For the Inception DPS I found two articles online that celebrate the amazing work by production designer Guy Dyas. This film is nominated in this and many other categories at the BAFTA's this season. These articles will be used for the info-graphic element of my magazine, which was a prerequisite in the brief. A section of the first article will be used to introduce the piece and give it come context. The interview encapsulated within the second article will be divided into 8 sections, represented by icons relevant to their titles, for example the Dream On section will be represented by a simplified dream catcher illustration. The info-graphic element of the brief is perfect for this film given the nature of one of the best films I have ever seen, seamlessly mixing sci-fi with fantasy in a very scientific way.
A meticulously thought-out design concept can make for cinema that feels as vivid as a dream—or, in the case of Inception’s production designer, Guy Dyas, five. Dyas was given the enviably daunting task of helping director Christopher Nolan realize a vision he’d had since he was 12, and helping very confused viewers keep track of it all. When you consider the complexity of Inception, and the general impression that we all pretty much got it, that’s quite an accomplishment. Dyas talked with us by phone from DreamWorks, where he’s helping Steven Spielberg craft a new dream world—Robopocalypse—and shared with us the ideas that animatedInception’s design and will likely dominate the dreams of film-goers for decades to come.
After viewing Inception, the lingering impression is of total architectonic precision—far from an accident, according to Dyas. He met with Christopher Nolan in the garage in back of Nolan’s house and hammered out the philosophy of the film’s look over about four weeks. “It’s such a bizarrely unique story, and the approach we both took to the design of the film was [that] it had to be unique ... the sets in the dreamscape are an architectural library of events that affected Cobb,” Dyas says. “It was an action film and a heist film, so you invented sets that looked cool, but they had a level of sophistication that you could believe an architect was invested in this dream.”
One of the first things Dyas did was create a 60-foot scroll that captured the history of 20th-century architecture, from the initial skyscrapers of the Bauhaus, to Gropius, to Le Corbusier. The scroll at first became a handy resource, which Nolan and star Leonardo DiCaprio would reference for inspiration (and probably just for fun). But its chronological layout actually ended up inspiring one of the film’s most astonishing designs—the dream city built by Cobb and his wife in their subconscious. “You’ll notice at as it stretches back, the buildings get taller. I imagine Cobb and his wife started off on the beach, building buildings that were homages to their heroes of architecture. As they built more and more, they were building their own 3D museum of the most stunning architecture.”
When Cobb returns with Ariadne to the dream city, however, they find it in total disrepair—again a design concept with a specific idea behind it: “The mere fact that they were eroding away into the sea, and the sea was eating into these buildings, was another visual method of showing that he was losing his mind,” he says. Dyas and Nolan discussed the look and feel of architecture that had been abandoned, specifically at the site of the Chernobyl accident, and had the good fortune of coming across a housing site in disrepair during a drive around Tangiers, which became the final set for the abandoned dream city. Special-effects supervisor Chris Corbould trucked in sand to make it look as though the complex was right by the beach.
Another key concept for Dyas was the notion of the maze, embodied in the film by an almost fetish-like obsession with stairways—specifically the looping “Penrose” steps that Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) uses to explain the concept of the dream building to Ariadne (Ellen Page). The mobius staircase occupies only a fraction of film time, and yet: “We went through 12 different physical cardboard models of the Penrose steps before we came up with something that worked,” Dyas says. “Once we did that, we created a digital model and started looking at what camera lenses would make this look like an Escher painting. Only then did we start building a staircase. [The space] is an ex-games company that went bust. We matched the wood with our staircase so that it looked like it belong there.” Dyas also pointed out a telling sign of Nolan’s directorial philosophy: if you look at the accompanying image, you will see scaffolding supporting the stairs. Most other directors would use a green screen to create the effect: Nolan wanted the stairs built, and then used visual effects only to remove the scaffolding and complete the illusion. “Only about 5 percent of the scenes in this film actually use green screen,” Dyas says. “You’re talking about a film that has real rotating corridors, elevator shafts that were built sideways in warehouses so that it would appear 300 feet long. We have tilting bars, real trains smashing into cars.”
The stair motif was repeated throughout the film’s design, even in the Japanese castle. “This could have just been a typical Japanese hall, but we needed to put an emphasis on the maze,” Dyas says. A space was constructed that melded the feel of a castle with a museum. In fact, the museum notion powered the design of Saito’s dream. Dyas said that because Saito (Ken Watanabe) was a smooth, cultured figure, the idea was that his dream space would bear the formality and clean lines of a museum. “The lighting in the dining room is coming from the floor, the tops lights are turned off, which gave [director of photography] Wally Pfister another opportunity to light the set in a dramatic way. All of that was really researched from museums,” he says. Even the arrangement of the lighting in the Japanese dining hall was motivated by specific ideas: “I lived in Japan for many years after leaving art school in England, and one of the things that I remember was in certain Shinto temples, they have multiple lanterns. There’s a certain symbolism that each of these lanterns represents a lost soul,” Dyas says. “Of course, Cobb’s wife is a lost soul—she’s lost in this kind of barrage of crazy architecture.”
