There are a lot of elements that make a film instantly recognizable as a Christopher Nolan film. There's his austere, film noir style. There's his preferred urban setting and a strong sense of realism. And, of course, there's the lead character in a gray suit.
But one flourish seems to connect Nolan's filmography more than any other.
"I think the distinct thing that makes a Nolanesque film is playing around with time," UK film critic Ian Nathan said. "I think (Nolan's) fascinated with the structure of films in terms of their linearity and breaking the rules of that."
Nathan is the author of "Christopher Nolan: The Iconic Filmmaker and His Work," which is the third in a series of books on iconic filmmakers like Ridley Scott and Guillermo del Toro. He tells Wisconsin Public Radio's "BETA" that one doesn't need to look much further than Nolan's flag planting breakthrough, "Memento," to get a sense of the director's MO.
"Memento" was an indie and noir-ish thriller whose protagonist, Leonard (Guy Pearce), suffered from severe short-term memory loss, instantly forgetting nearly every encounter he had trying to solve his wife's murder.
"The idea of a murder plot told through that character who can't hold on to information, almost defeating the idea of a plot, fascinated Christopher Nolan," Nathan said. "(Nolan) hits upon the inspired notion of, 'If I tell this story backwards ... then the audience has the same effect. The audience lose their memory.'"
According to Nathan, the result was a brilliant, controversial and rule-breaking film that sent the indie scene wild and entered Nolan into the mainstream.
Nolan's next big wave would be revitalizing the Batman franchise for Warner Bros. with his Dark Knight trilogy. Nathan said that Batman's lack of any superpowers appealed to Nolan's filmmaking desires of realism.
"He could turn a comic book character, Batman and all the villains that are associated with him, into ... sort of film noir style characters, and can make it very dark," Nathan said.
The result was the critically and commercially acclaimed "Batman Begins" in 2005. Nolan again plays with time, floating in and out of flashbacks seamlessly to build the story of how orphan Bruce Wayne becomes the vigilante hero, delaying the actual first sighting of Batman until the film's second half.
As Nathan writes, Nolan approached the film showing Batman primarily from the criminal's perspective. This is a similar technique used by one of Nolan's filmmaking heroes, Ridley Scott. Scott took the same approach to his titular alien, when he made his 1979 sci-fi horror classic, "Alien."
Forgoing CGI as much as possible, Nolan shot on location and produced as many practical effects as he could. The result was a tactile film and reimagining of the comic book movie genre. This would be Nolan's calling card throughout the trilogy.
"(Nolan) wanted to make them less fantasy, less huge," Nathan said. "He said, 'What happens if you put The Joker, the concept of the Joker into a real-world environment? What would he be? How would he function?' And I thought, that's really daring when you think about it."
"The Dark Knight" — featuring Heath Ledger as the aforementioned Joker — would be the high-water mark of the trilogy and for comic book movies in general, and is still considered by many to be the best ever.
It would also reignite major studio's desires to get back into the genre and has all but taken over mainstream filmmaking today.
Ironically, this renewed interest nearly blocked Nolan's next few ventures. Studios were less likely to finance big budget original idea blockbusters in the wake of all the success of Marvel and other superhero movies — like "The Watchmen" — that followed "The Dark Knight" in 2008 and "The Dark Knight Rises" in 2012.
In 2010, Nolan finally did prevail in selling the studios on the puzzlebox, dream saga, "Inception," perhaps by securing Leonardo DiCaprio to star. Nathan said that at its heart, "Inception" serves as an allegory for filmmaking itself.
"I think with Nolan, it's much more explicit than maybe with other filmmakers," Nathan said.
He points out that in the film — where an elite team of "extractors" who enter a shared dreaming space with a target to find out information or, in the case of the film, plant information — inhabit similar roles to a movie crew.
"Leonardo DiCaprio's crack team are essentially a crew who build a narrative within the mind of their chosen target. And one of them is the architect, and there's also the production designer. And one of them is the director," Nathan said.
That DiCaprio's look and wardrobe bear an uncanny resemblance to Nolan himself only serves to reinforce this allegorical read on the film.
Again, Nolan plays with the concepts of time. As the team goes deeper and multiple dream layers into the target's subconscious, the dimensions of time warp.
Nolan would return to this concept in his 2014 sci-fi film "Interstellar," which was a massively budgeted and researched epic about finding habitable planets to relocate our population before Earth's imminent decay.
Nathan stated that even for heightened and fantastical story conceits, Nolan attempted to ground the picture in realism as much as he possibly could. Nolan hired noted astrophysicist Kip Thorne to serve as a consultant on the set.
"(Nolan) would show him the screenplay, and they would discuss the idea of traveling through wormholes and bending space and all these kinds of incredibly huge concepts because Nolan wanted to get it right, and he wanted to portray it accurately," Nathan said.
"And again, you come back to the whole idea about time," he continued. "That is the central Nolan fascination. So, you have that fantastic concept within physics of time running at different paces and in different locations."
Nolan would be even more overt with time running at different paces in his World War II epic, "Dunkirk," which followed three different story lines all covering three different time periods all concluding as the film does.
"So one is a guy in a Spitfire. One is a sort of team on a boat going over to rescue them. And one is the soldier on the beach," explained Nathan. "Sea, air and land. These three different elements that he mixes up. And then, of course, he does this extraordinary idea of each one almost being in their own time signature, as it were, like a piece of music."
Nolan — who split his citizenship between the U.K. and the U.S. growing up but spent his formative years in English schools — knew the history well. Part of that was because his grandfather had been in the war. What he found out and was fascinated by, according to Nathan, was that Dunkirk wasn't about heroics as much as it was about simply survival.
"I think the more he conceptualized the idea of a Dunkirk film, the less it became a war film, and the more it became a film about something much more primal," Nathan said, "which was our instinct to survive. What are we willing to do under these circumstances to survive?"
Nolan will return to the period with his forthcoming film, "Oppenheimer," starring Nolan stalwart Cillian Murphy. Nathan states that this should present the imaginative director with a new challenge as he's never done a biopic before.
"This has been an itch that needed scratching," Nathan said. "What kind of film it will be, I'm so fascinated to know. What will he do with the biopic? I'm sure it'll be revolutionary when we come to see it."
There's little reason to doubt that sentiment.