Christopher Nolan names the greatest movie twist of all time: “Changes everything you’ve seen”
When used correctly, a twist is one of the greatest tools in a filmmaker’s arsenal. When used incorrectly, it’s one of the worst. Christopher Nolan has pulled a few rugs throughout his career, and that fondness for misdirection was inspired by the greatest cinematic example he’s ever seen.
Nobody wants to go full M Night Shyamalan and shoehorn in a twist for the sake of it, and it’s a delicate thing. Plenty of movies have been defined by their last-minute bait-and-switches, while others have been consigned to the history books of ignominy by undoing everything for a pointless final act upending.
By and large, Nolan has managed to deftly toe that line. The final minutes of The Prestige arguably stand out as the pinnacle, but he’s been doing it for decades. Leonard’s last revelation in Memento, the messages being from Cooper in Interstellar, and Dom Cobb using inception on his own wife have shown that he can use it well.
However, it didn’t turn out quite as well when Marion Cotillard was revealed to be the true criminal mastermind in The Dark Knight Rises, which was played as a jaw-dropping moment when it had been blatantly signposted all along, and her unintentionally hilarious death scene only made things worse.
As far as the be-all and end-all of big-screen twists go, though, Nolan didn’t favour one of the usual suspects. The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, The Others, The Empire Strikes Back, Oldboy, and Psycho are some of the titles that always come up, but the Academy Award-winning auteur has always favoured Angel Heart.
“That’s a movie that Alan Parker made that has this incredible twist at the end that sort of changes everything you’ve seen,” he explained. “And I was pretty fascinated. You could go back and watch it again and be surprised that you hadn’t noticed certain elements of the story that lead up to the ending.”
Since the atmospheric psychological horror flick is almost 40 years old, there’s no point in adding a spoiler warning. Parker’s begins as a story that finds Mickey Rourke’s private eye enlisted by Robert De Niro’s enigmatic employer to unravel the whereabouts of the missing singer Johnny Favorite.
In the end, it’s revealed that Rourke’s Harry Angel is actually Johnny Favourite, De Niro’s Louis Cyphre is the devil himself, and the former sold his soul to the latter before using black magic to take over Angel’s body and commit a string of murders to obscure the truth and cover his tracks, which earns him a one-way ticket straight to hell.
Nolan was suitably mesmerised, calling Angel Heart “a film that took you by surprise, but that played fair with you” in terms of not making its twist feel unearned, jarring, or at odds with the rest of the picture. In fact, it directly inspired Memento, with the director fascinated by the concept of “interesting movies where the story surprises you at the end in some way or towards the end in some way that does make you rethink what you’ve seen,” which sounds an awful lot like his breakthrough feature.
