Christopher Nolan Reveals His Favourite Musical Film Moments
Christopher Nolan has named two musical scenes he considers masterful: a haunting Irish folk performance in the 2025 film Sinners, and the notorious 'Singing in the Rain' sequence from Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.
Musical sequences in films can be a tricky business. All too often, they risk slipping into the territory of stage musicals, where a line of dialogue awkwardly morphs into song, or a sudden burst of music disrupts the cinematic illusion, reminding viewers that what they’re watching is, after all, a carefully constructed artifice. Yet, Christopher Nolan has identified two scenes that, in his view, manage to avoid these pitfalls entirely.
It’s not every day one associates Nolan with the world of musicals. His work is typically marked by a sense of gravity and realism—Oppenheimer, his 2023 biopic, is a prime example, delving into the life and inner struggles of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called “father of the atomic bomb.” Even the likes of Albert Einstein appear in his films with a raw, almost unsettling authenticity. One can hardly imagine Einstein breaking into song, let alone a rap number.
Unexpected Choices from a Serious Filmmaker
That’s not to suggest that musicals are incapable of depth or grit. They needn’t all follow the path of La La Land—a film Nolan has openly praised—where Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling glide through neon-lit streets, their tap routines growing ever more dreamlike and detached from reality. In fact, one of Nolan’s top picks for a musical moment arrived well after that 2016 romantic drama.
During a conversation with director Ryan Coogler at a special screening of Sinners, Nolan singled out a particular scene from the much-discussed 2025 release. In it, the antagonist Remmick and his group of vampires deliver a chilling rendition of the Irish folk song ‘Rocky Road to Dublin’. Nolan remarked,
“It’s a wonderful film in a lot of ways, but it deals in very stereotypical tropes of Voodoo about what constitutes the darkness of the human soul – how it’s expressed in anthropological terms. When I saw your film, the Irish River Dance, it was so chilling.”
The sequence, blending elements of history, horror, and musical tradition, is as tense as it is emotionally raw.
Musical Inversion and Cinematic Shock
Nolan went on to draw a parallel between this scene and another iconic moment in film history.
“It’s really the most spectacular musical inversion since Kubrick’s ‘Singin’ in the Rain,’ [from A Clockwork Orange.] I mean, what did we [Irish] ever do to you?”
His reference, of course, is to the infamous scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novel, where a group of intruders terrorise a couple in their home, all while performing a jarring, staccato version of ‘Singing in the Rain’—a song immortalised by Gene Kelly in the 1952 classic.
The contrast between the cheerful tune and the brutality unfolding on screen is deeply unsettling. The woman in red, her screams punctuating the performance, is a far cry from the joyous choreography of the original musical. Nolan’s choices, then, are both unexpected and rather grim, highlighting how music can be used to heighten tension and subvert expectations in film.