“I don’t know what I’m allowed to say about Inception,” Leonardo DiCaprio recently told a junket journalist for the Philippine Inquirer.

“It’s Chris [Nolan] delving into dream psychoanalysis and, at the same time, making a high-octane, surreal film that came from his mind. He wrote the entire thing, and it all made sense to him. [But] it didn’t make sense to many of us when we were doing it. We had to do a lot of detective work to figure out what the movie was about.”

To me DiCaprio’s statement as almost an iron-clad guarantee that Inception is going to be far-reaching, multi-layered and generally a kick-ass ride. Actors involved in ambitious films by major directors always say they found the plot perplexing. A big-name actress said the exact same thing to me last summer on the set of a big-budget espionage thriller. A TCM page on North by Northwest says that “according to biographies on Cary Grant, during production the star repeatedly expressed confusion over the film’s plot, which he found implausible and unclear.”