Every Distributor Said No to Memento, Then Venice Rose to Cheer It

Memento ended abruptly at its Venice premiere in 2000, and for a few seconds the theater was completely silent.

Filmmaker Christopher Nolan was at the Venice screening of Memento. Nolan has said, "My films always end the same way with some sort of sudden flourish." This one builds to that moment, then stops very abruptly. This time the screen went black, and for a few seconds no one made a sound.

"I thought, oh no, they hate it," Nolan later said. "There were a couple seconds where literally I had no idea what was about to happen. I was very frightened."

That silence connects the two parts of the story. Distributors had passed on the film, and the Venice audience responded warmly.

Nolan had spent the previous year trying to get Memento distributed. He was rejected by every distributor he approached, with the same polite summary that they loved the film and wanted to work with him but found it was not for them. Memento was personal to him, a film he said he made because he had to, after burrowing so deep into it that he could no longer see it clearly. The only thing left, he said, was to trust his initial instincts.

It was an odd bet. At 27, undeterred after being rejected by film school, Nolan had been pitching a tale about a man unable to form new memories who hunts for his wife's killer by inking reminders onto his skin. And he insisted on unfolding the story in reverse, an approach that mattered deeply to him. A friend from those days later recalled, "I couldn't quite see it, but when you're around someone who does, you start to believe it."

Then the silence broke. The quiet in Venice turned into an enormous standing ovation. Nolan said, "It was the turning point of my life."

The business caught up fast. About two years after those painful distributor meetings, Memento earned two Oscar nominations. In the two decades since, Nolan has gone from making tiny, micro-budget shorts to directing massive global hits, with films that have taken in more than $5 billion worldwide. Studios now treat him as one of their safest bets.