10 Secret Techniques Films Used To Ensure Perfection

If any one director represents the imaginative implementation of practical and cinematic trickery to pull off a specific effect, it’s Christopher Nolan - which is why he gets on this list twice, this final time for the extraordinary Inception.

A film that uses dream logic and imagery as plot, narrative propulsion, character development and mise-en-scène should find it impossible to remain something as basic as an action thriller - yet somehow Inception still manages to neatly slot into the genre.

The hotel fight scene (between Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Arthur and a bunch of hostile figments of a dreamer’s imagination) is the perfect representation of that weird dichotomy between the surreal and the spectacular. Arthur finds his ‘reality’ spinning when the dream he’s operating inside is affected by the actions taken in the dream his dream is nested within.

Confused? Don’t worry about it. Basically, up becomes down becomes sideways...

Once again, Nolan pulled off a miracle with practical effects when a lesser filmmaker would have defaulted to cartoonish CGI animation. Taking the rotating set effect created for Fred Astaire’s legendary dance number in Stanley Donen’s Royal Wedding (1951) and adapting it for a punishing two-minute fight scene, the shoot actually used several different sets (although it’s often referred to as the hallway fight scene, a third of it takes place in a hotel room).

Gordon-Levitt was battered and bruised at the end of each day, having to tumble and dance his way through fight choreography on a spinning set. The result is astonishing even when you know how it was done, messing with your perceptions throughout, keeping you as off balance as Arthur himself.