The Trivia of: Inception

The Hollywood Reporter reported that Brad Pitt and Will Smith were separately offered to play the role of Cobb, but both actors passed on the role. Leonardo Dicaprio accepted the role.

James Franco was in talks with Christopher Nolan to play Arthur, but was ultimately unavailable due to scheduling conflicts. The role later went to Joseph Gordon Levitt, who later plays the role of John Blake in Nolan´s ´The Dark Knight Rises´.

Evan Rachel Wood was Christopher Nolan's first choice to play Ariadne, but she turned it down. Before Ellen Page was offered and accepted the role, Nolan considered casting Emily Blunt, Rachel McAdams, Emma Roberts, Jessy Schram, Taylor Swift and Carey Mulligan.

Kate Winslet was approached for the role of Mal, but turned it down, citing that she couldn't see herself as the character. Marion Cotillard accepted the role.

Christopher Nolan first pitched the film to Warner Bros. after the completion of his third feature, Insomnia, and was met with approval from the studio. However, it was not yet written at the time, and Nolan determined that rather than writing it as an assignment, it would be more suitable to his working style if he wrote it as a spec script and then presented it to the studio whenever it was completed. So he went off to write it, thinking it would take "a couple of months", but it ultimately took nearly eight years.

According to Cinematographer Wally Pfister, Warner Brothers executives approached Christopher Nolan about making the film in 3D, but he refused the idea, claiming "it will distract the storytelling experience of Inception".

The fifth Christopher Nolan movie (out of the seven) to enter the IMDb Top 250, along with Memento, Batman Begins, The Prestige, The Dark Knight. The Dark Knight Rises makes it six out of eight movies.

The role of Saito was written exclusively for Ken Watanabe because Christopher Nolan felt that although he had appeared in Batman Begins, he did not have much screen time, and should therefore be given a more prominent supporting role.

In an interview with 'Entertainment Weekly', Christopher Nolan explained that he based roles of the Inception team similar to roles that are used in filmmaking - Cobb is the director, Arthur is the producer, Ariadne is the production designer, Eames is the actor, Saito is the studio, and Fischer is the audience. "In trying to write a team-based creative process, I wrote the one I know," said Nolan.

Despite prominent billing, Michael Caine only gets three minutes of screentime.

One of the reasons why Christopher Nolan cast Tom Hardy as Eames was because of his performance in the film RocknRolla. Hardy stated that he thought he was cast because of his role in Bronson. He arrived on set only to learn that Nolan has never even seen Bronson.

The third Nolan movie in five years in which Cillian Murphy's character spends a significant portion of his on-screen time with a cloth bag over his head. (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight an Inception)

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