Across eight features Christopher Nolan has kept as much of the image in the camera as production will allow, and the choice shapes far more than the look.
Building the shot instead of solving it
The folding Paris street in Inception, the rotating corridor, the water planet in Interstellar and the inverted car chase in Tenet were all staged physically first. The constraint is expensive and inflexible: a set that folds can only fold one way, so the shot has to be designed before it is filmed rather than assembled afterwards.
What it buys
Actors respond to something that is present, and the camera picks up incidental detail that nobody specified. In Dunkirk the aerial photography was shot from converted aircraft with the cameras mounted where the audience sits, which is why the dogfights feel cramped rather than balletic.
What it costs
Tenet is the case against: the inverted action is genuinely new and also frequently illegible, because a physically staged effect cannot be adjusted in post when it does not read. The method is not free, and Nolan has been willing to pay for it in clarity.