Christopher Nolan names the one David Lynch film “laborious to sit through”
Christopher Nolan has picked out the David Lynch film that he admires, but found “laborious to sit through” on the very first watch.
The acclaimed filmmaker, still riding high on the success of his recent blockbuster epic The Odyssey, was invited to the Criterion Closet to pick out the movies he cherishes most.
After singling out films such as Don Siegel’s 1964 movie The Killers, a John Cassavetes box set, Al Reinert’s 1989 documentary For All Mankind, and more, he turned his attention to late cult filmmaker Lynch.
Nolan happened upon Lynch’s 1997 classic, Lost Highway, a neo-noir horror film which follows a jazz saxophonist, Fred, who suspects his wife, Renee, is cheating. The confounding psychological puzzle delves deep into guilt, infidelity, and the psychological fugue state of trauma.
The movie stars Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette in the leading roles, with Robert Blake, Balthazar Getty, and even Lynch in supporting roles.
Picking up the movie, Nolan explained, “That’s one of my favourite David Lynch movies.”
He went on, “When I first saw it, I cannot say that I enjoyed the film. I found it quite laborious to sit through.”
Furthering his criticism, he added, “I thought it was quite heavy-going, quite hard, but I found myself thinking about it for weeks afterwards and remembering it like I was remembering one of my own dreams.”
Nolan mused that this was Lynch’s exact goal with the project, as it “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.”
He concluded smilingly, “I’m very keen to revisit this one.”
Elsewhere, Nolan has admitted that the unique non-linearity of Lost Highway inspired the structure of his very own breakout movie, Memento, which follows a former insurance investigator who suffers from an inability to form new memories.
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