Now comes his second feature, Memento , an incredible work that stars Guy Pearce as Leonard Shelby, a man obsessed with finding the killer of his wife. The catch is that Leonard has no short-term memory since the incident with his wife and, since the film is anchored from his perspective, the audience gets the full subjective rush of a mystery that is unraveled chunk by chunk and, to top things off, backwards. Your film just had its biggest public screening here at Sundance in a theater that holds 1,270 seats. It went incredibly well. I wasn't expecting it to be full - and it was really very full, there were people up in the balcony and it was a very responsive audience.
Memento touches on a lot of issues.
Power, vulnerability, manipulation, time, identity, revenge, obsession - to name a few. Memento 's very concerned with subjective perceptions of the world versus the concept of objective truth, and I think the film winds up denying the audience the concept of an objective truth in the world of the film which people find quite unsettling. Memento , however, is very much about being stuck between a point of view and the notion of an objective truth, and then stepping outside ourselves. I program an independent theater in Boulder. This summer I was going to show a block of films that are anachronistic and can't get pegged to a specific time frame.