The Making of Memento

by James Mottram

• ISBN13: 9780571214884
• ISBN10: 0571214886
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2002-04-18
• Publisher: Faber & Faber

Summary

The brilliance of Christopher Nolan's ingenious thriller Memento has had moviegoers coming back for more. James Mottram now offers the fullest imaginable guide to the film's many complexities. Memento's protagonist Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is on a mission to find the man who murdered his wife. But Leonard suffers from a rare form of amnesia, and in order to keep track of his life he must surround himself with written reminders, some etched on his own flesh . . . This invaluable guidebook steers the reader through the mysteries of the movie's making and its many possible meanings, with expert guidance from Nolan himself and his key creative collaborators.

Author Biography

James Mottram is a journalist and the author of two previous books on cinema, The Coen Brothers: A Life of the Mind and Public Enemies: The Gangster Movie A to Z. He lives in London.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	ix
Introduction	xi
Memento	1	(10)
Credits	11	(8)
The Making of Memento	19	(164)
Appendix	183

Excerpts

Chapter One

‘It's beer o'clock. And I'm buying.’ The Critical Response

FADE IN:

INT. DERELICT HOUSE -- DAY [COLOUR SEQUENCE]

A Polaroid photograph, clasped between finger and thumb, showing a crude, crime-scene flash picture of a man's body lying on a decaying wooden floor, a bloody mess where his head should be.

The image in the photo starts to fade as we superimpose titles. The hand holding the photo suddenly fans it in a rapid flapping motion, then holds it still. The image fades more, and again the picture is fanned.

As the titles end, the image fades to nothing. The hand holding the photo flaps it again, then places it at the front of a Polaroid camera.

The camera sucks the blank picture up, then the flash goes off.

As the Polaroid fades to white, so we begin with a blank slate ...

    It's the story of Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), a man who proves as emotionally empty as his surname suggests. Unable to make new memories since a blow to the head during a raid on his apartment, he remains hell-bent on avenging the death of his wife from that same assault. Hampered by his affliction, Leonard trawls the motels and bars of Southern California in an effort to gather evidence against the killer he believes is named John G. Tattooing scraps of information on his body, Leonard's faulty memory is abused by two others: bartender Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss) and undercover cop Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), both involved in a lucrative drug deal.

    It's also the story of how writer-director Christopher Nolan avoided the ‘sophomore slump with flying colours’, as Variety delicately termed it. No second-album syndrome here, for in Memento Nolan manages to significantly deepen the issues of identity and narrative pursued in his black-and-white 70-minute debut Following . The story of a would-be writer who becomes entangled in a murderous web of his own making after he meets a charismatic burglar who shows him the voyeuristic delights of his profession, its fractured time-line indicated just how willing Nolan was to challenge his audience. Raised in both the US and England, Nolan's mother is American, his father English, leading one critic to aptly call him ‘a double-crosser himself’. He had been making Super 8 shorts (Action Man toys in science-fiction epics) with his father's camera since he was seven, collaborating with his brother and childhood friends Roko and Adrian Belic (who themselves would go on to make the award-winning documentary Ghengis Blues ). All good prep in terms of fine-tuning his powers of resourcefulness, much needed on Following . Shot on weekends with friends from University College, London, where he studied English literature, it received a cursory UK release, after receiving finishing funds from Next Wave Films. With his third film -- a re-make of Erik Skjoldbjærg's thriller Insomnia starring Al Pacino, Hilary Swank and Robin Williams -- in the can, Nolan stands on the brink of widespread critical and commercial acclaim as he turns 30.

    It's also a story of the resuscitation of film narrative. While twist-ending movies with unreliable narrators have been flourishing at the box office in recent times ( The Usual Suspects, Twelve Monkeys, The Sixth Sense being the most memorable), Memento manages to out-manoeuvre them all. A modern noir about time, memory and identity, it delivers a sucker punch unlike any other. While The Usual Suspects closes as a mere shaggy-dog story and The Sixth Sense does no more than play paranormal games, Memento 's unique reverse structure lures us into a false sense of security; by the end, at the point we think we know absolute truth, Nolan whips the rug from right under our feet. What follows is an attempt to survey the reaction to Memento and introduce the reader to some of the theories and themes that surround the film.

The critics

I hope it's no shame to admit I couldn't understand Memento . Maybe I should have gone back and seen it a second time. Frankly, I couldn't face the exam it would set me ... The feat of keeping so many bits of disparate and seemingly disordered information in one's mind was too much for me. Mensa champs might have accomplished it; I grew fatally confused, then resentful that such a brilliant idea should be so unnecessarily entangled in style. Alexander Walker, London Evening Standard , 19 October 2000

One of the most honest reviews I have read for Memento , Walker's critique also lamented the fact that Nolan was not rewarded by his newspaper at their annual film awards for Most Promising Newcomer for Following -- a film that led Walker to call Nolan ‘an ingenious new talent who looks back to Stanley Kubrick's own polymorphous beginnings’ -- high praise indeed from a critic with strong personal links to the late Kubrick.

