Christopher Nolan is one of the great filmmakers of our time. Even if you’re not a full-on Nolan fanboy or girl, you have to admit his brand of mixing mind-bending narratives with a genuine reverence for the craft always yields compelling results: Be it historical drama (Dunkirk, Oppenheimer), suspenseful mystery (The Prestige, Following) or colossal action-thriller (Dark Knight trilogy, Tenet), the man knows how to deliver a picture that gets the adrenaline and the brain working, and that’s a rare feat indeed nowadays.
But it all had to start somewhere, and while we’re not exactly going back to the very beginning, we’re going to highlight the movie that introduced Chris Nolan to the world and kickstarted his incredibly successful career. Don’t quite recall which movie we’re talking about? Don’t worry, we made a note of it – in fact, we’ve got plenty of notes scribbled down about it somewhere – so try your best to remember everything we’re going to tell you about just WTF Happened to “Memento!”
In this video, we dig into how Nolan, who has only just begun his career with the micro-budget indie Following, was able to get this drama financed. We’ll dig into how Guy Pearce, who was then coming off of L.A Confidential, wound up playing the lead, and how not one but two The Matrix stars (Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano) got cast.
Do you think Christopher Nolan’s Memento holds up as well as his later work? Let us know in the comments!
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