25 Years Ago Today, This Almost-Rejected Indie Launched an Oscar-Winning Director’s Career

It’s sad that twenty-five years ago, Christopher Nolan’s career-defining film Memento nearly never made it to theaters, and the thriller fans would have missed the chance to witness cinema’s most celebrated cult classic.

Contrary to the film’s reputation today, when Nolan first shopped it to distributors, the reaction was brutally cold, with distributors walking out. “We organized a big distribution screening in L.A. the weekend all the distributors were coming to town for the Spirit Awards,” Nolan told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview.

“But every distributor passed [on it] in one night — nobody wanted it. Some of the distributors were really awful to us, actually, and said they’d walked out of the film. It was a really, really tough ride … pretty devastating.”

Thanks to Newmarket Films, they saw something vivid in Memento that everyone else missed.

 Released in March with a meagre $5 million budget, Memento went to gross over $40 million at the box office – a remarkable number for an Indie film. The success came not only in numbers, but with the revered title of best film of the decade by many fans.

Awards followed soon after. The film won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the Sundance, swept four major categories at the Independent Spirit Awards, and received two Academy Award nominations.

For Nolan – then a relatively unknown name with a low-budget feature (Following) and a short film (Doodlebug) under his belt – it was a breakthrough. He established himself as the master of non-linear storytelling, and the rest about Nolan, as they say, needs no introduction.

Memento is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.

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