Inception was a movie that blew everyone’s mind away. The amazing concepts of controlling your dreams, being able to enter other people’s dream space, navigate the intricate structure of dream levels and extract sensitive corporate information from the dreamer, all challenge our innate sense of the perception of reality. The reality and facts involved in the making of this movie are also just as amazing and thanks to IMDB, Wikipedia and a few other sources we were able to gather for you some of those incredible facts you’d not want to miss…

1 If you take the first letter of the main characters Dom, Robert, Eames, Arthur, Mal and Saito you get DREAMS.

And if you add the rest of the characters, Peter, Ariadne and Yusuf, you get PAY. DREAMS PAY – they certainly did in the movie.

2 Christopher Nolan refused filming the movie in 3D. He didn’t want it to serve as a distraction from the actual storytelling experience.

According to Cinematographer Wally Pfister, Warner Brothers executives approached Christopher Nolan about making the film in 3D, but he refused the idea.

3 Nolan first started writing Inception in 2001… 10 years before he started filming it. 

At that time he believed that he was inexperienced when it came to large scale movies. He was also influenced by the movies The Dark City (1998), The Matrix (1999) and The Thirteenth Floor (1999) which were all based on virtual/alternate realities. Instead, during that time he made ‘Batman Begins’ and ‘The Dark Knight’ before Warner Bros. purchased the script from him in 2009.(source)

4 Pete Postlethwaithe, who played Maurice Fischer, was actually suffering from Pancreatic Cancer while filming. He died five months after its release.

5 The freight train that smashes into Cobb’s car in the first level of dream was not CGI. It was in fact a tractor fitted to look like a train.

The 18 wheeled tractor trailer was manned inside a hidden cab and was driven with the help of LCD monitors during the scenes. That it was neither CGI nor a real train is evident from the fact that the cars were just pushed and dented, whereas a crash with real train usually results in far more damage.(source)

6 Nolan initially intended Inception to be a horror movie. He later changed it to a heist after revisiting the script.

The conflict and crucial moments of the plot revolve around Cobb’s relationship with his dead wife Mal. His inability to make peace with her death jeopardizes their mission with the possibility of trapping his team in limbo. The importance of Cobb’s nostalgic memories with his wife made him raise the emotional stakes which turned the movie into a much more intellectually and emotionally satisfying experience. (source)