Christopher Nolan realised explaining his films was a “mistake” after the premiere of his second movie Memento.

The Oppenheimer filmmaker is well known for making complex time-bending films that can be hard to understand, leading fans to offer up theories about their meaning.

Nolan decided to stop answering this speculation and stay ambiguous after the Venice Film Festival press conference for Memento in 2000.

“I made the mistake years ago and luckily it was before the prevalence of social media,” he said on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. “In the press conference afterwards, they asked me about my interpretation of the ending and I said, ‘Well, the important thing is it’s ambiguous, it’s unknowable, but yeah, what I think is blah, blah, blah.’

“My brother Jonathan took me aside after that and said, ‘You can never do that again.'”

Jonathan, who wrote the short story on which Memento is based, told his brother that if he wanted the film to be ambiguous he needed to “keep (his) mouth shut”.

Despite Nolan’s comments, Colbert tried to push for clarity on his films Tenet and Inception, but the director once again insisted they’re not supposed to be fully understood.

“You’re not meant to understand everything in Tenet. It’s not all comprehensible. It’s a bit like asking if I know what happens to the spinning top at the end of Inception,” he said. “I have to have my idea of it for it to be a valid, productive ambiguity, but the point is it’s an ambiguity.”

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