Christopher Nolan is famous for movies packed with ambiguity, particularly over their endings. There are countless fan explanations for everything from Inception to Interstellar that attempt to come to some kind of agreement about what has actually happened. Nolan, though, will never offer the official explanation himself — and that’s because his brother told him off for doing just that with Memento.
Memento, like so many Nolan movies, is packed with twists and turns and leaves the viewer wondering what it was all about. We won’t spoil anything here in case you haven’t seen it (you should, it’s great!), but, as Nolan told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, Memento is at the heart of the celebrated filmmaker’s approach.
“I never like to define the experience for the audience,” he began. “And so, for me, there are ambiguities. There are questions. There are layers in which things can work.”
Nolan said that he knows the truth of his films — he has to for them to make sense as he’s making them. But he won’t give the audience the answers they want. Instead, he’s keeping them to himself.
“I have to know the answer,” he said “I have to know what I believe the answer to be. And then, otherwise, the ambiguities won’t be productive. There will be a sort of non-answer, as opposed to — if you look at the ending of Inception, for example, the spinning top and people often will ask me, you know…”
At this point Nolan explained how his brother, Jonathan Nolan, influenced his philosophy.
“The first time I ever took a film really out there and did a bunch of interviews on it was Memento,” he said. “And that’s a film that I wrote based on a short story that my brother had written. And he came with us to the Venice Film Festival, where we premiered it. And right afterwards, I was asked a bunch of questions. And they asked me about the ambiguity of the end. And I said, ‘Well, it’s meant to be up to you. But I think it’s this, this, this.’ And he took me aside, and he’s like, ‘Nobody heard the first part where they said it’s meant to be up to you. All they hear is what you say. Your interpretation trumps everything. You can never do that again.’ And he was right. And I never have since then.”
While Inception is perhaps Nolan’s most famous ‘ending explained’ movie, expect plenty of ambiguity in The Odyssey, too. Nolan leaves plenty to the viewer’s imagination, including the reliability of each character’s experience. The Odyssey hits theaters July 17, 2026.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
