Brad Pitt almost starred in Memento
Nolan’s 2000 crime thriller following a man suffering from anterograde amnesia almost featured Brad Pitt in the lead role. “[Pitt] did read the script and he met with me about it when he didn’t have any reason to know who I was or anything about it,” Nolan told Yahoo movies. The actor’s interest in the script is said to have helped it gain traction with studios. When he dropped out owing to scheduling conflicts, however, the director offered the role to Guy Pearce.
The Tenet cast learnt their dialogue backwards
For Nolan’s 2020 film, in which objects capable of reversing the flow of time enable sequences to play out forwards, backwards and often both simultaneously, the cast not only had to learn how to perform fight choreography backwards but to also speak that way. “I had an app that helped, where you speak a line, or really a word, into the app, and it says it backwards to you. Then you learn how to say that and then speak it into the app and then make sure you’re checking it. So, it was very difficult,” actor John David Washington told Good Morning America.
A burglary inspired Nolan to make his first film
“Somebody broke into my flat,” Nolan said, during a screening of his first film, Following, at the IFC Centre. “I realized that my door was just plywood, and that was never keeping anybody out. What was keeping people out was the social protocols that we have that allow us to live together. I was interested in the certain types of people who would stop observing those protocols, and why that would be.” This prompted him to write and direct the film about a man (Jeremy Theobald) who decides to shadow people around London and observe their lives, only to end up entangled in a web of crime.