Memento (Part 7)

I did it! I have killed the white whale that is Memento! I'm incredibly proud of the work we all did with this story, but my lord was it a massive effort. There are a lot of reasons this movie proved to be so difficult to realize, but the main one is the degree to which little details matter. 

The exact location of every prop needs to be correct. Normally there is a shared reality, so I don't need to keep track of if the knife was under the table or under the chair. The player put it down, and therefore they can pick it up at any time. They know where it is, and the specific details don't really matter. 

In Memento they matter. If the player doesn't check under the table, they don't know the knife is there. I have to keep track of all of those minute details and get them right on the day, while doing high intensity improv. It's stressful, and took a lot of work and attention to make sure I had them right.

As to why the edit proved to be so long: A lot of reasons, some of them technical,  but a big one was that each player needed to have the reality thoroughly reestablished for them. There was a lot of description and consideration of their surroundings, which was great for the players but made the episodes drag for the audience, that does not need every detail reexplained to them in every segment. Cutting down over-explanation without losing the flow and the logic of the story is hard.

But for me getting the details right is the first step in telling the kind of story I wanted to tell: Memento is like two dozen little detective stories. Each player is set-up in a strange scenario, and immediately the audience should start to try to suss out how Leonard ended up in that predicament. Beyond that, the macro-stories I was working to build were mostly mysteries: a big interconnected world of gangland Los Angeles, with big mysteries to solve.

The key to this kind of story, and in fact detective stories in general, is getting the little details right because it gives you the power of contradiction. Contradiction is a powerful force. It's a clash of details: a character saying one thing in one scene, and the opposite in another scene. A change in the description of a location or object. These discrepancies are always meaningful, they betray a lie, or a secret. They are the main tool with which one can give the audience information that a single Leonard doesn't have access to.

But if you make mistakes, the audience will quickly lose confidence in those little contradictions being purposeful. 

Alright, sorry about the cludgy dates. Editing will be out of my hands for the foreseeable future, so that will hopefully help our release dates!