Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight) recently spoke to The L.A Times about his upcoming film, Inception – starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Marion Cotillard, Cillian Murphy, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ken Watanabe, Tom Hardy and Michael Caine. Nolan and his wife/career partner, Emma Thomas, spoke about the scale of the film and the fact that the film is his biggest challenge so far.

It’s something that we had been talking about on and off for seven or eight years,” Thomas said. “Coming off of the ‘The Dark Knight,’ the only thing we really knew is that we wanted to do something more personal. It seemed like the right time to do this. The fact that it’s really just an enormous movie — that wasn’t ever really a factor in the decision. This story lends itself to a movie of this size.”

A key part of the premise is corporate espionage by way of dream invasion, but motives and even reality are slippery in a film that toys with perception as its travels through time and space. The crew covered a lot of territory too, filming in six countries.

“This is the biggest challenge I’ve taken on to this point,” said Nolan, who may return to Gotham City for his next feature. “We’re trying to tell a story on a massive scale, a true blockbuster scale – the biggest I’ve ever been involved with. We tried to make a very large-scale film with ‘The Dark Knight’ and with this one we wanted to push that even further.”