Christopher Nolan has revealed how David Lynch’s Lost Highway influenced his own breakout film Memento, though admitted he found it “laborious” on a first watch.
Following the release of his new film The Odyssey, the director stopped by the Criterion Closet to talk about some of his favourite movies.
Picking up Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway, Nolan shared: “When I first saw it, I cannot say that I enjoyed the film. I found it quite laborious to sit through. I thought it was quite heavy going, quite hard.
“But I found myself thinking about it weeks afterwards and remembering it like I was remembering one of my own dreams, which just speaks to the way that 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.”
Speaking previously about Lost Highway’s influence, he said last year (via Far Out Magazine): “I realised that Lynch had created the shape of a film that would project a shadow in my memory, assuming the shape of a dream. It’s like a hypercube: the shadow of a four-dimensional object in our three-dimensional world.”
Lost Highway stars Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette and follows a man who receives tapes of his home before being arrested for his wife’s murder, and then is replaced by a younger man.
Memento was released a few years later in 2000, and features Guy Pearce as a man with amnesia who tries to piece together his wife’s murder through notes, photographs and tattoos on his body.
Elsewhere, The Odyssey has become a huge success for Nolan, becoming one of his best-ever openings, as well as the best live-action opening of 2026 so far.
The film stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, the Greek king of Ithaca, and his perilous journey home from the Trojan War, and is based on Homer’s classic tale.
Meanwhile, Nolan has revealed that he would like to make a horror movie after including genre elements in The Odyssey.
“It very much whets my appetite for more,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “But I’ve always believed that horror as a genre has to be approached very carefully from a conceptual point of view. In other words, you have to have an amazing idea.
“When you go see a film like Obsession, that’s an amazing idea. That movie works like a motherfucker. It’s not about the technical side. It’s not about what technical itches I would have to scratch. It’s about story. So I’m always looking.”
However, he has said it will be “at least” three years until he releases his next film, admitting he “hit the limits” of his stamina on his latest project.
In other news, it has emerged that The Odyssey has sparked an interest in people wanting to learn Greek.
The post Christopher Nolan on how David Lynch’s ‘Lost Highway’ influenced ‘Memento’ even though he found it “laborious” at first appeared first on NME.