Christopher Nolan says wife Emma has the ‘correct answer’ to the ending of Inception

Back in 2010 when Inception first premiered, all anyone could talk about was that ambiguous ending.

Now, director Christopher Nolan may have finally put us all out of our misery.

But first, a quick refresher.

The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a professional thief called Cobb, who steals information from people by infiltrating their subconscious.

Throughout the movie, he travels between dreams and reality, before reuniting with his children in the final scene.

In that lasting moment, he spins a top, the totem that’s supposed to identify whether or not he’s in a dream, but chooses to turn away before seeing if it falls.

The camera focuses on the spinning top and people all over the world would have held their breath to see whether or not it falls.

Then screen then cuts to black.

DiCaprio has previously admitted that even he doesn't know how the film ended.

“When it came to Chris Nolan and his mind and how that was all pieced together, everyone was trying to constantly put that puzzle together," he said on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast in 2020.

But now Nolan may have finally answered the question for us. Well, sort of.

Warner Bros. Pictures

When asked about the ending of the flick during a recent interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, he said: “I haven’t been asked that in a while, thankfully. I went through a phase… where I was asked it a lot.

“Every now and again I would make the mistake of getting caught outside of a screening where everyone was coming out.”

Nolan then credited his wife and producer, Emma Thomas, with coming up with the best explanation.

“I think it was Emma who pointed out the correct answer, really, is that the character, Leo’s character - the point of the shot is the character doesn’t care at that point. It’s not a question I comfortably answer," he said.

In 2015, during a lecture on 'reality and dreams' at Princeton University in New Jersey, Nolan gave a similarly vague answer.

He said: "The way the end of that film 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."

Warner Bros. Pictures

Nolan continued: "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.

"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."

Mystery solved. Well... kind of.