    Likewise, Jonathan Romney began his review in the New Statesman :

I tend to take a lot of notes during press screenings; the more intriguing the film, the more notes. Sometimes I write so much that I miss entire chunks of the film. Then, when it comes to writing a review, I can't always read my own writing or remember exactly what a note means. So reviewing ends up being largely a process of deciphering my own notes and reconstructing in my mind the film that they supposedly refer to (but which I may already have half-forgotten). This probably means that my reviews are inaccurate and unreliable; but, if so, they are no more unreliable than anybody else's, or than memory itself.

    As you might imagine, Romney went on to draw comparisons with Memento , a film in which ‘the hero is similarly confounded by his own note-taking’. Just as many of the more interesting critiques of the film showed, Walker and Romney found themselves unwittingly in Leonard's shoes; their task akin to his, they, unlike Leonard, were less prepared, their ‘system’ not as in tune as his. Unable to disconnect themselves from this world, they got a taste of what it was like to be Leonard Shelby.

    Undoubtedly the best-reviewed film since LA Confidential three years before, it was clear from the outset that Memento would garner strong praise, surrounded as it was by a lacklustre selection of major-league films at the time ( Space Cowboys, What Lies Beneath and the thematically related Invisible Man re-working, The Hollow Man , spring to mind). Screen International 's Lee Marshall, reporting from the Venice Film Festival, where the film received its first international screening, immediately spotted the film's potential: ‘That the ending leaves too many questions unanswered will, if anything, only boost the film's word-of-mouth appeal; Memento is the sort of film that gives rise to long post-screening discussions.’ Variety's Lisa Nesselson, reporting from Deauville, where the film next played, called it ‘a bravura tribute to the spirit of Point Blank and the importance of memory [that] deconstructs time with Einstein-caliber dexterity in the service of a delectably disturbing tale of revenge’.

    The UK-based long-lead reviewers that followed were equally impressed. Sight and Sound 's Chris Darke, for example, called it ‘a remarkable psychological puzzle film, a crime conundrum that explores the narrative possibilities of noir’. Empire , meanwhile, called the film ‘exciting, intriguing and exhausting ... the promise Nolan showed with his no-budget noir debut Following has been borne out with an assured and original thriller’.

    As can so often happen, sensational advance word can rankle some critics further down the line ( American Beauty , for example, received a whipping from some national reviewers in the UK, fed up of being told it was the film of the year). ‘Chris and I were real concerned that any minute there would be a backlash,’ says Memento's Executive Producer, Aaron Ryder. ‘The reviews were so good, it felt like somebody would take a shot at us. But it's just kept going. I saw a statistic that said we had 94 per cent good reviews.’

    Indeed, the majority of the UK national critics, who saw the film before their US counterparts, were positive. Philip French, in the Observer , called it ‘one of the year's most exciting pictures’; Anne Billson of the Sunday Telegraph noted it was ‘a thriller that engages the brain from beginning to end ... an intellectual roller-coaster’; Peter Bradshaw, in the Guardian , said that ‘bobbing and weaving for 112 minutes, it is a film which somehow manages to keep you off balance and on your toes’. There were detractors, of course. Adam Mars-Jones in The Times said: ‘Perhaps he's [Nolan] been influenced by Roeg's love of fracture, but the editing here isn't in the same class; memories of the assault are cut into the narrative with an aggressiveness that sometimes seems callow’; meanwhile, Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times added that Nolan ‘weaves promising labyrinths for an hour. Unfortunately the film lasts two hours, by the close of which we are screaming for either enlightenment or release.’

    By the time the US critics saw the film, Memento was already a cult classic. Elvis Mitchell, who would later conduct an enlightening interview with Nolan for the DVD, called the film an ‘intense, through-the-looking-glass noir ’. His colleague, A. Scott, noted that the film pulled off ‘a dazzling feat of narrative sleight of hand’. Peter Travers, of Rolling Stone , called it a ‘mesmerizing mind-bender ... a mind-fuck as well as a new classic among thrillers’; Kenneth Turan, the LA Times ' film critic, called it ‘exceptional ... a haunting, nervy thriller’; Joe Morgenstern, from the Wall Street Journal , said: ‘I can't remember when a movie has seemed so clever, strangely affecting and slyly funny at the very same time.’ Roger Ebert, in his Chicago Sun Tribune column, even batted away suggestions of plot holes (such as, How does the protagonist remember that he has short-term memory loss?) by saying: ‘Leonard suffers from a condition brought on by a screenplay that finds it necessary, and it's unkind of us to inquire too deeply.’

