joewright:

Academy Award Winners for Best Cinematography:
2011 —

Wally Pfister, ASC
Inception (2010)
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Aspect Ratio: 2.39 : 1

After reading the script for Inception‘s hotel scene, where dream-thieves fistfight in zero-G as the walls twist and tumble around them, Pfister jokes even he “had to have an immediate meeting with Chris to figure out what the fuck was going on.”

”Nolan’s concept: build a 360-degree rotating hallway, inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s sets for 2001, complete with hidden tracks in the carpet for upside-down camera moves and lighting fixtures strong enough to withstand actors falling and running over them. When he described how we’re going to physically execute the rotating set, I got very excited in trying to figure out how to light and shoot it,” Pfister recalls. “I wanted to create a specific warm orange color palette, but Chris also wanted to have ‘normal’ camera movement in there even though the whole set was rotating around.” 

From the beginning, Nolan wanted Inception‘s dreams-within-dreams to feel as real as any earthly environment. “Our mantra was, ‘dreams feel real,‘” Pfister says. To that end, he spent months in preproduction shooting still photographs of real locations in England, Paris, Japan, Canada, and Morocco, then manipulated them in Photoshop to create otherworldly-yet-believable looks — from metallic blue for the rainy van chase to stark whiteout for the ski battle. “Each dream has a different color scheme so Chris could cut back and forth without confusing the audience,” Pfister explains. Even the haunting setting of “limbo” is based on Pfister’s photographs of an actual half-built housing project in Morocco. “We wanted the surreality of the dreams to come from these strange but credible settings, rather than from any weird lighting or camera movement. Limbo is right outside of Tangiers where Chris discovered these wild white buildings where streets hadn’t been paved yet. We shot those buildings there, and it was enhanced by the crumbling CGI structures in the shoreline.” — [x]