Christopher Nolan explains the ending of ‘Inception’

It's movie lovers' favourite puzzle that never got solved. The ending of Christopher Nolan's sci-fi film "Inception" is still among the most confusing and most discussed in the world of cinema. An exceptional film by all measures, its end, however, is still the one thing that made the biggest impression.

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb, who entered people's minds by synthesising dreams. They would enter their subjects' dreams to either extract information or plant the seeds of a new idea in their mind. To achieve this, they would often travel between multiple levels of dreams, risking being left behind in a limbo forever.

Fans have, for years, wanted to know if Cobb did finally meet his family or was he forever trapped in the limbo. Desperate ones even tried to find clues in the fact the kids' outfits never change from the beginning of the film to the end, meaning Cobb is merely imagining his family. But there is no end to speculation about the end unless we hear it explained by Christopher Nolan.

In an interview with Esquire magazine, Michael Caine, who played Cobb's mentor and father-in-law, said Nolan had explained the film to him. "When I got the script of Inception, I was a bit puzzled by it, and I said to (Chris), 'I don't understand where the dream is'. I said, 'When is it the dream and when is it reality?'

"He said, 'Well, when you're in the scene it's reality.' So, get that – if I'm in it, it's reality. If I'm not in it, it's a dream," he added. Now because Caine did feature in the final scene featuring Cobb and his kids, it means the scene was reality and not a dream.

But if you want Nolan's own explanation of the scenes, things get bit more vague. In 2015, Nolan tried to explain it during a lecture on "reality and dreams" to the graduating class at Princeton University in New Jersey. Here is what he said:

"In the great tradition of these speeches, generally someone says something along the lines of 'Chase your dreams,' but I don't want to tell you that because I don't believe that. I want you to chase your reality.