Christopher Nolan remembers “Memento”

A recent Indiewire interview with writer-director Christopher Nolan reflecting back on the 2000 movie Memento, a film he wrote (based on a short story by his brother Jonathan Nolan) and directed.

When you were making this film, did you ever wonder if the puzzle structure would play to an audience?

There’s this weird irony, because you actually find yourself as a filmmaker in the position of the protagonist that has to trust these notes he’s written himself. It sounds a bit trite, but it’s really true. I watch the screen and think, okay I read the script three years ago and it seemed like a good idea at the time. But it’s like you really are, at a certain point, you’re so immersed in the material. You’re just having to trust yourself. You have so many points along the way where the film stops being real and you just have to say: this is what I’m making, this is what I’m doing and switch that half of your brain off and absolutely trust your initial instincts, your editor, your actor’s instincts and your own instincts about whether you’re getting what you want. The weird thing is you go through these torturous creative machinations and then you look back at the original script and it’s pretty, pretty close to what’s on the screen. It’s almost exactly the same. You say, “Thank God, how did that wind up like that?”

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What personally do you appreciate about your protagonist?

Since I was a child, I’ve been really interested in the concept of empathy between individuals and the concept of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and that kind of relativism. Film, it seems to me, is this fantastic medium for drawing the audience into somebody else’s point of view. I think more so than books in a funny sort of way. In books you can use the first person — you can clearly signal that in a way that in films there’s always this illusion of objectivity. There isn’t really any first person technique.

What we tried to do in “Memento” is simply block the film from the character’s point of view as much as possible. So he walked into a room, you’re kind of looking over his shoulder, you’re exploring the room as he does and you’re always at his eye line — the camera’s always a little bit closer to him. So there’s a conscious attempt to keep the blocking that way, but there’s always this illusion of objectivity because the camera is on the side of him and you are always aware that there’s somebody choosing those shots; there’s another consciousness, another author if you like. So it’s tricking the audience, drawing the audience into this other point of view. I think it’s tremendously powerful, because people don’t realize it’s being done because it has to be done in fairly subtle ways. I wanted to have a certain element of consciously reminding people: you’re in this guy’s point of view, so they understand the structure.

There’s probably more voice over in this film than there was in the script. I kept missing it when it wasn’t there for 20 minutes, because you just needed to keep drawing people into his mind, so they understand that we’re seeing it from this guy’s point of view and that’s why you’re confused and that’s why you don’t know who this guy is. I find it quite satisfying that people will come out of this film arguing about who the good guys and who the bad guy is. Not because there isn’t one, but because we are using an unreliable narrator, calling into question the judgments of who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy, which I think is like real life.

Here is the original trailer for Memento:

For the rest of the Indiewire interview, go here.

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