Christopher Nolan said David Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway was initially “laborious to sit through”, despite his admiration for Lynch. He later concluded that its unsettling, dreamlike structure influenced his thinking about how a film can remain in an audience’s memory.

Nolan watched Lost Highway while developing Memento, his 2000 thriller about a man with short-term memory loss. After initially finding Lynch’s fragmented narrative difficult, Nolan said he came to remember it like a dream, an idea that helped shape Memento’s non-linear storytelling.