Backwards step

MEMENTO | Remake Memento? Think again, says Guy Pearce…

To put it mildly, the recent announcement that Christopher Nolan’s breakthrough movie Memento is due for the remake treatment sent shockwaves through Hollywood. Monika Bacardi, who co-runs AM BI Pictures, the company that picked up the remake rights after acquiring the library of Exclusive Media Group, announced: “We intend to stay true to Christopher Nolan’s vision and deliver a memorable movie that is every bit as edgy, iconic and award-worthy as the original.”

Told in reverse, Nolan’s 2000 thriller about the tattoo-clad, memory-addled Leonard Shelby, struggling to search for his wife’s killer, came out of nowhere to gross almost $40m and claim two Academy Award noms, including Best Original Screenplay. As the film’s original star, Guy Pearce, who played the amnesiac Shelby, wryly tweeted: ‘Why would they remake it? We all know how it starts.’

“That was my attempt at humour,” chuckles Pearce, when Buzz caught up with him recently. But rebooting a one-off is no laughing matter, he says. “One of the things that made Memento so incredible was that it was original in its execution. I don’t know if it will then lose something if you do it a second time, unless you come up with something equally original.”

In his eyes, it’s an exercise as foolhardy as re-recording another band’s song. “You would never attempt to cover a Radiohead song,” he says. “I don’t think covering Memento is a great idea, unless you do the $200m Tom Cruise extravaganza version and you set it in a whole futuristic world, and you Radiohead the shit out of it. But there was something about Chris’ unique quality that will be hard to supersede.” JM ETA | TBC The Memento remake is currently in pre-production.