25 things you didn’t know about your favorite action movies

Inception – An ode to Edith Piaf

Plenty of action movies revolve around getting into the mind of a character and figuring out what makes them tick. But in the case of Inception, they literally go into people’s heads and steal valuable secrets from them. It sounds confusing because it is.

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a thief, but not in the classic sense. He’s an industrial spy who specializes in lifting valuable information from a person’s mind through their dreams. Someone approaches Cobb with an interesting task: they want him to implant information into someone’s mind, an extremely difficult process known as “inception”.

Cobb wanted to give up being a dream architect, but when approached with the possibility of being reunited with his family, he can’t say no, even if it means doing the impossible.

This movie might mess you up, with all the discussion of the different levels of dreams and how the mind works. But as difficult as the plot may be to understand for some, there are some fun facts about the movie that isn’t nearly as hard to understand.

The film has a pretty interesting connection to French star Edith Piaf. Nolan said he specifically chose her song “Non, je ne regrette rien” for the film because both the song and the film deal with the effect of memories on the psyche, and how it can be disastrous if you don’t let go of harmful memories.

Some have also pointed out the significance of the lyric (in French): “Ni le bien qu’on m’a fait ni le mal.” “Le mal” in this instance means “the bad”, and in the film, Cobb’s wife is named Mal. To really hammer in the song’s significance, the movie’s runtime is 2 hours and 28 minutes, and the original Piaf song is exactly 2 minutes and 28 seconds long.

Additionally, if you look at the names of the characters in the film, you might notice something. The names of the main characters — Dom, Robert, Eames, Arthur, Mal and Saito — spell out “DREAMS” if you add up the first letters. If you include Peter, Ariadna and Yusuf, it spells “DREAMS PAY,” which is essentially the plot of the movie condensed into two words.