Christopher Nolan's Concept For TENET Began with the Opening Scene of MEMENTO
Christopher Nolan’s Tenet was one hell of a wild film. I enjoyed the film and I loved the ambitious concept of it and the unique and complex story that it told. While it was hard to follow at times, I have never seen anything like that before; it was a crazy, visually stunning spectacle.
The whole idea for Tenet was actually born from Nolan’s breakout film Memento, specifically the opening scene, which set the tone of the film and introduced audiences to the film’s non-chronological storytelling style. The movie opened up by showing us someone being killed in reverse and that includes a visual of a bullet being shot back into a gun. This is something we saw all throughout the film Tenet, and this is a concept that Nolan held on to for something even more ambitious.
The filmmaker recently sat down with Complex for an interview and explained:
“I had this notion of just a bullet getting sucked out of the wall and into the barrel of a gun. It’s an image that I had in Memento to demonstrate the structure of that movie, but I always harbored this ambition to make a film where the characters had to deal with the physical reality of that. In a way, an idea comes to the fore when the time is right for it, and it’s a hard process to quantify, so I was doing all these other things.”
You can watch the opening scene of Memento below:
It’s interesting to watch this and see how Nolan utilized it in an epic way in Tenet. Nolan went on to acknowledge how all the other films that he’s made before helped prepare him to make this film:
“There are things that you learn how to make, and everything in Tenet, interestingly, on the surface of it, they’re all versions of action or particular ways of filming things that I’ve tried before in a different form. You’re building on what you’ve done in the past.”
Tenet is currently available to buy and watch at home. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should give it a go! Also if for some reason you haven’t watched Memento yet, you should watch that as well! If you’ve already seen Tenet, what do you think about what Nolan had to say here?