The public

After the reviews, though, come the public. Glowing critical praise or not, Memento could still have suffered at the hands of the hardest audience to please -- those who pay. Strong word-of-mouth was obviously vital. By December 2000, two months after the film had been released in France and the UK, it still had to make its US debut. The Internet buzz, by this point, was at fever pitch. ‘Do yourself a favor, though, buy a ticket for the second show following so that your own short term memory doesn't forget the details,’ said one web-head. The reaction on film-preview site Corona (www.corona.bc.ca) was typical, as reviews were being sent over from Europe. ‘OK, now we really want to see this film and see if it's as good as all our UK readers say it is ... Everything tells us so far that this is one of those films that flies in under the radar and surprises everyone.’ That the film then flourished, as we shall see, in an unforgiving marketplace is testament to the fact that Memento is a movie that prompts coffee-shop debate. Chris Nolan's brother, Jonathan (known as Jonah), whose short story Memento Mori inspired the film, has a perspective typical of most:

I got a phone call from a buddy of mine, who's a film studies student at Tisch Film School in New York. He called me up from a movie theatre, the Angelika in the Village in New York, having tried to get into a screening. This was the third weekend, and he had some difficulty getting into the midnight screening. Then he watched two people get into a physical fight with each other, arguing about what the film was about. I can't remember hearing that about any other film. To be perfectly honest, I take a sick sense of pride being connected to something that has a power to do that. I don't expect people to sit around for the rest of their lives talking about it; it's just a piece of entertainment. I snuck out in New York and watched it with a group of people. I had read from chat-groups people saying, ‘This is the first time I've ever seen total strangers stick around after the screening and talk about it with each other.’ Sure enough, that's exactly what happened -- and I'm tremendously proud of that.

    As Jonah notes, chat-groups were put to good use where Memento was concerned. Too many to cover here, but the one I studied (www.cinephiles.net) contained what one would expect: healthy argument about the meaning of Memento . By way of introducing the myriad theories surrounding the film, here are some of the topics up for discussion. As I have already suggested in the Introduction, many of the film's plot points can only be speculated upon and Nolan himself is not about to put his cards on the table and reveal all. Here's what he has to say:

I believe the answers are all there in the film, but the terms of the storytelling deliberately prevent people from finding them. If you watch the film, and abandon your conventional desire for absolute truth -- and the confirmation of absolute truth that most films provide you with -- then you can find all the answers you're looking for. As far as I'm concerned, my view is very much in the film -- the answers are all there for the attentive viewer, but the terms of the storytelling prevent me from being able to give the audience absolute confirmation. And that's the point.

The Insurance Scam. My personal favourite, one fan suggested that Leonard's wife faked her own death for insurance money. ‘If not, why would she let Lenny continue to hunt for her killer?’ Based on the confusing clip of Leonard in bed with his loved one, with the ‘I've done it’ tattoo on his chest, this person suggested it was a flash-forward to a time when they were re-united, with the wife masterminding the whole scam, even manipulating her husband.

The mental hospital. As reported by the film's website (www.otnemem.com) and the short story Memento Mori , Leonard has spent time in a mental institution. One particularly pedantic reader, after pointing out that Leonard would have crashed his car had he driven it, as he does, with his eyes closed for a few seconds in the film's close, added: ‘I say he's still in the mental hospital and this is all in his mind.’

Remember Sammy Jankis. A popular one, given the fact that Teddy winds up by telling Leonard that Sammy was a con man, is that some think Leonard is Sammy (as evidenced by the three-tenths of a second shot of Leonard in the nursing home, in the scene where Sammy is committed). Or at least, he has distanced himself from his own past, and merged it with Sammy's story. With the brief clip of Leonard's wife, post the rape, under the plastic sheet but with an eye still open, it is suggested she may have lived. This could mean his wife had diabetes, despite Leonard claiming otherwise (it was possibly brought on after the attack, hence Leonard being unable to recall it). That Leonard is unable to make new memories would cover the fact that he accidentally killed her in the end by overdosing her with insulin -- possibly goaded by his wife, in the way he remembers Sammy's spouse desperately trying to shake her husband from his memory loss. With the various shots of Leonard pinching his wife's thigh, along with the brief insert of a needle being flicked as Leonard notices his ‘Remember Sammy Jankis’ tattoo, Nolan does imply that this is possible. Returning to the ‘I've done it’ tattoo, it ties in to Teddy's suggestion that Leonard has already killed the real John G. As Joe Pantoliano theorizes: ‘Leonard's wife is the one that tells him to start tattooing himself, in the hope that he remembers. That's why he's got that tattoo over his heart that says "I've done it".’ But then why is there no sign of the tattoo now, or a scar where it once was? As some have suggested, Leonard's flashback to him lying in bed with his wife may just have been a figment of his imagination -- an idealized fantasy of being reunited with his wife, and a convergence of memories -- after the conversation he had with Natalie where he points out that the space round his heart is ‘for when I've found him’. Leonard may well have been admitted into care after overdosing his wife, and then incited himself to escape and find his wife's ‘killer’ via his tattoos, having hooked up with Officer John ‘Teddy’ Gammell along the way. But as costume designer Cindy Evans points out: ‘There is no solution. You'll never know how long he's been doing what he's doing, or how long he's been with Teddy being manipulated. You'll never know whether his wife is living or dead. You just have to let go of it.’

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Making of Memento by James Mottram. Copyright © 2002 by James Mottram. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.