Christopher Nolan has admitted that he did not enjoy David Lynch’s Lost Highway the first time he watched it, describing the surreal 1997 thriller as “quite laborious to sit through.”
Nolan continued thinking about the movie for weeks and began remembering its images as though they belonged to one of his own dreams.
He watched Lost Highway on VHS while writing Memento and later recognized that Lynch’s treatment of fractured identity, memory and dream logic had influenced the psychological thriller that became his international breakthrough.
Nolan discussed the experience during a recorded visit to the Criterion Closet, where he selected 16 releases and connected several of them directly to his own filmmaking.
Nolan Found ‘Lost Highway’ Difficult to Sit Through
“When I first saw it, I cannot say that I enjoyed the film,” Nolan said. “I found it quite laborious to sit through. I thought it was quite heavy going, quite hard.” Lost Highway stars Bill Pullman as Fred Madison, a jazz saxophonist who begins receiving videotapes showing increasingly invasive footage of his home. He is later convicted of murdering his wife, played by Patricia Arquette.
The story then shifts identities when a young mechanic named Pete Dayton, played by Balthazar Getty, inexplicably appears inside Fred’s prison cell. After Pete is released, he becomes involved with a woman who looks identical to Fred’s supposedly murdered wife, with Arquette playing both characters.
Lynch never reduces the transformation to a conventional explanation. Reality, fantasy and memory overlap as characters change identities and scenes return in altered forms. Nolan told Criterion that his response changed once the screening was over. “I found myself thinking about it weeks afterwards,” he said, “and remembering it like I was remembering one of my own dreams.”
Lynch’s Dream Logic Helped Shape ‘Memento’
Nolan encountered Lost Highway while developing Memento, based on a story by his brother and frequent collaborator Jonathan Nolan. The film stars Guy Pearce as Leonard Shelby, a man unable to form lasting new memories after an attack that killed his wife. Leonard uses Polaroid photographs, handwritten notes and tattoos to continue investigating her death.
Nolan presents the color sequences in reverse chronological order, preventing viewers from knowing what happened immediately before each scene. A second storyline shown in black and white moves forward until the two timelines converge. Although Memento uses a more clearly defined narrative structure, Nolan said Lynch demonstrated how cinema could recreate the emotional experience of dreaming without turning every image into a puzzle with one fixed answer.
“Lynch figured out how to take dream logic and the experience of dreaming and make a sort of cinematic proxy for that for the audience,” Nolan told Criterion, according to Entertainment Weekly. Nolan previously compared Lost Highway to the shadow of a multidimensional object.
Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse Helped Inspire the Joker
He also chose Fritz Lang’s 1933 thriller The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, explaining that he and Jonathan studied its criminal mastermind while developing the Joker for The Dark Knight. Lang’s movie depicts Mabuse directing a criminal network built around fear, disorder and apparently purposeless violence even while he remains confined inside a psychiatric institution.
Heath Ledger’s Joker similarly presents himself as an agent of chaos who manipulates Gotham’s criminals, police and political institutions without pursuing an ordinary financial objective. Nolan also selected Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, which he remembered seeing in 70mm during its original theatrical release. He noted that the film includes a childhood appearance by John David Washington, who later starred in Nolan’s Tenet.
His selections included Satyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy and Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3, a collection devoted to restoring and distributing films from countries whose cinematic histories have often been difficult for international audiences to access.
Nolan Filled His Bag With 16 Criterion Releases
Nolan had visited the Criterion Closet before the company began filming its popular Closet Picks videos. During his recorded return, he moved quickly through the shelves while discussing childhood favorites, experimental cinema and filmmakers who influenced his career.
Nolan called Robert Altman’s The Player an incisive Hollywood satire and praised Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, which followed the same central actor across approximately 12 years of production. His final selections included Carl Franklin’s crime thriller One False Move, Carroll Ballard’s The Black Stallion and Welles’ Citizen Kane.