Story-Telling - Memento

In a recent lecture, I sat and watched one of Christopher Nolan's first major hits, Memento (2000). The film was both written and directed by Christopher Nolan and starred Guy Pearce who played a man named Leonard Shelby, who must face the task of finding his wife's killer while facing the handicap of not being able to remember anything after about 15 minutes. To do this, Leonard must take pictures of certain people/scenarios and write notes as well as tattoo certain bits of information to his body to remind himself of the numerous points he has pointed out along the way.





What particularly interests me about this film is the way the story is structured, it starts at the end and works its way to the beginning. What impresses me even more is that it still manages to offer some unexpected surprises making the end result all the more significant. I feel that by structuring a film in this way you are able to create something that seems so incredibly complex and complicated from a story that in actual fact is very simple. For this reason I very much enjoyed watching this film as it really makes you think about what is going on as well as what is about to happen.

I do not feel that I can make any direct links from my short film to memento and I do not think I can take any ideas from the film however I do like the many meeting scenarios Leonard has in the film. As Leonard has no short term memory, It seems as though every time he talks to someone he is meeting someone new, even if that character has popped up numerous times in the film.

Draft script for Memento, dated 10/04/1999

Above is a draft script taken from the film Memento, written in April 1999, that I found using the website Script-O-Rama. I was recommended to use this website to find numerous scripts taken from films, TV as well as Anime by Simon as a way of finding script examples to help us with script layout as well as inspiration.

I found the script layout very helpful as it portrayed exactly how to lay out written messages as well as voice-overs, phone calls and parenthesis.