We all know that Christopher Nolan loves playing with time. He did it with Memento, then Interstellar, and now with Tenet. He really is a science nerd. And it doesn’t take long for one to realize how one of his first iconic films Memento inspired him to write Tenet. Non-linear story-telling is something Nolan thrives in. But, did you know that Memento also has a Tenet easter egg? Yes, it’s true and Nolan has confirmed it.
Nolan reveals the Tenet easter egg in Memento
While giving an interview to Complex, Nolan talked about how one little scene in Memento inspired him to put pen to paper and write Tenet. He said:
I had this notion of just a bullet getting sucked out of the wall and into the barrel of a gun. It’s an image that I had in Memento to demonstrate the structure of that movie, but I always harbored this ambition to make a film where the characters had to deal with the physical reality of that. In a way, an idea comes to the fore when the time is right for it, and it’s a hard process to quantify, so I was doing all these other things.
And sure enough, Nolan put in a lot of hard work into his ideas. According to him, it took him 5 years to write Tenet. And that doesn’t include the almost complete decade it took him to come up with its central ideas. In Memento we saw non-linear storytelling. It was the story of a man (Guy Pearce) who had short-term memory loss and went through scenes of the past in reverse order. But, in Tenet, we saw time itself as non-linear – going backward and forward. And through this maze of time, we saw our protagonists follow an agent who could manipulate time.
And here’s the opening scene from Memento that is a cute Tenet easter egg for all Nolan fans today. Spot the bullet that looks like it’s being caught by a gun.
