Christopher Nolan debuted as a director with a low-budget indie psychological thriller called Following, but it was his 2000 mystery drama Westworld.
Yet, it's Memento from where their journey started. Here are 10 differences between the film and the story.
The Lead's name
Australian actor Guy Pearce plays a man called Leonard Shelby, who suffers from a short-term memory loss condition (anterograde amnesia). For this reason, he often documents everything that he sees in the form of instant photographs, or tattoos on his body and notes to himself.
In the story, however, the character's name is Earl. Despite the difference of the name, the rest of the mannerisms of the character is mostly similar.
The story takes place in a mental institution
All through the story, Earl is a patient in a mental institution and plans to solve his wife's murder by breaking out of this facility. In contrast to this, the movie's protagonist is shown as an insurance investigator who operates mainly from a motel room where he stashes all his photos and notes to himself.
With that being said, there are a few flashback sequences where he is shown as being itted in an asylum (even if those memories are initially fuzzy for him).
The City
Coming back to the location, the story leaves little scope for one to wonder in which city is the story set. The asylum setting further adds to the 'locked up' feeling that Earl and his mind is undergoing.
In Memento, the hero is confused but constantly running around the city searching for his clues like the protagonist of a classic neo-noir. Christopher Nolan had the noir vibe in mind and hence shifted his shooting location from Montreal to Los Angeles.
The ambiguity around the ending is treated differently
The movie's ending is confusing at the start, but you can figure out later that Teddy, the cop Leonard was in touch with, wasn't the real Johnny G (a term Leonard uses for his wife's killer). Earl, however, continues thinking of him as the killer even when he gets to know the truth and shoots him down. The movie ends from where it began.
In the story the ending is more ambiguous, as Earl puts two and two together and thinks he has found the killer (his 'Johnny G') and escapes the mental facility, leaving it up for the reader to figure out Earl's next move. He doesn't doubt his intentions and knows for sure that he has figured out the culprit.
The movie has more characters
There's no Teddy and no Natalie in Memento Mori although it has been speculated in the story that the protagonist encounters such characters. There's a mention of a policeman, a doctor, and so on, but we don't directly meet them. There's no exchange of dialogues with any other characters, and Earl mostly talks to himself.
This, in a way, makes the story easier to interpret. In the movie, we do see multiple characters with established identities, but because we are meeting them from the perspective of Leonard who's already an amnesiac, we can't know for sure whether their identities are real or not.
Most of what happens in the movie already happened in the story
As we prepare for Earl to break out, we understand his thoughts and observations. And most of these observations talk about interactions that already happened, events that already ed. Every time he recovers from a bout of memory loss, an event has already happened and readers are just made to guess about this event.
This is unlike the movie where we start with the ambiguous ending and then get various flashbacks to piece together what actually happened. That way, the film is more interactive and three dimensional than the story.
Direct look inside the brain
Memento Mori is a story that's concise but very intriguing as you get to understand indirectly what Earl undergoes after every short interval when he loses his memory, and desperately tries to piece together his life.
Christopher Nolan in his cinematic treatment tries to have a more direct approach inside his lead's brain. As he has established the fact that the protagonist's first-person narration isn't always reliable, we also see interior monologues, mind flashes, and flashback sequences (with Easter Eggs that viewers would miss out at first glance).
The wife's death
Leonard in Memento does that his case of amnesia as a result of a head injury. This injury occurred while he was fighting the men who raped and killed his wife.
While this is hinted in the story, Earl himself never re what exactly happened to his wife, making him speculate much more than Leonard. As a age from the story states, 'The last thing you . His face. His face and your wife, looking to you for help.'. This implies that Earl was struck in the head right before the actual killing happened. But in his mental asylum room, he has a photo of his dead wife, which fills him with grief and anger as he figures what actually happened after he was struck in the head.
Acceptance with memory loss
'How can I heal if I can't feel time?' Leonard says in one scene, expressing his helplessness with his condition. He wants to avenge his wife's murder and just move on. He wants to forget and leave a new life. He wants to heal. In the end, he finds solace in his own way (even if he killed Teddy, thinking that he was the killer).
In contrast to this, Earl has given up on healing in the story. He wants to stay stuck with the grief of his wife's death so that it's the only memory driving him to his ultimate goal: to find his wife's killer. Earl doesn't seem to move on at all.
Loose adaptation
Memento and Memento Mori seem very similar on the surface but are different if you look deeper. The reason behind this is that Jonathan Nolan's story and Christopher Nolan's screenplay were both being written at the same time. So, Christopher Nolan didn't add details from all of the story.
In fact, it was just Jonathan Nolan's pitch for a story of an amnesiac with body tattoos trying to piece together the puzzle of his wife's death which led Christopher Nolan to make a film out of it. In this sense, one can say that Memento is an adaptation of the idea of Memento Mori rather than Memento Mori itself.
