The Jetpacker

In October of last year, Jackie’s dad told us about a letter he received that a movie called “Oliver’s Arrow” would be filming near his home in Palos Verdes, California.

First thing we thought was, “that’s a terrible title for a movie… it must be fake.”

In addition, we live near Hollywood and we’re friends with plenty of people in the industry, so we know that movies are often shot under fake titles to prevent stalkers and crazed fans from invading the set.

So we did quick search on the Internet Movie Database and found that “Oliver’s Arrow” was actually the fake title for Christopher Nolan’s next movie, Inception.

By now you’ve seen the trailer at least twenty times, and judging by the trailer, you have no clue what the movie is about.  That’s exactly why the movie was shot under a fake title.

Nolan, the director of The Dark Knight, worked on the script for over a decade, and the content of the movie is allegedly so mind-bending that Warner Brothers wanted to keep its $200 million investment tightly under wraps.

But for a movie shrouded in such secrecy, it wasn’t that difficult to walk on set.

We kind of expected the shooting location, a beach front park on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, to be surrounded by armed guards and killer dogs and landmines because of the high profile cast involved… but there wasn’t even yellow tape.

We parked in a nearby parking lot and watched crews set up lights all around a cove, some as far as half a mile away, to illuminate two set pieces: a three-story tall wooden facade of a Japanese castle on the beach, and a Japanese balcony perched cliffside.

Since the sets were facing the ocean, we couldn’t see what they looked like, but I found this picture of the beachside column later…

So as darkness fell, we inched closer and closer to the set, until we were literally standing ten feet from Mr. Nolan.

We still couldn’t see the construction in its entirety, but it appeared to be a blend of future and past, reality and dream, a stylized Japanese balcony that played host to a party with actresses in classy yet unusual dresses and hats that looked like they could have been flight attendants from Blade Runner.

After a few minutes of guessing what we were looking at, a production coordinator came over and told us it was a closed set.

We struck up a conversation in an attempt to convince her to keep us around, and I soon found out that we both went to the same film school.  But that still didn’t stop her from politely kicking us out.

Nonetheless, it was a cool experience to be on the set of Inception, and it made us even more curious to see the movie when it comes out this Friday.