January 2001: Bright Lights, Park City By the time Memento hit screens at the Sundance Film Festival, it had already been “discovered” at Venice, Deauville, and Toronto, and opened to wildly enthusiastic audiences in England. But there’s nothing quite like the media glare of Robert Redford’s independent-film showcase to generate excitement for a movie—as Steven Soderbergh, Kevin Smith, and the makers of The Blair Witch Project can attest. For ten days this past January, moviegoers on the streets and slopes of Park City, Utah, debated Memento’s plot points and urged those who hadn’t seen the twisty thriller to rearrange their schedules accordingly. “We had a great screening early one morning,” says writer-director Christopher Nolan, who won the festival’s Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. “I had trouble getting up myself, so I thought, ‘Who the hell is going to be there?’ But it was packed—for a mind-fuck at 9 o’clock in the morning!”

A mesmerizing meditation on memory, identity, and loss, Memento is a thriller that plays out in reverse, beginning with the end and ending with the beginning. Guy Pearce portrays Leonard Shelby, a former insurance investigator with short-term memory loss, a rare (and real) condition that has been brought on by head trauma suffered during his wife’s rape and murder. Since Leonard is unable to form new memories (his attention span is 15 minutes or less) and can only recollect events from before the incident, he must rely on Polaroids, scribbled notes, and other people—including barmaid Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss) and a cop named Teddy (Joe Pantoliano)—to tell him everything, from which motel he’s staying at to whom he can trust. As he looks for his wife’s killer, Leonard tattoos his body with the most vital pieces of information regarding the man’s identity.

“It’s very much about the futility of revenge,” says Nolan, 30, who’s half-English, half-American, and has a preppy, professorial air about him. “Leonard can’t identify himself in the present tense—he knows who he was, but he can’t connect that with who he is—and revenge seemed an excellent jumping-off point for an examination of the subjective nature of reality.”

From its startling opening image of a Polaroid photo undeveloping and being sucked back into the camera to its intriguingly oblique website (www.otnemem.com)—designed by Nolan’s younger brother, Jonathan, who wrote the short story on which the film is based—there’s little about Memento that’s conventional. None of the characters are who they appear to be; nothing is quite what it seems. Only one thing is certain: Everybody is manipulating Leonard—Teddy, Natalie, the motel receptionist, even Leonard himself. Moreover, the deliberately ambiguous ending (or, more accurately, beginning) has had audiences returning to unlock the movie’s secrets, as they did with The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense.

“I was very concerned about making a film that people could come back to a second time and it wouldn’t fall to pieces,” says Nolan. “It’s all internally consistent if you see it enough.” Even so, every viewing is likely to elicit something new. “I’ve seen it about five times,” Moss says, “and each time I feel differently about what it’s about.” Many viewers find it hard to believe what they’re seeing—particularly during a key expositional scene late in the film. “[It’s] the one you get in a million movies, where the bad guy—the untrustworthy one—lays it on the line,” Nolan says. “In every other film, you always believe him. Why? ’Cause you’re supposed to—because film grammar tells you to, because that’s comfortable. In this film, it’s not. People won’t accept it, which is really cool.”