Leonardo DiCaprio and Marion Cotillard at the London premiere of Inception

I wanted to know if you’ve been fascinated by dreams in your lifetime and also if you’ve thought differently about them since working on Inception?

LEONARDO DICAPRIO: It was interesting being a part of this film because I’m not a big dreamer and never have been; I remember fragments of my dreams. I tried to take a traditional approach to researching this project and doing preparation for it. I read books on dream analysis, Freud’s book on the analysis of dreams, and tried to research it in that sort of formula.

But I realise that this is Chris Nolan’s dream world. It has its own structure and its own set of rules that he’s created. So, in doing that, it was basically being 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. The only thing I’ve extracted from the research of dreams is I don’t think there’s a specific science you can put on dream psychology. I think that it’s up to, obviously, the individual.

When you suppress emotions, things during the day and thoughts that we obviously haven’t thought through enough, in that state of sleep, in our subconscious, our minds sort of randomly fire off different surreal story structures and when we wake up we should pay attention to those things.

In shooting this film, were there any moments where it was so complex and involved for the actors that you became disoriented and had to regroup about where your characters were at a given moment?

What was very interesting for me was reading the original screenplay and, obviously, this story structure was extremely ambitious. What Chris talked about very early on with us was being able to go to these six different locations around the world, and it was startling to see the screenplay in a visual format. That’s the magic of movie-making. You clearly identify one scenario with the other and each [dream state in the film] is a completely different experience. When you’re at the snow-capped mountains of Canada or whether you’re in a van or an elevator shaft, or in Paris or London, you experience it and you have a visual reference. It was a lot easier to understand than I ever thought it would be and that’s a testament to how engaging the visual medium is.

Marion Cotillard and Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception

What did you love about your character Dom Cobb?

Well, look, like I said before, this was an extremely ambitious concept that Chris was trying to pull off here and he accomplished it with flying colours. There are very few directors, I think, in this industry that would pitch to a studio that they wanted to do a multi-layered, almost, at times, existential, high-action, high-drama, surreal film that’s sort of locked in his mind, and have an opportunity to do that. And that’s a testament to the work he’s done in the past. Watching his work, and certainly Memento and Insomnia, he’s able to portray these highly condensed, highly complicated plot structures and give them emotional weight and have you as an audience feel fully engaged along that process.

So, for me, it was a matter of sitting down with Chris and being able to really form the backbone of a character that had a real, cathartic journey. And at the end of the day, these different layers of the dream do represent a psychoanalysis — him getting deeper and closer to the truth and what he needs to understand about himself.

So, that, in its own right, is immediately intriguing. And Chris and I got to work and talk a lot about the different concepts of what Cobb has been through in the dream world and what his past is. And I had a lot of wonderful talks with Marion (Cotillard) as well about some of the sequences at the end that start to become very surreal and disturbing at times. So, as we were talking more and more about the character, it all became more and more exciting and I think all of us mutually here felt like this was a journey that we had to be a part of. That was extremely exciting.

What were the toughest action sequences for you?

I think the sequence in Morocco was pretty tough because I had to run through a crowd of people and I felt like a pinball because I was bouncing from Moroccan to Moroccan and falling into various vending machines. That was a little bit tough, but at the end of the day you’d be surprised — we pulled off a lot of stuff in a day’s work that was pretty spectacular. All of us, everyone here did. It was a very professional team that took care of us.

This is another character that’s very chameleon-like, who has a lot of secrets, a lot of mysteries. Are those the kind of roles that you are naturally attracted to?

I don’t really question when I read a script. If I feel like I could be of service to that role, if I feel like it emotionally engages me, it’s something that interests me and, obviously, if the director is somebody that has the capacity to pull off the ambitious nature of whatever they’re trying to do in the screenplay, I never question that. So, I guess a lot of my films have been more serious in tone, but that’s something that I don’t try to deny. Look, I’m a very fortunate person. I get to choose the movies that I want to do. I’ve a lot of friends in this industry that don’t get to do that. I grew up in LA. A lot of my friends are actors and, so, I realise every day how lucky I am to have this opportunity. So, while I’m here I’m going to do exactly what I want.

When you’re a character playing in a imaginary world, how does that change the rules of acting?

If there’s something you need to be aware of or do different, I would say absolutely not and that’s what was exciting about even attempting it. This is my first science-fiction film. One of the earliest conversations I had with Chris was about how both of us have a hard time with science fiction. We have a little bit of an aversion to it because it’s hard for us to emotionally invest in worlds that are too far detached from what we know.

