Christopher Nolan had just spent a long anxious year trying to secure distribution.
He had been turned down by every distributor in town with the same variation of, this is great,
we love it, we really want to work with you, but this is not for us.
This film was personal to him.
Memento was born into the world on the back of obsession.
Failure to find expression would have been almost inconceivable to Christopher Nolan.
Nolan made the movie because he had to.
What happens when you make a film is you burrow into it.
You dig in so deep, so you kind of can't see it anymore.
You're fully immersed in it, he said.
The only thing you can do is trust your initial instincts.
You just have to say, this is what I'm making.
This is what I'm doing.
It's going to work.
Just trust it.
Memento would go on to earn two Oscar nominations,
nearly two years to the day after that disastrous screening for distributors.
Nolan's ascent since that movie has been near vertical.
In the space of two decades,
Christopher Nolan has gone from eking out micro-budgeted three-minute shorts to making billion-dollar blockbusters.