Inception is full of scenes with impressive visual effects, but the most famous one is the zero-gravity hallway fight scene, which isn’t the product of CGI – here’s how it was filmed with practical effects. Christopher Nolan has built a solid and loyal fanbase over the years thanks to his unique filmmaking style, often grounded in existential themes and exploring concepts like time, memory, and identity, sometimes through unconventional narrative structures, as he did with Memento in 2000. However, in 2010, he took the audience to a completely different realm with multiple layers and visually stunning scenarios in Inception, which explores the concepts of dreams and reality.
Inception follows Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), a professional thief who steals information through a different and complex method: infiltrating the subconscious of his targets, extracting and implanting ideas in the process. When he’s offered to have his criminal history erased so he can go back to his family, Cobb takes on a very complicated mission that requires the help of his team, which includes architects, chemists, and more. Together, they build dream scenarios with different layers so they can extract or plant the ideas they need, but without the target even knowing that their subconscious is being infiltrated. Among Cobb’s crew members is Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the “Point Man” who manages and researches their missions, and the one who got involved in one of the most iconic scenes in the movie.
When infiltrating Robert Michael Fischer’s (Cillian Murphy) subconscious, Cobb’s team builds a three-layer shared dream: the first one is Yusuf’s (Dileep Rao) dream set in rainy Los Angeles, the second is Arthur’s dream set in a hotel, and the third is Eames’ (Tom Hardy) dream in a fortified mountain hospital. The “dreamer” of each level has to stay behind to set up a “kick” that would wake the rest up from the deeper dream and they have to happen at the same time, but things get complicated real quick. While Saito (Ken Watanabe) is wounded in the first level, Yusuf is pursued by Robert’s projections and initiates the kick too soon, causing zero gravity in Arthur’s dream and an avalanche in Eames’. The projections soon reach Arthur in his dream, and a zero-gravity fight ensues in a hallway at the hotel.
The scene sees Arthur fighting the guards of Robert’s dream through a rotating hallway and in zero-gravity, and as impressive as it looks, this scene wasn’t achieved through CGI. Instead, the team behind Inception built rotating sets in an airship hangar outside London and had Gordon-Levitt and the actors playing the guards suspended from a wire. To achieve the zero-gravity effect, the hallway was built vertically and the camera was placed at the bottom, so when the actors were suspended, it gave the idea of them being floating in zero-gravity. Another set would rotate 360 degrees, and depending on the shot they needed, the camera would be attached to the set or would be separate from it. Of course, shooting a fight in a rotating set and then in a vertical one was not easy for the crew and the actors, who rehearsed the scenes for days. In the end, the fight took three weeks to film and required a lot of training, but it was worth the effort.
The final result was one of the most impressive sequences in Inception, made even better by the fact that it was all practical effects and a lot of training and rehearsing with the cast, along with months of planning and building the sets so the scenes looked believable. Inception will go down in history not just because of its themes and concepts, but also due to the amount of detail and work put into its scenes, most notably the zero-gravity hallway fight in Arthur’s dream.