Memento research

On Friday we watched a feature film called memento (2000).  Directed by Christopher Nolan. A film I have never seen before.
Memento is a story about Leonard who suffers from short term memory loss, meaning he can't build new memories. After a few minutes of talking to someone he won't remember it ever happened. He is searching for the murderer of his wife, the last memory he has before he got attacked. Leonard has to take photos and write notes about each person and have tattoos all over his body.

I enjoyed watching the film, it is difficult to understand until you watch it to the very end. It feels quite long and repetitive as part of the scenes repeat giving you an insight story to how he is thinking. When watching the film I felt as though I was in his shoes, trying to work out who the murderer was. The film is a good way to keep the brain active as you are actually working out what is happening along with the character. Christopher Nolan himself explains how he wanted to tell the story in first person. (video below) I like the fact that Memento is not in a chronological order, the film is played backwards and starts at the end, finishes at the beginning. Simon told us that one of the DVD features on the limited edition pack allows to view the film in chronological order, but Simon says it would be too simple to watch and unappealing. I agree based on watching the film as we did, I rather watch it like that instead.
Such a simple but very unique idea, made into a complex feature.

Christopher Nolan:

Here is a video I found of Christopher Nolan explaining about his analysis on the story. I really liked watching this as I have a better understanding of why he did the film like he did.

screenshot of video

It is a great video that I recommend watching all of it but my favourite part is when Christopher draws out his meaning of how the scenes alternate between the colour and the b&w scenes.

I had a browse on Imdb to find out more about him and his other work. I knew he did a lot of work for The Dark Night Trilogy. I found out he wrote Interstella (2014). I know Interstella had a lot of coverage in the media for its release but I never went to watch it. I may consider watching his other films after seeing Memento.  Memento was his second feature after he debut Following in 1998. Most of his films are around the same concept of memory, personal identity. Like Memento his other work has non-linear narrative such as The Prestige (2006). He co-writes work with his brother, Jonathan Nolan.

Draft script for Memento

I also found the draft script for Memento (dated 04/10/99) using Scriptorama, it was recommended we use this site by Simon. It is a decent site that takes some time to find scripts but still a good resource for researching them.

I enjoyed this task and the film itself. I think it is quite inspiring but complex. Simon doesn't expect us to come up with a feature film like Memento. It is really looking down at the story and ideas that we can work from to come up with a fantastic short film.