And what’s interesting about Chris Nolan’s science fiction world is (that it’s) deeply rooted in things we’ve seen before. They are cultural references and it feels like a world that is tactile, that we understand that we could jump into and there’s not too much of a leap of faith to make.

But emotionally, as far as a character’s journey, I took everything as if it was entirely real. You have to; otherwise you’re not invested in the character and not invested in the character’s journey. You’re not going to make it believable to an audience. Everything is real, in essence.

What was it like working with Ken Watanabe (who plays Saito)?

I’ll just be the first to say that Ken should be a national treasure in Japan because he is an unbelievably talented actor. You couldn’t find more of a gentleman. He’s sweet, kind, and he’s extremely thoughtful in the work that he does, and one of the best actors around. I can’t say enough wonderful things about this guy.

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Marion Cotillard is a dreamer. She not only remembers almost every dream she’s had, she says, but can control them, too. “I have busy nights,” she says. “If I wake up during a dream I can usually go back to sleep and finish the story.”

Leonardo DiCaprio with Marion Cotillard at the premiere of Inception in Paris

The Oscar-winning French actress is clearly a little uncomfortable talking about her nocturnal habits, but the conversation somehow strayed into such intimate territory while discussing her latest role. The new mega-budget movie from British director Christopher Nolan, Inception, is a highly complex science-fiction adventure about dream thieves set within the architecture of the human mind.

Cotillard stars, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, as a mysterious femme fatale. At least, I think that’s her role; she says that when she first read the script by Nolan, who had directed both Memento and The Dark Knight, even she did not fully understand her character or the story.

“I had never read a script like it before,” says Cotillard, her expressive 34-year-old eyes widening. “It is so emotionally complex I had to read it a second time. But I was touched by the different layers of the story and I wanted to be a part of it.”

Over the past few years, as her international career has taken off, Cotillard has studied English with serious devotion and although she still speaks rather slowly, taking her time to select the right word, her language is almost flawless. She now splits her year between Paris, where she lives with her boyfriend, the actor and director Guillaume Canet, and California, where we meet. She is clearly adjusting well to the American lifestyle.

“I’ve spent a lot of time here over the past few years and I’m happy to come back because although Paris is my country and I love being there, this is the first time I’ve been not homesick, but US-sick? Can I say that?”

‘THE FANTASY OF IT ALL’

She had been a star for almost a decade in her native France before her role as Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose earned her an Oscar, making her the first ever winner for a performance in the French language. She credits the late singer herself with helping her to capture her essence and fragility by visiting her in her dreams. “We had some night meetings,” she says, mysteriously.

“The movie and the Oscar changed my life in a very good way. It put me in a different universe,” she says. “When I was in Los Angeles during the campaign process for the Academy Awards, I kept telling myself that it was not real life, it was something else. I was having an amazing time and really enjoying the fantasy of it all and then I thought I should stop saying it wasn’t real because it WAS real.”

The glow of her Oscar win was tainted when an interview she had given a year earlier surfaced in which she suggested that the 9/11 attacks on New York may have been a conspiracy and questioned how two buildings the size of the Twin Towers could collapse. She immediately issued abject apologies and her career did not suffer any permanent American backlash.

Cotillard poses at the premiere of Inception at the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood

By the time international fame arrived, she was well prepared for it, having grown up in an artistic household in Orléans, the daughter of an actor-director father and actress mother. She began her professional acting career at 16 in the television series Highlander, before making her feature film debut in Luc Besson’s action comedy Taxi. She appeared in several high-profile French films, winning a Cesar award for her role in Un Long Dimanche de Fiançailles (A Very Long Engagement). In 2003 she made her US film debut in Tim Burton’s Big Fish.

For her first post-Piaf role, Cotillard starred opposite Johnny Depp in Public Enemies as Billie Frechette, living in Louisiana to perfect the character’s accent. She then spent four months learning to dance for her role in the musical Nine. Next up is another action thriller, Contagion, which she will start shooting shortly for Steven Soderbergh in San Francisco.

If she had not been an actress she believes she would have been a musician — she occasionally sings and plays bass and keyboard for a French band called Yodelice. But while she can take her pick of scripts, she claims she has no long-term acting ambitions. “I don’t have a goal,” she says. “I want to live the life I’m living right now. As an actress I just want to tell beautiful stories.”