Christopher Nolan says Inception is “bigger than The Dark Knight”

After the eye-popping second teaser trailer for Christopher Nolan’s Inception hit theaters in front of Sherlock Holmes on Christmas day and then the web on December 28th, I thought I’d have to wait another couple months before hearing any news about the film. Bloggers and fans have been going crazy over the last two weeks speculating and providing theories on what they think Inception will/could be about. That type of mystery hanging over an upcoming blockbuster can drive a movie geek insane. Now, the man behind it all, finally speaks.

In an interview with the LA Times’ Hero Complex Blog, writer/director/producer of Inception, Christopher Nolan, spoke candidly (to a point) about the the vision for his first post-Dark Knight movie:

I think we’ve put a lot of different things into the pot with this one. I grew up watching James Bond films and loving those and watching spy movies with their globetrotting sensibility…. We get to do that here, not just geographically but also in time and dimensions of reality as well. We get to make a movie that’s expansive, I suppose you’d say, in four dimensions.

4-D? I don’t even know what that means physically or scientifically, but…take that James Cameron!

Another interesting dynamic revealed from the interview piece came via Nolan’s wife, business partner and co-producer of  all his films, Emma Thomas. Although Inception has a rumored $200 million budget, boasts one of the best young casts ever assembled,  and features an epic mind-bending plot, the film is, apparently, personal to Chris. Thomas explains:

It’s something that we had been talking about on and off for seven or eight years. Coming off of the ‘The Dark Knight,’ the only thing we really knew is that we wanted to do something more personal. It seemed like the right time to do this. The fact that it’s really just an enormous movie — that wasn’t ever really a factor in the decision. This story lends itself to a movie of this size.

So its going to push the boundaries of like 30 dimensions and is a very personal project, but how does it’s size, scale and scope compare to The Dark Knight? Which was only the 3rd highest-grossing film of all time, received eight Oscar nominations and re-defined a genre… Answer:

This is the biggest challenge I’ve taken on to this point. We’re trying to tell a story on a massive scale, a true blockbuster scale – the biggest I’ve ever been involved with. We tried to make a very large-scale film with ‘The Dark Knight’ and with this one we wanted to push that even further.

So there you have it folks, straight from Oz himself, Inception is going to be BIGGER than The Dark Knight.

What Do You Think? Discuss.