Christopher Nolan: Reality is subjective

Christopher Nolan finds the premise of “subjective reality” deeply important.

The 44-year-old director wrote and helmed 2010 sci-fi thriller Inception, which centres on a thief played by Leonardo DiCaprio who uses dream-sharing technology to score his targets.

Christopher spoke to new graduates of Princeton University at their commencement ceremony on Monday and the filmmaker explained his perception of Inception’s surreal ending during the speech.

"I feel that over time, we started to view reality as the poor cousin to our dreams, in a sense. ... I want to make the case to you that our dreams, our virtual realities, these abstractions that we enjoy and surround ourselves with — they are subsets of reality," he explained, according to The Hollywood Reporter. "The way the end of [Inception] worked, Leonardo DiCaprio's character Cobb — he was off with his kids, he was in his own subjective reality. He didn't really care anymore, and that makes a statement: perhaps, all levels of reality are valid. The camera moves over the spinning top just before it appears to be wobbling, it was cut to black."

Christopher is also the director behind acclaimed films such as Academy Award-winning sci-fi epic Interstellar and The Dark Knight trilogy.

He thinks it’s important to leave the audience with a quandary about what’s real.

"I skip out of the back of the theatre before people catch me, and there's a very, very strong reaction from the audience: usually a bit of a groan," Christopher joked. "The point is, objectively, it matters to the audience in absolute terms: even though when I'm watching, it's fiction, a sort of virtual reality. But the question of whether that's a dream or whether it's real is the question I've been asked most about any of the films I've made. It matters to people because that's the point about reality. Reality matters."