IF you haven’t read a single review of Inception—don’t. Go into the movie with nothing but a clean slate in your mind and you will fully appreciate the mind-blowing idea borne from Christopher Nolan’s brains. The plot has been shrouded in secrecy for good reason, and it’s now time to find out what lines like “your mind is the scene of the crime” really entail.

The Dark Knight director’s latest film has only been released for one week but will reportedly bring in a whopping US$100 million by tomorrow night. The secret to one of the most buzzed-about movies of 2010? Nolan’s crazy, real-life dreaming, of course.

“There are times in my life where I experienced lucid dreaming, which is a big feature of Inception,” Nolan told E! News recently when discussing the film. “The idea of realising you’re in a dream and…trying to manipulate it in some way. That’s a very striking experience.”

But unlike most, Nolan felt his dreams could come to life without a whole heap of help from CG animation.

“However sophisticated animation is, the audience can always tell the difference between something that has been photographed and something that has been animated,” Nolan said, explaining why Joseph Gordon-Levitt found himself in a rotating hallway rather than in front of a green screen.

In fact, to pull it off, the filmmakers created a 100-foot-long corridor that could be rotated 360 degrees six times every minute.

“I couldn’t think of the floor being the floor and the ceiling being the ceiling,” Gordon-Levitt said. “I had to think, ‘This is the ground…now this is the ground…and now, this is the ground.’ That was the mind game I had to play to make it work.”

Of course, effects were later required to recreate the large, elaborate city-mazes that formed the foundation of the movie’s terrain.

Leonardo DiCaprio, aka The Extractor, had to do a little homework of his own for the movie, apparently sitting with Nolan to understand the complexity of the story.

“I’m not a big dreamer,” said DiCaprio. “I never have been. I remember fragments of my dreams.”

“But I was able to sit down with Chris for two months every other day and talk about the structure of this dream world, and the rules that apply in it.”

Inception also stars Ellen Page, Ken Watanabe, Tom Hardy, Michael Caine and Marion Cottillard, and opens Australia-wide today.

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