Christopher Nolan Once Recalled Receiving Humiliating & Devastating Reactions For ‘Memento’ From Distributors, “They Were Really Awful To Us”

Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan once recalled his humiliating experience of selling Memento to distributors. Read on

By
Koimoi.com Team
- August 7, 2023 | 11:55 PM IST
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Christopher Nolan is one of the most celebrated filmmakers in Hollywood. He is known for blockbusters with complex storytelling. Although he debuted with Following (1998), he gained international recognition with his second film, Memento (2000).

The film also helped give the Batman director 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 the Academy Award-winning film weren’t all that favourable.

Even years after Christopher Nolan wrote Memento, the feature film was still inspiring some of his later works.

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“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 harboured this ambition to make a film where the characters had to deal with the physical reality of that. 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 said.

Even though Memento is now widely recognised as some of Nolan’s best work, it wasn’t always like that. In his early years as a director, Nolan had trouble getting his film distributed. They largely dismissed Nolan’s thriller based on memories, making it challenging for him to find funding.

“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.”

Finally, Memento successfully got Newmarket Films to contribute money to the film. The film had a $5 million budget but ended up making $40 million at the box office.

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