The industry experience Christopher Nolan found “devastating” with ‘Memento’
Over the last two and half decades, Christopher Nolan has handled some of the most mesmerising movies that cinema history has ever known. His takes on the superhero genre with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, and science fiction with Interstellar and Inception, have cemented Nolan’s position as one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation.
After his feature film debut, Following, arrived in 1999, Nolan made his industry breakthrough with 2000’s neo-noir psychological thriller Memento, starring Guy Pearce, Joe Pantoliano and Carrie-Anne Moss, which told of a man suffering from amnesia who must piece his life back together amid danger and deception.
However, Nolan had a big problem in distributing Memento, even though it was well received at its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, and subsequently playing to great acclaim at the Toronto International Film Festival. Therefore, finding European distributors was an easy task, but Nolan had a harder time of it in the United States.
The film was screened for several figures in the American film industry, and though most of them admired the movie itself, and, indeed, Nolan’s work, many believed that the plot was too confusing and a big enough audience would not arrive. It was a frustrating time for the director.
He told The Hollywood Reporter of the experience, “We organised a big distribution screening in L.A. the weekend all the distributors were coming to town for the Spirit Awards. 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.”
Thankfully, Nolan’s fellow filmmaker, Steven Soderbergh, saw the film and thought it was brilliant and subsequently started praising it in public when he heard that it was not set to be distributed in the United States. Still, Soderbergh’s actions did not manage to secure a distributor for Memento, so Nolan remained stuck in the mud.
At last, Newmarket decided to take a financial risk on the movie and released it in America. Even after just the first few weeks of distribution, the film had been viewed in over 500 cinemas across the country and brought in over $25million through the box office. Evidently, the risk was worth taking, and Nolan earned his well-deserved breakthrough into the industry, leading to the acclaimed pictures we associate him with. And, perhaps as a result, his title as one of the most profitable and economic artists. in Hollywood.
Interestingly, Soderbergh believed that even if Newmarket hadn’t distributed Memento, then Nolan would have still enjoyed his career success with another movie. “He’d have made something else and still had the career he has. That was just a fortunate set of circumstances where I could advocate for him,” he noted.
