Here’s How They Made the Incredible Inception Hallway Fight Scene

CineFix’s latest Art of the Scene video tackles one of the more ambitious, wild sequences in modern film history: the rotating hotel corridor fight scene in Christopher Nolan’s Inception. In the scene, Joseph Gordon-Levitt grapples with a bad guy in zero gravity dream battle. The beauty of the scene was in no small part due to Nolan’s decision to find a practical way to film it rather than rely on CGI. CineFix shows us how they pulled this off, and it’s pretty incredible.

The hallway dream fight required the construction of a colossal centrifuge, the use of motion-capture cameras, and the use of ambient light coming from the lamps and sconces that are a part of the actual set. It also required Gordon-Levitt to become intimately connected to the set—both literally and intellectually. Not only was he connected to wires, which required training, he also studied every piece of the set so he could credibly move throughout the scene without crashing into anything and ruining the moment.