LOS ANGELES

NEARLY everything in Christopher Nolan’s world is more than it appears to be. In his hands his 2000 feature “Memento” became not only a taut thriller with a catchy psychological gimmick but also a calling card to a career of cinematic independence.

His most recent film, “The Dark Knight,” was not just a big-budget summer movie about a vigilante in a bat costume, but also a meditation on heroism and terrorism. Even the deceptively quaint home he keeps on an unassuming block in Hollywood has a dual identity: it doubles as his residence and the bunker where he has been finishing his first film since “The Dark Knight,” which in 2008 earned the all-time highest domestic gross for a motion picture not made by James Cameron.

Yet for all the fanfare that will accompany Mr. Nolan’s new film, “Inception,” when Warner Brothers releases it on July 16, most of its intended viewers will know almost nothing about it. At Mr. Nolan’s preference, trailers for “Inception” have shown little more than snippets of its star, Leonardo DiCaprio, and a nattily attired supporting cast in slow-motion action sequences. Intensifying the fantastical quality of these disconnected moments and their vaguely modern settings is the revelation that they are taking place inside a dream.

With these few bread crumbs Mr. Nolan and his studio are confident that their opaque and costly film will lure large crowds. They are betting that moviegoers have come to regard Mr. Nolan as a director who combines intimate emotions with outsize imagination and seemingly limitless resources  a blockbuster auteur who has made bigness his medium.