Christopher Nolan Talks about a “Tenet” Foreshadowing in Memento
The veteran director of mind-bending movies has revealed an easter egg about his latest film “Tenet.” He has said that the easter egg was there in his 1999 Academy Award-winning suspense film “Memento.”
It is now almost four and a half months since the release of the tenth feature film directed by Christopher Nolan. Now, the director has come out and said that many people had overlooked the fact that his two-decade-old mind-bending film featured an easter egg about his film.
Have you ever got a chance to see the film “Memento”? Yes? Well, do you remember the opening scene? The opening scene of Nolan’s psychological thriller from the year 2000 had a mind-blowing easter egg about his latest film “Tenet.”
Well, in the opening shot of Memento, we see the protagonist Leonard (played by Guy Pearce) holding a photograph, then in the next shot, as we see the rewinding of the moment (time running backward), we see him catching a bullet with his gun. Now, can you get the reference? Cool, stuff, right? A mind can wonder whether Nolan was thinking about making a film like “Tenet” from the year 2000 itself.
In fact, it is indeed the truth. Nolan took 20 years to write the script of “Tenet.” He himself had revealed this during the film’s promotion.
The director talked about the easter egg in his interview with Complex and said that he has always been fascinated by that scene. He explained that he used the scene to explain the structure of “Memento”; however, in his mind, he always had this ambition of expanding that scene into an idea of creating a world where the character had to deal with an inverted time.
Nolan added that such a complex idea arrives in your mind only when the time is right, and then to work on that idea is a laborious task, so meanwhile, he was working on other things.
When you watch the film “Memento” for the first time, you would feel that at its core, it is a revenge story, a crime thriller relaying the story of Leonard, who is on his quest to avenge the rape and murder of his wife.
However, you would understand the beauty of the film only when you watch the film three or four times. In reality, the film is basically a character study about a protagonist who is unreliable, and we are witnessing the world through his eyes, and to really understand what is going on, we really have to question his motives and the movements.
Christopher Nolan is one of the most influential artists of this generation. He has not created one masterpiece but rather a bunch of films that can subjectively be considered his magnum opus.
If you go by IMDb ratings, then his best film up to this day is The Dark Knight, and the film is really hard to argue against (The Heath Ledger magic).
However, I would take the side of Inception here (IMDb rating-8.8) just because you can imagine how hard it would have been to write a story like that, let alone directing it.
“Tenet” has now been released on DVDs and Blu-rays.
