He’s one of the few filmmakers who might also be a household name, but Christopher Nolan didn’t expect to find himself on the Quay Brothers’ radar. It’s understandable. Given their astonishing and singular body of work, who wouldn't imagine the twins inhabiting their own fusty antiquated cupboard in a plane removed by some degrees from our own, probably in some inaccessible “Zone” near an imaginary Poland? The very idea of the Quays moving around out there in our world and taking in The Dark Knight Rises at the multiplex—it just feels incorrect.

“He was pleasantly surprised that we knew about him,” says either Stephen or Timothy (they also sound identical, at least over the phone from their fabled Koninck Studios in London). “We told him that we liked The Prestige. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I told my art director to look at ‘Street of Crocodiles’ and use it as a reference.’ So we said, ‘Well, why didn’t you ask us?’”

“Street of Crocodiles” (1986) is largely held to be the Quays’ first masterpiece, an adaptation in the very loosest sense of the Bruno Schulz short story, more enduring as the most complete revelation of the brothers’ basic visual and aural language, an endlessly dusty, morbid, Eastern European dimension filled with antique detritus, insects, infernal shadow, particulate light, and painstakingly animated dolls.

Fanboy Nolan has mounted a roadshow exhibition in 35mm—coming to the Cinematheque for a short run starting Thursday (January 20)—augmenting “Street of Crocodiles” with his own 8-minute documentary (“Quay”) and two essential shorts, 1990’s obliquely erotic “The Comb”, and the immaculate “In Absentia”, a collaboration with Karlheinz Stockhausen from 2000 that reportedly moved the avant-garde composer to tears.

Their visual approach to “In Ansentia” is blanched, set out in an almost abstract flutter of grey tones that gradually reveal the tale of a woman obsessively writing letters to her husband from an asylum. The Quays describe Stockhausen’s contribution as “forbidding” and “awesome, in the best sense of the word.” The schizophrenic feel of the piece provided an uncanny match to the Quay’s working methods.

“You weren’t really going to find the arc of it except by very slowly dipping your feet in for about seven seconds every day,” they explain. “You couldn’t channel it. It had to channel you. You submitted to this great gift that was given to you.”

In turn, that gift has become ours.

Originally from Philadelphia, the brothers first arrived in London as art students in the late ‘60s, where they promptly shunned anything that looked like it might swing.

“We kept casting our eye a little bit further over to the continent, and seeing a lot of foreign films,” they say, recalling a time when London was festooned with repertory houses importing Bergman, the Czech new wave, and Bunuel. “It’s interesting how you immediately set up that bias. In a way, we left Philly in ’68 at the height of hippiedom, and I think we sort of felt like we’d been through it. We’d made that run. And we started really exploring classical music and the most extreme range of art films that were being offered at the art cinemas.”

The story really begins 10 years later, however, when the Quays returned to London, first from Philadelphia and then Amsterdam, where they put their talents as commercial artists to good use designing book jackets. They were enticed back to the UK by their old Royal Art College chum Keith Griffiths, who was working at the newly energized British Film Institute (he’s been their producer ever since.)

Their first short, “Nocturna Artificialia”, coincided with the unlikely appearance of the Quays (in stills) in Peter Greenaway’s first feature film, 1980's The Falls. Greenaway would later model A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) on the faintly exotic duo, originally asking them to star. Why’d they say no?

“Oh, because we can’t act our way out of a paper bag,” the Quays answer, with a guffaw (or two).

Neither could the other guys!

“It’s true, they weren’t much better,” they say. “Maybe they had higher illusions than we did. But the thing about Peter was that he was at the British Film Institute when we were there with Keith, so we were all making early short films there. Hence we got to know Peter and Peter just said, ‘Can I borrow two photographs of you guys?’ That’s how The Falls happened. We thought it was very amusing.”

Since then, the Quays have garnered worldwide acclaim for their own unmatched filmography. Yet funding becomes ever harder to come by. Over the years they’ve made music videos for His Name Is Alive and 16 Horsepower, among others, and commercials for less wholesome organizations. Timothy memorably describes the advertising world as “lunacy” in a 2012 BBC interview, when MOMA celebrated their work.

Talking to the Straight, “junk” is how he characterizes the products they were hired to pimp. “You kind of had to turn a blind eye to what you were doing, but it was buying us our liberty to work for another year in the studio, so we always said that if we worked six weeks on a commercial, then it would buy you 48 weeks of freedom in the studio to do what you want to do. But we always said it was a bet with the Devil.”

He adds that they also tried to focus on commercial projects that “we could do something with,” although the relationship was often fitful. After producing the first of three ads for Roundup weed killer, the client advised them to make their weeds less “sympathetic.” Sighs Timothy: “This is true. We were fully on the side of the weeds dying under this blast of Monsanto pesticide.”

“It’s very apparent when the commissions you get are coming from more and more marginal areas. Channel 4 wouldn’t touch us, the BBC wouldn’t touch us,” the brothers continue. “It hasn’t been easy for us in the last years, and they’re all small projects.” A Polish stately home provided the finance for 2009’s "Inventory of Traces". The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia commissioned the brothers—who would regularly attend drawing classes among its collection of medical oddities as young students—to produce what is arguably their most accessible piece, 2011's quasi-documentary “Through the Weeping Glass”.

It feels like an important work. A bravura single-take in "Weeping Glass" begins with a wedding on the museum’s main floor (yes, a wedding, “these are the kinds of things they do there to make money,” explain the Quays) and ends with a dazzling metaphorical tangle as "you literally descend into the lower depths of the museum and you end up on the famous ‘Siamese twins’ Chang and Eng.”

For the Quays, married their entire lives in a creative process that they’ve only half-jokingly referred to as the work of a single person, the implication is unmistakable. “There’s very much a self-portrait in there, with Chang and Eng,” they say. “Yeah.”

The Quay Brothers in 35mm—Curated by Christopher Nolan runs from January 21 to 24 at the Cinematheque