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Tell it out of order
Cutting up the script
Christopher Nolan wrote the script for his first film in chronological order, then cut it up and rearranged the scenes. He had been heavily influenced by Reservoir Dogs and was curious what Quentin Tarantino would do next. Pulp Fiction and Citizen Kane, made decades apart, share a lot of structure.
Against chronology
Nolan rejects what he calls chronological conservatism. We don't tend to have chronological conversations either, and the books people read don't run in order. He thinks television, which tends to present things in chronological order, influenced how filmmaking works.
The same thinking carried into Memento, the story of a man who loses his short-term memory, which Nolan wanted to tell backward.
How did Pulp Fiction scramble its timeline?
Quentin Tarantino's 1994 film tells three main stories out of sequence. A character is shot dead in one segment and then appears alive in a later scene that takes place earlier in time. The structure makes viewers piece the timeline together themselves. The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1994.
How does Citizen Kane use flashbacks?
Orson Welles's 1941 film begins with a media tycoon's death and follows a reporter interviewing people who knew him. Each interview becomes a flashback told from that person's point of view. The scenes are arranged by who is remembering, not by the date the events happened. This lets the film show the same man in contradictory lights.
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