Christopher Nolan is a sucker for the practical effect. The technology-obsessed director may have given up on traditional film in favour of digital, and his new film Interstellar is going to be stuffed full of CGI out of necessity (it is about astronauts exploring an alternate universe, after all), but for the most part he kicks it old school with his special effects. His brain-bending dream-cracking blockbuster Inception featured a fair amount of computer graphics, too, but a surprising amount of in-camera work as well. Like, you know the bit where Leo and Ellen Page are chatting on that Parisian street corner, and then suddenly everything freezes and stuff starts exploding? All done for real. And diCaprio probably deserves that Oscar just for not flinching when pressurised guns were firing vegetables off near his face. Most impressive of all, however, is how they pulled off that dizzying, spinning hotel hallway scrap between Joseph Gordon Levitt and a goon. As the dreamers tumble in real life so does the room they're imagining, going through a full 360-degree rotation as JGL and his enemy scrabble for a gun. CGI or something, right? Nope, they built a full, spinning rig, and the actors just had to deal with it. Well, they got two weeks of training beforehand, but still. Crazy!
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
