Christopher Nolan Once Revealed the ‘Pretty Devastating’ Reactions ‘Memento’ Received From Distributors
2000’s Memento was an important film for Christopher Nolan, as it introduced the filmmaker to a mainstream audience. It also helped give the Batman director a momentum that’s lasted for over two decades now in his career. But initially, while Nolan was trying to find the film a distributor, early reactions to Memento weren’t all that favorable.
Christopher Nolan’s ‘Memento’ inspired ‘Tenet’
Even years after Nolan wrote Memento, the feature film was still inspiring some of his later works. Speaking to Complex, the Oppenheimer filmmaker discussed how Memento eventually led to Tenet.
“I had this notion of just a bullet getting sucked out of the wall and into the barrel of a gun. It’s an image that I had in Memento to demonstrate the structure of that movie, but I always harbored this ambition to make a film where the characters had to deal with the physical reality of that. ” Nolan said. “In a way, an idea comes to the fore when the time is right for it, and it’s a hard process to quantify, so I was doing all these other things.”
Christopher Nolan thought the initial reaction for ‘Memento’ was ‘pretty devastating’
Although many might see Memento as some of Nolan’s best work now, this wasn’t always the case. When Nolan was a young and aspiring filmmaker, he had trouble peddling his film around to potential distributors. Most of them didn’t see much potential in Nolan’s memory-based thriller, which meant he had trouble getting the film financed.
“We organized a big distribution screening in L.A. the weekend all the distributors were coming to town for the Spirit Awards,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “But every distributor passed [on it] in one night — nobody wanted it. Some of the distributors were really awful to us, actually, and said they’d walked out of the film. It was a really, really tough ride … pretty devastating.”
Memento was eventually able to get the film financed through Newmarket Films. The flick went on to make $40 million at the box office on a $5 million budget.
“It was a really unique road. I don’t think I’ll ever have a moment like that [again] in my career,” Nolan recalled. “We took a huge knock, back as far as we could go. But we came back from it with sheer good fortune.”
How Jonathan Nolan came up with the idea for ‘Memento’
As some may know, Nolan’s brother, Westworld creator Jonathan Nolan, originally came up with the idea for Memento. The idea was originally planted in Jonathan’s mind during one of his college courses.
“I had read about this condition in one of my General Psych classes, and I already had a number of different things that I knew I wanted to deal with in a story, ideas about identity and memory,” Jonathan told Filmmaker. “I was at a period in my life when I was thinking a lot about victimization; about what being victimized does to people, and how they recover and learn to get over it. One of the things you find yourself doing in that period of recovery, once the initial aura of the incident fades, is willing yourself to remember the incident.”
Fascinated by the concept, Jonathan wondered what if people couldn’t move past a particular incident or trauma.
“In some cases, obviously, people are flooded with memories, and they can’t escape them, but I was more interested in situations where people force themselves to remember the bad things that happened. I got very interested in the idea of a character who was stuck in that moment,” he added.
