it’s a similar technique, but a very different effect!

Q: Leo, is it true you’re going to go dark again, to play J. Edgar Hoover?

LD: Yeah, I’m talking to Clint Eastwood about playing Hoover, who had his hand in some of the most scandalous events in American history—everything from the Vietnam War and Dillinger, to Martin Luther King and JFK. It’s about the secret life of J. Edgar Hoover.

Q: Will there also be stuff about his homosexuality?

LD: Yes, that will be in there, definitely.

Q: So will you wear a dress?

LD: Will I wear a dress? Not as of yet. We haven’t done the fittings for those! But I don’t think so.