Michael Caine Explained The Ending Of ‘Inception’, Which Kind Of Defeats The Point Of The Movie

Michael Caine has cleared up any ambiguity about what happened at the end of Inception, thus defeating the whole point of what happened at the end of Inception.

In case you’ve forgotten one of the most iconic movie endings of the past 20 years, Inception cuts to black just as Leonardo DiCaprio spins his trusty totem to check whether he’s awake or still in a dream. The audience doesn’t ever get a definitive answer either way.

Writer-director Christopher Nolan meant for it to be ambiguous, telling Indiewire back when the movie was first released that “the important thing is that Cobb’s not looking at the top. He doesn’t care.”

But movie nerds do care. They care very much. And they’ve been arguing about it for almost a decade. Enter Michael Caine, who seemed to offer some clarity on the issue at a recent screening of the movie in London.

“When I got the script of Inception, I was a bit puzzled by it,” said the actor. “And I said to [Nolan], ‘I don’t understand where the dream is… 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.”

I’m not actually sure that I buy that explanation, since there are plenty of scenes that don’t feature Caine that seem to pretty definitively happen while DiCaprio is awake. And while Caine does appear in the divisive final scene, couldn’t DiCaprio have just… y’know… dreamt that he was there?

Still, if you had a burning desire for an answer, there it is. Maybe.