De Palma
Noomi Rapace was cast as Isabelle after De Palma ran into a director in New York who was interested in having Rapace in his film. The director gave De Palma some of Rapace's Swedish films, and De Palma was impressed by Rapace's performances. He saw Rachel McAdams' performance in "Mean Girls" and decided to cast her as Christine. For the film, De Palma had initially written a sequence inspired by "Inception" (2010), saying "I had this incredibly complicated commercial based on "Inception" with three dreams on top of each other, they finally get to the vault and there's the phone. It was elaborate and some of my director friends looked at this and said, 'Come on! Get rid of that "Inception" thing. Do something else ... I said, 'I love this "Inception" thing.' De Palma ended up discarding the idea.