This post is part of our series highlighting most-loved indie films—ours and yours. Don’t forget to share your submission to The 50 Most Loved Indie Films and help us foster the indie spirit. Learn more about the list here or learn more about Skyline Indie Film Fest.

Memento

Today’s selection is Christopher Nolan’s ultra-dark, highly influential second film, the psycho-noir, Memento.

Memento is the story of Leonard (Guy Pearce), a former insurance investigator on the trail of his wife’s killer. The major issue with Leonard’s hunt for the killer is that every time he goes to sleep, or becomes overly stressed, he loses his memories from the previous days due to an injury he sustained during the attack and murder of his wife. So as a means of keeping track of clues to the identity of the murderer, Leonard tattoos the most pertinent information regarding his investigation onto his body, making him look like a human little black book crawling with names, addresses, telephone numbers, and random notes.

What makes Memento truly unique, and one of the hallmark crime films of the mid-late 90’s and early 2000’s—along with Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights — is it’s structure. The continuity of the film is told in reverse, with Leonard discovering his wife’s killer at the beginning of the film, and then moving backward to follow how his discovery was made.

The second storyline of the film is interspersed throughout and is told in a more traditional linear narrative. Filmed in black and white, the secondary plot are stark, no frills scenes of Leonard speaking on the telephone to an unidentified listener in a nondescript motel room filling in personal details about his investigation, and telling the story of a couple he investigated before his injuries, where the husband has also lost his short term memory. The secondary narrative was the original basis of Nolan’s screenplay was the short story, “Memento Mori”, written by Nolan’s brother and longtime writing partner, Jonathan Nolan.

Nolan spoke about the writing process with his brother and merging of the two storylines in a 2001 interview with IndieWire:

It’s been a weird organic process, because my brother told me the concept when he was writing the story. He told it to me while we were driving from Chicago to LA, across country. And I was like great, can I go and write a screenplay for this while you write the story? Because he’d been doing draft after draft and in fact it took him another two years. As we were finishing the film, he was finishing his final draft of the short story.

We had decided that in our own ways we were going to try and tell the story in the first person. Me in film and him in a short story. We’re both trying to escape the boundaries of the particular medium that we’re choosing to tell, because we really want to create an experience that doesn’t feed into your head, that bleeds around the edges. I was going for something that lived in its own shape, that was slightly built from that standard linear experience. My brother in the same way, in writing the story, had wanted to randomize it somehow.

The performances in Memento are very reminiscent of many classic crime films. Pearce is steely and aloof, albeit easily manipulated because of his injury, as Leonard. Carrie-Anne Moss is equal parts victim and femme fatale as bar owner, Natalie, and Joe Patoliano is at his sleazy best as Leonard’s best friend/antagonist, Teddy.

Since its 2001 release, Memento has spawned dozens of films which have tried and failed to duplicate its complex storytelling and sleazy, bottom of the barrel atmosphere. And, of course, the success of Memento skyrocketed Nolan’s career as a director, and he has since gone on to direct most notably, The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, and most recently, the epic space opera, Interstellar. Although many fans of Nolan have said that most of his new films lack the creative spark and ingenuity of Memento.

Alright, now it’s time to hear from you. What’s your favorite indie film? What indie movie has stuck with you since the first time you saw it and makes you want to watch it over and over again?

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