The Editing Room: Memento

MEMENTO: THE ABRIDGED SCRIPT

By Rod Hilton

FADE IN:

INT. ABANDONED OLD HOUSE

GUY PEARCE shoots CYPHER in the face.

The entire movie is then shown backwards, which is
CLEVER and CREATIVE, and not GIMMICKY at all.

INT. GUY PEARCE'S PLACE - MOMENTS EARLIER

GUY PEARCE
I have tatoos telling me things like
"John G. raped and murdered your wife."
My favorite one says "FIND HIM AND KILL
HIM" across my torso, which is not upside
down so I can read it nor is it backwards
so I can read it in a mirror. In fact,
there are no regular circumstances under
which I can see that message clearly.
It's actually to scare other people.

CYPHER
Hey! You ready to go kill me now?

GUY PEARCE
Didn't I already shoot y--oh yeah,
backwards. Right. Okay. Let's go.

INT. CARRIE-ANNE MOSS'S PLACE - MOMENTS EARLIER

CARRIE-ANNE MOSS
I am Carrie-Anne Moss. Please notice the
casting choices. They are meant to
predispose you into thinking I am good
and Cypher is bad.

AUDIENCE
Actually, I kinda figured Guy killed him
wrongly and the whole movie will be
showing us how.

Just to make things difficult to follow, we suddenly cut
to a series of black-and-white scenes that seem to take
place before all of this. These are shown in NORMAL
ORDER.

DIRECTOR
Okay, you see, my silly little gimmick is
cute, but it makes it really hard to tell
necessary parts of the story.. so I break
the whole idea with these black-and-white
shots, but that's not a problem, right?
So color scenes are in reverse and black
and-white scenes are in order. Got it?
Remind yourself of this constantly. Oh
and the ending scene was literally shown
backwards.

AUDIENCE
My head hurts.

DIRECTOR
Then perhaps you won't be able to realize
how cheap I am.

INT. GUY'S CAR - MOMENTS EARLIER

CYPHER
Hey. I'm still alive. I will now make
some pretty good points about your suit
and car, illustrating you're not exactly
who you think you are.

GUY PEARCE
I, along with the audience, will ignore
those points because you are Cypher and
Cypher sucks.

INT. ABANDONED OLD HOUSE - MUCH EARLIER

GUY kills a guy who he believes is the man he is looking
for.

CYPHER
I will now become Joe the Explainer and
overload you with information as a
justification to the rest of the film.
(pause)
You see, I am a cop. I have, for some
reason or another, spent some time going
around with you, finding guys to kill and
convincing you to kill them. You killed
the real guy a long time ago but didn't
remember. You may have been doing this
for a very long time. I don't know why I
never just videotaped one of them to
convince you later. Or for that matter,
why I'm stupid enough to hang around you
all the time when my initials could
implicate me in your eyes.

GUY PEARCE
You're quite stupid.

CYPHER
Tell me about it. First I expected the
machines to put me back in the matrix,
and now this.

GUY PEARCE
Kill ya later.

CYPHER
Don't you mean earlier?

GUY PEARCE
No..I..er..wait.. don't try to confuse
me.

CYPHER
Sorry. Hey, I was wondering, how did the
guy you just killed know you? He knew
what you looked like and he told his
girlfriend about you but I don't recall
that being explained.

GUY PEARCE
I...er..uh.. Memory loss, you know? Heh,
I don't know how that works..

CYPHER
Oh.. and how, exactly, can you remember
that you have this condition? You would
have found that out after the attack..

GUY'S HEAD explodes.

CYPHER (CONT'D)
Ha! Not gonna kill me this time, I
already saw the end of the movie.

END