10 Things You Didn’t Know About ‘Memento’

Memento the film began as an idea between two brothers, director Christopher Nolan and his writer brother Jonathan. After Jonathan pitched the story to Chris, he returned to college at Georgetown and wrote the short story Memento Mori that would serve as the basis for the film. The idea for the story came to Jonathan after taking a general psychology class where the professor told the story of a man who suffers an incident and becomes afflicted with anterograde amnesia. Not a bad idea for a movie!

Christopher Nolan was so impressed by Carrie-Ann Moss as Trinity in The Matrix that he sought her out to play Natalie, Leonard’s quasi-love-interest in the film. Once cast, Moss recommended her Matrix co-star Joe Pantoliano to play Teddy in Memento. It ended up being one of his best-known roles, so good job, there.

Reddit wasn’t around in 2001 when Memento took American indie film by storm, buf if it was, they’d have had a hell of a time untangling Memento’s mobius strip of a narrative structure. The film in told essentially backwards — since Leonard’s condition means he can’t remember new information anyway, each subsequent scene is new, even if he’s already been through it in chronology before. But interspersed with the backwards-chronology scenes are black-and-white scenes that move forward in sequence, delivering valuable, tantalizing backstory.

Salon ran a thorough deconstruction of the film, presenting an order to the scenes and laying out the film’s story in chronological order, including the lynchpin scene at the end where black and white transitions into color. The same Salon writer, Andy Klein, would participate in Salon’s other great explainer of a 2001 movie, Salon’s piece on the plot of Mulholland Dr.

The original choice to play lead character Leonard was Brad Pitt, but he had to pass on the film due to scheduling conflicts. It should be noted that neither of Pitt’s 2001 films — Gore Verbinski’s The Mexican and Tony Scott’s Spy Game — had the kind of cultural impact that Memento did.

Like everybody in the 2000s, Christopher Nolan wanted in on Radiohead. Specifically, he wanted to use their song “Paranoid Android” to play over the film’s closing credits. Alas, Nolan wasn’t able to secure the rights, so instead it’s David Bowie’s “Something In The Air” over the credits. And as second choices go? David Bowie’s not bad.

Memento was a massive word-of-mouth hit at the film festival circuit in late 2000. From its Venice Film Festival premiere through the Toronto Film Festival in September to Sundance the following January. The only problem is, none of the distribution companies wanted to buy it. In an Entertainment Weekly article on the film, Pantoliano talked about the distribution woes:

At the Independent Spirit Awards I ran into Bill Block from Artisan, and he said, ‘Omigod, Memento! You were wonderful.’ ‘Thank you. You gonna buy it?’ ‘No.’ Then I saw Russell Schwartz of USA Films. Russell said, ‘Joey Pants! Memento! Brilliant, baby!’ ‘Thanks Russell. You gonna buy it?’ ‘No.’ Next night, Harvey Weinstein. ‘Joey Pants! Memento! You’re f—in’ great!’ ‘Thanks Harvey! You gonna buy it?’ ‘Uh, no.’

Enter Newmarket Films, a fledgling indie company that would go on to distribute such films as Donnie Darko, Whale Rider, and The Passion of the Christ, if that gives you any indication of the kinds of risks the company would end up taking. Memento was only Newmarket’s second feature film, and its first of any consequence. Clearly, it paid off.

Character actor extraordinaire Stephen Tobolowsky played the character Sammy Jankiss in Memento. A character only seen in flashbacks, Sammy serves as Leonard’s cautionary tale, a relic from Leonard’s life as an insurance adjuster. Sammy was also afflicted with anterograde amnesia, and the flashbacks show Sammy with his wife, and the circumstances that led to him being responsible for her death.

Tobolowsky told a Reddit AMA that he had a special connection to this particular role:

I told my agent I had to meet Chris Nolan. When I spoke with him, I told him, “You’re going to have a lot of people who want to be in this movie. A lot of people who want to be Sammy Jankis. But I bet you I’ll be the only one you see who’s actually had amnesia.”

Chris found this amusing and asked me the circumstances.

I told him about how I had surgery with an experimental general anesthetic that did not put me to sleep but made me forget. And like all general anesthetics, it took several days to wear off. So for 3-4 days, I’d be in the house and I’d be “born” in a moment and not know where I was or what I was doing.

I’d be holding an empty glass and not know if I was thirsty and going to get water, or if I’d just drunk a glass of water and needed to return the glass. It was terrifying.

For starters, the Memento script won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the Sundance Wilm festival; it’s one of only four films to win that award and go on to an Oscar nomination (along with You Can Count On Me, The Squid and the Whale, and Winter’s Bone). The Nolans also won screenplay prizes from the Boston film critics, the Chicaho film critics, the Broadcast Film Critics Association, and the Independent Spirit Awards. As for those Oscars? They lost that award to Julian “Downton Abbey” Fellowes for Gosford Park.

By the time Christopher Nolan made Inception in 2010, Nolan had become so established as a blockbuster director of Batman films that few people saw his movies through the lens of Memento anymore. Which is too bad, because the most direct parallel to Memento is Inception. Both films, in fact, hinge on the same crucial moment of self-deception. As we ultimately discover in Inception, Cobb’s big trauma is the death of his wife, a suicide caused by her inability to believe that her world is real, because Cobb incepted her with the idea that it wasn’t. This itself is even a callback to Memento, as Leonard talks about how he unwittingly planted in Sammy Jankiss’ wife the idea that Sammy might be faking his affliction, something that has dire consequences.

At the end of Memento, we see that Leonard, dissatisfied with what Teddy has revealed to him — that Leonard has already killed the man he thinks is responsible for his wife’s murder, that in fact Leonard may have been the one to have killed her, and that Teddy (among others) has been using him — decides to lie to himself, to plant the evidence for himself to find later that will ultimately lead him to kill Teddy. What is this moment if not a moment of self-inception? Just as the characters in Inception can place ideas that make characters think they’ve come up with the idea themselves, so is Leonard ensuring that he will follow his rules — his notes, his tattoos — to the conclusion that Teddy is his wife’s murder. He incepts himself into killing Teddy and continuing with his fruitless quest for revenge. Inception might as well be a spiritual sequel.

Speaking of which: it was announced last November that AMBI Pictures intends to remake Memento, as it has recently acquired the rights to the film. You know what sounds like it will be great and not a shoddy disappointment? A remake of Memento. Time to start working on that situational amnesia.