Memento’s trickery echoes the twisty plotting Quentin Tarantino utilized in the ’90s classics Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, but it feels much more mathematical. As the main plot winds backward, the film consistently cuts to black-and-white segments flowing in the opposite direction, in which Leonard has a paranoid phone conversation in a hotel room and explains the particulars of his condition. At the end of the movie, Leonard leaves the hotel and drives out of town to murder a man he thinks is his wife’s murderer; the black-and-white scenes bloom into color, and it becomes clear that the two ends of the film’s timeline are syncing.

In 1998, Nolan made his debut with the little-seen British crime drama Following, made for just $6,000, which tells a similarly elliptical and twisty tale of criminal intrigue and revenge. Memento, written by Nolan and inspired by a short story by his brother Jonathan, secured a $9 million budget on the strength of his script alone, funded by the now-defunct indie studio Newmarket. It premiered in Europe in 2000, where it was a hit at the Venice Film Festival, and an even bigger one at Sundance the following year, but didn’t secure U.S. distribution despite rapturous reviews. With the support of the director Steven Soderbergh, who talked the film up in interviews, Newmarket eventually decided to distribute it themselves, a risky move that paid off—Memento made a tidy $25 million domestically.

After its U.S. release on March 16, 2001, it was nominated for two Oscars in the Original Screenplay and Editing categories, and although it lost both, it established Nolan as a director to watch. His next project was a remake of the Nordic crime drama Insomnia with Al Pacino and Robin Williams in 2002, before Warner Bros. tasked him with reviving the Batman franchise in 2005, betting big on the hope that an indie director could make the world’s most famous superhero cool again. Nolan succeeded, and he hasn’t looked back since, mostly making widescreen genre epics with huge budgets. Nevertheless, every movie he’s made has one thing in common with Memento: extreme attention to detail.

Nolan has employed that strict framework to pull off dazzling storytelling feats again and again—think of the perfectly-timed dream-within-a-dream heist sequences of Inception, or the showmanship of his Victorian revenge drama The Prestige, which is structured with the practice of an elaborate magic trick. The magic of Memento, at least on first viewing, lies in realizing the intricacy of the plotting, which turns an ordinary neo-noir thriller into a tale of misbegotten revenge. The audience would have no sympathy for Leonard if the story played in proper time—he’s a patsy, an angry, confused man unleashed on local criminals by his manipulative “friends” (played by Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano) who ends up turning on them almost by accident.