The fit of jealousy that launched Christopher Nolan’s career: “The idea was perfect”
In 1996, Christopher Nolan‘s filmmaking career had barely started. At this point, he only had one micro-budget independent film under his belt: Following, a mystery thriller he shot with friends on weekends in London while working his day job. It cost an astonishingly low £6,000, but provided a great calling card when it finally hit the film festival circuit in 1998.
After making this budget feature, Nolan, who has dual English and American citizenship, left England in the rearview mirror and went to Chicago, where he had lived periodically while growing up. Then, he decided to relocate to Los Angeles to give his budding film career a better chance of success and took a cross-country road trip with his brother Jonathan, who was studying screenwriting at Washington’s Georgetown University at the time.
Along the way, Jonathan began to pitch Nolan the idea of a short story he was working on. He told his brother about a protagonist trying to solve his wife’s murder, hamstrung by the fact that he can’t make any new long-term memories after being struck on the head during the attack that killed her. This protagonist was therefore forced to write himself extensive notes about his investigation and even tattoo important information on his body. Jonathan said the story was called ‘Memento Mori’.
When he was finished explaining his tale, he fell silent as he awaited his meticulous brother’s response. You see, he had always known his brother could spot logical flaws in stories almost instantly, and he was worried his idea had holes. Instead of immediately telling him what was wrong with the story, though, Nolan was quiet for a moment, then said, “That’s a terrific idea for a movie”. In Tom Shone’s The Nolan Variations, it’s even explicitly noted that Nolan was “jealous” that his little brother had come up with such an ingenious concept.
After stopping for petrol and mulling over his next move, the director decided the idea was too good to pass up. He knew his brother had already completed several drafts of the story, but hadn’t finished it to his satisfaction. There was no telling when he’d reach the mythical level of perfection he was seeking, and in the meantime, Nolan had become convinced he wanted to write his own version of the mysterious tale. “I was like, ‘Great, can I go and write a screenplay for this while you write the story?'” he recalled to IndieWire.
Memento: The road trip that rewired cinema
To his delight, Jonathan agreed, and then the brothers began excitedly bouncing ideas off each other for how the narrative could specifically work in the cinematic medium. “The plot had to be cyclical,” Shone wrote. “Motel rooms were key”. Even the fact that Jonathan’s Chris Isaak cassette was stuck in the car’s tape deck, meaning the brothers could only listen to the same album on a loop, had a weird effect on their thinking.
“I just remember the idea was perfect for a Lynchian film noir,” Nolan vividly recalled, clearly associating Isaak with Lynch’s haunting filmography. The artist, of course, starred in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and his music was used in a host of Lynch films, most famously ‘Wicked Game’ becoming synonymous with Wild at Heart.
“That’s how it struck me: film noir, but with a subversive modern or postmodern spin,” Nolan added. “The thing that I said to him right away, with both the short story and the screenplay, was if we could find a way to tell it in the first person, and put the audience in that character’s point of view, that would be amazing. That would crack something open. The question was how to do it.”
In the end, the director worked at a much faster clip than Jonathan. He smiled, “It took him another two years. As we were finishing the film, he was finishing his final draft of the short story”.
Nolan’s Memento and Jonathan’s ‘Memento Mori’ wound up differing in many ways, both in terms of story content and structure, but the core concept was the same. Memento launched Nolan’s filmmaking career, and Jonathan followed him into the business several years later as the writer/creator of Westworld and Fallout. Perhaps this shows that, every now and again, jealousy mightn’t be the worst thing in the world.
