Why Christopher Nolan replays the same scene over and over in his movies

• Christopher Nolan layers his screenplays with many instances of recurrence to create the big twist endings that he's famous for.
• Recurrence is continued repetition, often reappearing in a patterned manner.
• The nonlinear structure of Nolan films constantly flashes back and forth between distinct timelines, adding more and more context to each timeline with each recurrence until, ultimately, everything makes sense.
• Nolan constantly presents the audience with all of the answers throughout his films, but it's difficult to know what exactly to look for (until Nolan shows them, right at the very end).

The following is a transcript of the video.

Cooper: No. Don't let me leave, Murph! Ah! No! No! No! [sobbing]

Narrator: This is the moment when the big twist in "Interstellar" is revealed: that Cooper was the ghost interacting with Murph's bookshelf from the beginning of the film. This is the moment we find out the big twist in "The Prestige": that Angier cloned and killed himself every night to achieve his magic trick. And this is the moment we find out the big twist in "Following": that Bill is being framed for murder.

All these scenes have something in common, and not just that they're directed by Christopher Nolan. We see each of these scenes multiple times in their movies. So, how are scenes we've already watched still able to deliver such a big twist? The secret lies in Nolan's use of recurrence.

Nolan uses the idea of recurrence in his films in a myriad of ways. In "Inception," recurrence is featured as a main component of the plot, creating dreams within dreams. In "The Prestige," Nolan explores recurrence as a motif. The film features twins and clones, diaries within diaries, and the main characters repeatedly sabotaging each other's magic tricks. And in "Memento," the very structure of the film is recursive, as the film constantly alternates between scenes from the past and scenes from the present. Put simply, recurrence is continued repetition. However, one of Nolan's greatest uses of recurrence is how he employs it to deliver twists at the end of his films.

A simple first example to help wrap your head around how Nolan uses recurrence to pull off his twist endings comes from a scene in "The Prestige" that Nolan replays three times throughout the film. At 47 seconds into the film, we see a bunch of top hats in a forest. When the scene cuts away from the hats, it's confusing. We don't see the hats again for another hour and 25 minutes, when we learn that the hats have been duplicated by Tesla's machine. This time, the scene makes a little more sense. However, the real significance of the hats isn't revealed until Nolan shows us the top hats once again right before his final reveal. Angier achieves his magic trick by cloning himself every night using the same Tesla machine that duplicated the top hats, ultimately drowning each of his clones.

So we see the scene three times, and our experience of it the third time is significantly different than when we saw it the first time. Suddenly, the perplexing scene from the opening now makes sense because of all of the context that we get throughout the movie. And even though the movie presents us with everything we need to figure out the significance of the opening image...

Angier: Well, which one is mine?

Tesla: They're all you hats, Mr. Angier.

Narrator: We don't tend to apply what we've learned until the scene plays again.

Now, one could argue that the scene is just a simple flashback, but it's actually more than that. While many films and filmmakers use flashbacks and nonlinear storytelling, what makes Nolan's style distinct is that he doesn't flash back just once in his films. Instead of structuring his nonlinear films to have distinct sections that are out of order chronologically, like "Pulp Fiction," the nonlinear structures of Nolan's films constantly flash back and forth between distinct timelines, adding more and more context to each timeline with each recurrence, until, ultimately, everything makes sense.

Now, using recurrence does not at all make a film inherently better, but it does happen to be an extremely helpful technique when trying to create a twist ending. Even among movies with twist endings, Nolan's use of recurrence sets his films apart from the rest. For example, in the film "The Usual Suspects," there is certainly a twist at the end of the film, but it's a one-and-done reveal. The seemingly meek Verbal was lying throughout the film and is actually the fabled crime boss Keyser Söze. So while it's an entertaining twist ending, the film purposefully misleads the audience throughout the majority of the film, and there are very few clues placed throughout that lead the audience to the truth about Verbal's identity.

However, in Nolan's films, the audience is almost always given the opportunity to solve the mystery through recursively presented clues and scenes that are shown over and over again. Take, for example, the opening shot of "Inception," where a haggard Cobb washes up on a beach and talks with an old man. This scene is revisited again at the end of the film, now that the audience understands the context and realizes what's going on: that this beach is limbo and that Cobb has traveled there in order to save Saito, the old man. Nolan even shows a very similar scene of Cobb and Ariadne washing up on the beaches of Cobb's limbo, but he doesn't leave enough time for the audience to process the significance of washing up on the beach and its connection to the short scene that happened two hours before. Nolan is constantly presenting the audience with all of the answers throughout his films, but we just don't quite know what to look for until he shows us right at the very end.

The fact that Nolan is able to repeatedly show the audience the truth without them realizing what's happening is what makes his films so iconic. While the twist of "The Usual Suspects" is like telling you that the duck you've been staring at is actually a rabbit, the twists in Nolan's films are more like a hidden puzzle. There's a colorful image or a scene that doesn't make sense when you look at it the first time; however, when Nolan finally gives the audience the key and you revisit the image, you can see things clearly. This is why revisiting Nolan's scenes are such a twist. The answer has been there the whole time, hiding in plain sight.

Even Nolan's films that don't have traditional twist endings have recursive elements. For example, in "Dunkirk," he shows the same scene from several different perspectives, which results in a miniature twist. While initially it appears that the pilot, Collins, is fine after being shot down by an enemy plane, waving to the other pilot, when Nolan later cuts to Collins' perspective of the event, it turns out that he's actually not OK. His waving is actually him struggling to open his cockpit while he slowly begins to drown. While this is one of the most basic examples of Nolan's recurrence, it shows how such a simple tool can be so powerful.

Luckily, knowing how Nolan works won't necessarily ruin your experience watching his films. As Cutter famously says at the end of "The Prestige"...

Cutter: Now you're looking for the secret, but you won't find it, because, of course, you're not really looking….You want to be fooled.