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The Treatment

Chris Nolan: Memento

The Treatment

KCRW

Arts

4.6639 Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2001

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Elvis Mitchell hosts director Chris Nolan whose films include Following and his new film, Memento.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Good afternoon, welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. My guest today was here a couple of years ago with this movie following, which was an amazing picture that I saw the slam dance film festival. And in the intervening time, his new picture Memento,

0:24.7

won the Waldos Salt Screenwriting Award at the Sundance Film Festival this year.

0:25.7

It's a remarkable movie.

0:26.4

He's Chris Nolan.

0:27.5

Chris, thanks for being here.

0:28.3

Thanks, Elvis.

0:29.1

Thanks for having me.

0:37.8

You movies are so much about sort of perception and memory and playing with time.

0:39.4

Where does that come from for you?

0:42.0

How big influences Nicholas Rogue on your work, I wonder?

0:48.0

Well, I'm a big fan of Rogue's work, and I think if you look back, particularly the first 20 minutes or so of performance, you know, there's just this incredible display

0:52.6

of nonlinear editing and shifting time

0:56.1

and different images from different points of the story to just create, you know, type of narrative

1:01.0

from that. So that's certainly a big influence. But other filmmakers, I mean, even back to

1:06.6

Orson Wells, you look at the structure of Citizen Kane. I mean, it's still, to this day,

1:10.9

an incredibly adventurous narrative structure. But I think my real interest is not so much,

1:16.2

you know, shifting time for the sake of it. My real interest is points of view, you know,

1:20.0

deciding what's the point of view we're trying to express in the story, whose eyes are we

1:24.6

seeing the story through. And in the case of Memento, you know, it's

1:27.7

very specifically, the structure is very specifically an attempt to see the events of the

1:33.7

story through Leonard's eyes, basically. But in both these movies, there's also about a deceptive

1:39.7

point of view. You're basically telling the audience, they think they're saying what they're seeing,

...

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