Christopher Nolan‘s upcoming film Inception, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Ellen Page, and Michael Caine has been shrouded in virtual secrecy for months, though The LA Times was lucky enough to visit the set recently, and they managed to pry some information about the film from Nolan himself.

Nolan said that the film was inspired by his ability to manipulate his own dream state:

You can look around and examine the details and pick up a handful of sand on the beach. I never particularly found a limit to that; that is to say, that while in that state your brain can fill in all that reality. I tried to work that idea of manipulation and management of a conscious dream being a skill that these people have. Really the script is based on those common, very basic experiences and concepts, and where can those take you? And the only outlandish idea that the film presents, really, is the existence of a technology that allows you to enter and share the same dream as someone else.

I originally wrote it as a heist movie, and heist movies traditionally are very deliberately superficial in emotional terms. They’re frivolous and glamorous, and there’s a sort of gloss and fun to it. I originally tried to write it that way, but when I came back to it I realized that — to me — that didn’t work for a film that relies so heavily on the idea of the interior state, the idea of dream and memory. I realized I needed to raise the emotional stakes. What we found in working on Batman Begins is that it’s the emotionalism that best connects the audience with the material. The character issues, those are the things that pull the audience through it and amplify the experience no matter how strange things get.

The description of the film and DiCaprio’s role below the jump contains some spoilers, so if you want to stay spoiler free – turn back now!

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The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a specialist in the new branch of corporate espionage — he’s a dream thief who plucks secrets from the minds of tycoons after pumping them full of drugs and hooking them up to a mysterious contraption. The problem, though, is the land of nod can be volatile — as can Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Dom Cobb, who is a wounded dreamer after the loss of his beloved wife.

Inception is slated to hit theaters on July 16th, 2010.

[Source] LA Times