Christopher Nolan Felt Guy Pearce’s ‘Memento’ Performance Wasn’t Appreciated Enough
Christopher Nolan first began receiving mainstream attention from Hollywood for his work in the 2000 feature Memento. Nolan was grateful for the recognition he received for the film, but felt actor Guy Pearce deserved similar attention.
Guy Pearce felt he embarrassed himself when he asked to be cast in ‘Memento’
Memento was Christopher Nolan’s 2000 thriller about a man trying to piece his life back together after experiencing memory loss. It was both a commercial and critical success, which helped launch the filmmaker’s current Hollywood career. The movie featured Pearce in the lead role, who remembered being floored by the script.
“It was around July of ’99. I’d been sent the script to look at and immediately went, ‘Oh wow, this is just fantastic.’ The way in which it’s told is twisted, it’s unconventional, but it also feels very emotional. Even in the face of it running backwards, Chris was still adhering to film conventions [in terms of] getting to know a character. It was handled so simply and beautifully,” Pearce said in an interview with Empire.
So when it came time to meet Nolan about the film, Pearce was willing to embarrass himself a little.
“I got to meet Chris, then I saw Following, and then I called him and I said, ‘Look, I’m really embarrassed to be doing this. But I hear people tend to respond to this sort of thing, so I’m just gonna do it: I’m calling to tell you that I really love this and I’d really love to do it,’” Pearce recalled.
Christopher Nolan felt Guy Pearce’s performance in ‘Memento’ wasn’t appreciated enough
Nolan eventually end up casting Pearce in the role, who he felt was instrumental to the movie. The Batman Begins filmmaker believed Pearce offered audiences a more accessible way to invest in the movie.
“What Guy Pearce brought to the character was a much greater degree of emotion, so that other people less interested in the plot could still get something out of the film,” Nolan once told The Guardian.
Nolan was so impressed by Pearce’s performance that he felt the actor deserved more attention for it than he’d gotten.
“Guy’s performance in Memento is often not appreciated – he certainly never got the recognition for his performance that I did for my screenplay – which is unfortunate because he brought so much to it,” Nolan said.
Guy Pearce felt Christopher Nolan’s ‘Memento’ read like ‘gobbledegook’
Although he was impressed by Nolan’s work in Memento, Pearce had trouble understanding it at first. But there were a couple of elements that were clear enough in Nolan’s script for Pearce to connect to.
“The thing was that even though on some level it felt like gobbledegook as I was reading it, because you got the sense that things were all over the place, what I really got and what was really clear was the emotional journey of the character. As the actor that’s the only thing I need to latch onto in order to do my job,” Pearce said in a GQ interview.
