“There Was Such Contempt”: Memento’s Disastrous First Screenings Recounted By Jonathan Nolan

Memento story writer Jonathan Nolan recalls the disastrous first screenings of the psychological thriller. Director Christopher Nolan experienced a critical breakthrough with his 2001 mystery film, based on his brother Jonathan’s short story, about a man with short-term memory loss tortuously trying to solve the case of his wife’s murder. Made for under $10 million, the film employed an innovative non-linear approach similar to the tricks Nolan would later deploy for his Oscar-winning blockbuster Oppenheimer.

Memento went on to gross $40 million on its relatively small budget, and is now widely acclaimed, but the movie was originally received rather coldly by potential distributors, as Jonathan Nolan revealed recently, recalling the film’s disastrous early screenings. Check out Nolan’s remarks below (via Happy Sad Confused):

So we screened it for everyone, all on the same day, March of 2000. I took Chris out for a steak. Emma [Thomas] went to one screening, [producers] the Todd sisters went to another, Aaron Ryder our producer went to a to a third, and they called me on my old Nokia cell phone. Chris and I were waiting for the hosannas…the calls came in and no one wanted to buy it.

It started with Harvey Weinstein and all the rest. … We screened it for all these movie theaters and we get completely blanked. No one wanted it and the response from all of them was, “Oh I thought it was great.” “Okay well how much do you want to offer?” We would have taken not a lot of money. And the answer was, “I get it, but the audience won’t get it.” And there was such contempt for the audience.

This is really what motivated a lot of my career and a lot of the way I’ve approached my career. There’s such contempt for the audience, that the audience was a bunch of f—–g idiots. So they wouldn’t get it. And I thought to myself, “God I’ve met some of these executives. What makes you think you’re that much smarter than the audience? Cause you’re not.”

Why The Response To Memento Motivated Jonathan And Christopher Nolan To Make Challenging Works

Nolan’s experience with those early Memento screenings stayed with him, and later he would go on to challenge the audience with works of his own, including his narratively daring sci-fi series Westworld and The Peripheral. As Nolan explained, both he and Christopher grew up on movies that overturned convention, convincing them that there is an audience out there for movies and TV shows that require attention and thought:

We really felt from the beginning, and growing up together watching all these weird movies together and weird shows, that the audience was really really smart and really well-versed ,or at least there’s enough of the audience that was bored with what they were being served. For a movie, of a budget that small, there might be enough people that you’d recoup your money on that, who wanted to watch something that was a little more…”Pay attention.”

Nolan’s next big project with his long-time producing partner Lisa Joy, a series adaptation of the video game Fallout, figures to once again take the audience on a challenging journey into an unusual world. The Fallout co-creator has also collaborated with Christopher on a number of his best movies, including The Prestige and The Dark Knight.

It’s been nearly 25 years since Memento first clued critics and audiences in on the Nolan brothers’ unique approach to narrative, but it seems neither has forgotten the lessons they learned not just from making that film, but from trying to get it distributed in an environment where originality is not always prized. The wild success of Oppenheimer, which has grossed nearly $1 billion worldwide, represents proof that audiences are indeed eager to be engaged by something that requires attention to appreciate.

Source: Happy Sad Confused