But great production design can be just as much about what you take out as what you include. Perhaps contrary to a production designer’s instinct to build a bursting mise-en-scène to fill the frame, Dyas says that he and Nolan worked specifically to strip away specific elements and give each dreamscape a surreal lack of detail—no landmarks, no signage, no markings. They were probably vastly helped by the anonymity of Los Angeles’s downtown business district—but what’s amazing (at least to your blogger) was their use of L.A.’s iconic downtown D.W.P. building for the scenes that show Cobb and his wife’s dream house floating on a moat of water. It’s hard to miss for native Angelenos—unless, of course, they dreamed it?
Even in London, where "The King's Speech" clearly had home-court advantage at the BAFTA Awards, the royal movie didn't win everything. One of the areas where it fell short was in Production Design, where the elaborate and densely layered work on "Inception" took home the prize for Guy Hendrix Dyas, Larry Dias and Doug Mowat.
The three are also nominees at the Oscars in the Art Direction category, where they once again appear to be in a tight race with "King's Speech" for top honors. (The other nominees: "Alice in Wonderland," "Black Swan" and "True Grit.") Before the BAFTAs, Dyas spoke to TheWrap about his experience on the film, where he was one of the first crew members hired by Christopher Nolan and where he spent his first month working out of Nolan's garage as they planned the look of the film's multiple dream levels. Note: Because it comes up in the conversation, it's worth noting that we spoke in a lower-level lounge at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, in a dining area with a bar at one end of the room.
Dyas' comments on the look, feel and execution of "Inception":
Turning Japanese: "One point of pride is that when I read the script, the castle was undefined as any specific style. It read very much like a European medieval castle, and I remember one day saying, 'Chris, what do you think about this being a Japanese castle?' Not only because the character we’re introduced to is Saito, but because Japanese architecture is so quintessential to any architect's understanding of what architecture is. And he just looked at me and said, 'Great, do it, I love it.'"
True Colors: "It was extremely important that we made all the different dream levels read as very different places. With the quick cutting style of Chris and Wally Pfister's photography – they don’t hang around too long on any one shot – I thought it would be important to use color. The human eye's an amazing thing, and you can give someone a quick read by coming up with a different color scheme for the different levels of dreams.
"So when they're trying to seduce their target, it's an environment not dissimilar to where we are now: a warm, stylish, relaxing hotel, perfect for a seduction. Whereas if you're out in the street and you want to scare someone shitless, then you want to have a rainy, stark L.A. street."
Dream On: "In dreams, at least from my experience, our focus is on what's directly in front of us, and everything else merges away. And the only way I could figure out how to portray that in the real world was literally removing the detail. For instance, if you and I were on a set in 'Inception' right now, everything in front of you would be real. We would avoid CG at every cost.
And we would start removing things from the background. So, for example, that bar in the back wouldn’t be there — it'd just be a plain wall. There'd be no glasses on the tables adjacent to us, and as you went further back the detail would drop off.
"Now, there's a very eerie effect when you do that. When you walk onto a set that's been that carefully art-directed in terms of the details, you do notice it. The same thing happened when we stripped everything away downtown. We took all the advertising out, we took a lot of the street furniture out, so you have these insane chases with motorcycles and vehicles and all that flash stuff, but instead of having just a typical street, there's something eerie about it. You can't put your finger on it, but you feel it."
Downtown Train: "Of course, the freight train that we drove downtown was a dressed-up semi. It was just after the morning commute, and there were still some stragglers going to work with hangovers, I think. And they were literally looking up at this enormous 18-foot freight train driving down Sixth Street in downtown L.A."
The Real World: "As you can see from the end of the film with the spinning top, everyone's saying, 'Well, is this real or is this not?' Part of that is because Chris made a very smart decision to say, 'We need to do a lot of this for real, we need to put it in camera, so that people can't really determine where they are.' Is this a dream, is this reality? And that's why they did these effects practically, and used beautiful visual effects exactly as they should be used – as a support to the main event."
One Good Turn: "The rotating sets were a challenge, putting together these frightening sets that would rotate and tilt. And of course all of those have to be padded. Things that look like metal in those sets were actually molded of rubber. It's extremely difficult to mold a rubber light fitting when it had electricity running through it, trust me. But I can do it now, if it ever comes up again."
Baby It's Cold Outside: "A lot of people think that entire 300-foot-by-200-foot fortress in the snow, with the 80-foot tower, was CG. No, we built a substantial set 7,000 feet up from sea level, where the air was thin. And it not only worked for Chris as a set, but also it housed a lot of our crew. We fed our crew from that building, kept camera equipment in there, had green rooms in there. We sort of built an all-purpose exterior set with some interior sets, and big spaces where we could hide our crew. Because it was cold up there."
The Last Word: "It was very, very hard, but very exciting and rewarding.
I mean, you go through all the research to make sure that everything is going to be right on the day, but to actually see some of those sets working – tilting bars, fake trains smashing through real cars, 200-foot corridors that rotated like tumble dryers, mountaintop fortresses that were built on foundations of ice because I wasn't allowed to put concrete in the ground… What can you say? It was an amazing opportunity."
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